Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 29, 2026
07:09
Gaze in Action: Head-mounted Eye Tracking of Children's Dynamic Visual Attention During Naturalistic Behavior
Published on: November 14, 2018
Time use in child care and housework and the total cost of children
Journal of Population Economics
|July 1, 1994
Insights
Swedish families
Area of Science:
- Family Economics
- Sociology of the Family
- Time Use Studies
Background:
- Understanding the economic and social implications of child-rearing is crucial for family policy.
- Previous research has not fully captured the nuanced impact of child age and care arrangements on parental time allocation.
- Swedish families provide a unique context for studying time use due to established social support systems.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the time allocation for child care and housework within Swedish families.
- To quantify the total cost of children, encompassing both time costs and direct expenditures.
- To analyze how the age of children and out-of-home care arrangements influence time spent on child care and housework.
Main Methods:
- Econometric analysis of time-use data from Swedish families.
- Modeling the differential impact of child age on time allocation.
- Estimating the cost of children, including time, goods, services, and housing.
Main Results:
- Time dedicated to child care significantly decreases as children age.
- Time spent on general housework does not show a similar sharp decrease with child age.
- The study provides estimates for the total economic cost associated with raising children.
Conclusions:
- Parental time investment in child care is highly sensitive to child age.
- Housework time allocation shows less age-dependency compared to direct child care.
- Findings offer valuable insights for economic and social policies related to family support and child-rearing costs.
Abstract:
"The use of time for child care and housework among Swedish families is investigated. We allow the effect of children on child care and housework to vary by age of the child and also by whether the child is cared for outside the home or not. Our estimates allow us to compute the total cost of children in the form of the cost of time, and the cost of goods, services and housing. The result shows that time used for child care decreases sharply with the age of the child but this is not the case for time used for other housework."
Related Concept Videos
00:51Energy Budgets and Reproductive Strategies
Organisms must balance energy intake with the energy required for growth, maintenance, and reproduction. These trade-offs result in a variety of survivorship and reproductive strategies, including semelparity and iteroparity. Semelparous species reproduce only once in their lifetime, often investing most available resources into that single reproductive event. Iteroparous species, by contrast, reproduce multiple times over their lifetimes, typically allocating fewer resources to any single...
01:37Parental Care
Many animals exhibit parental care behavior, including feeding, grooming, and protecting young offspring. Parental care is universal in mammals and birds, which often have young that are born relatively helpless. Several species of insects and fish, as well as some amphibians, also care for their young.
01:10Electrical Energy
Using electric appliances for a longer period of time consumes more electrical energy and results in a higher electric bill. The energy produced by the transfer of electrons from one point to another is known as electrical energy. If power is delivered at a constant rate, the electrical energy can be defined as the product of power used by the device for a period of time. The energy unit on electric bills is the kilowatt-hour, where one kilowatt-hour is equivalent to 3.6 × 106 joules. The...
02:30Quantifying Work
As a system undergoes a change, its internal energy can change, and energy can be transferred from the system to the surroundings, or from the surroundings to the system.
01:29Drug Dosing: Infants and Children
Pediatric patient dosages diverge from adults due to disparities in body surface area, total body water, and extracellular fluid per kilogram of body weight. The dosing regimen considers the variations in pharmacokinetics and pharmacology across distinct age groups, encompassing preterm newborns, infants, young children, older children, and adolescents. Calculation of pediatric patient doses is predicated on determining body surface area, which exhibits a superior correlation with the child's...
01:04Cumulative Frequency Distribution
A cumulative frequency distribution is another type of frequency distribution. Instead of reporting how many data values fall in some classes, it reports how many data values are contained in either that class or any class to its left. Technically, it means the sum of frequencies of the class and all the classes below it in a frequency distribution. A cumulative frequency is calculated by adding the frequency of each class lower than the corresponding class interval or category. In general, a...