Educational Differences in Parental Care Involvement and Child Developmental Stages: A Couple-Level Study with Spanish Time Use Data

Pablo Gracia, University of Amsterdam

We use data from the ‘2003 Spanish Time Use Survey’ for couples with children aged 0 to 16 (n = 3,531) to investigate educational differences in parental care time in families with children at different developmental stages. The study complements previous literature (Gracia, 2012; Kalil et al., 2012) by adopting a couple-level approach focused on four parental care activities (basic, management, teaching, and non-teaching interactive) in households with the youngest child within five distinct age groups (0-1; 2-3; 4-5; 6-11; 12-16). Our analytic strategy makes two main contributions to the literature on parental care involvement: (1) We are able to report educational differences in couples’ total time allocated to different child care activities with age-specific effects on child development; (2) We can accurately study how heterosexual couples of different levels of education share their parental care activities depending on children’s age-specific developmental stages.