Does Money Buy Love: Mothers' Earnings and Time Spent on Child Care in the U.S.

• In Event: 4363 - Stratification, Families, and Gender

Abstract

Ample research indicates women’s earnings reduce their housework, particularly among women partnered with men (Killewald 2011). Associations of women’s earnings with housework are also larger than cross-spouse earnings influences and links between men’s earnings and their housework. Scholars have argued that theorized relationships between women’s earnings and housework do not translate to child care (Sullivan 2013). We argue, however, that increases in earnings homogamy in marriages and widening class gaps in parental investments in children suggest women’s earnings should influence child care time. We adapt hypotheses from three dominant theories used to explain variation in housework--autonomy, gender display and bargaining--for child care. Revising these theories is necessary because child care and housework differ in important ways even though they are both forms of unpaid work disproportionately done by women. Child care is generally considered more consequential than housework, and therefore subjected to greater social and legal surveillance. Unlike much housework, it is by definition not solitary, and requires dynamic interaction with its recipients. It is more emotionally rewarding and challenging. Because child care can have lasting effects on children’s well-being, mothers may be less inclined to reduce time spent on it compared to housework and more inclined to bargain to increase husband’s child care time. We therefore develop another set of hypotheses based on the separate literature on the relationship between parents’ socioeconomic status and time spent with children. We extend this literature by considering distinct influences of mothers’ and fathers’ absolute and relative earnings on child care. Further, we distinguish between two primary kinds of child care, routine and developmental, and apply both sets of hypotheses separately to each.

Authors

• Sanjiv Gupta, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Liana C. Sayer, University of Maryland-College Park

• Jessica Anne Pearlman, University of Massachusetts Amherst