Parent-Child Leisure among Cohabiting and Married Households in Four Countries

Christina M. Wolfe, Pennsylvania State University

Craig and Mullan (2012) have showed in previous cross-national work that while labor force participation varies among mothers varies by country, time spent in parent-child leisure does not. I extend their analyses to assess differences in parent-child leisure time by national context, including maternal labor force participation and availability of publicly funded childcare, and individual characteristics, including hours worked per week and age of child using recent time diary data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway and Germany. I also improve upon their work by looking at the effects of cohabitation as compared to marriage on parent-child leisure time.