This study tests the two assumptions underlying popularly held notions that maternal employment negatively affects children because it reduces time spent with parents: (1) that maternal employment reduces children's time with parents, and (2) that time with parents affects child outcomes. We analyze children's time-diary data from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and use child fixed-effects and IV estimations to account for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that working mothers trade quantity of time for better “quality” of time. On average, maternal work has no effect on time in activities that positively influence children's development, but it reduces time in types of activities that may be detrimental to children's development. Stratification by mothers’ education reveals that although all children, regardless of mother's education, benefit from spending educational and structured time with their mothers, mothers who are high school graduates have the greatest difficulty balancing work and childcare. We find some evidence that fathers compensate for maternal employment by increasing types of activities that can foster child development as well as types of activities that may be detrimental. Overall, we find that the effects of maternal employment are ambiguous because (1) employment does not necessarily reduce children's time with parents, and (2) not all types of parental time benefit child development.

Significance We find that the Asian-American educational advantage over whites is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to ( i ) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and ( ii ) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

Time diaries of sibling pairs from the PSID-CDS are used to determine whether maternal time investments compensate for or reinforce birth-weight differences among children. The findings demonstrate that the direction and degree of differential treatment vary by mother's education. Less-educated mothers devote more total time and more educationally oriented time to heavier-birth-weight children, whereas better-educated mothers devote more total and more educationally oriented time to lower-birth-weight children. The compensating effects observed among highly educated mothers are substantially larger than the reinforcing effects among the least-educated mothers. The findings show that families redistribute resources in ways that both compensate for and exacerbate early-life disadvantages.

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The time parents spend with children is the central construct in theories of child development and human capital formation. According to human capital theory, the amount of time parents spend with children can be seen as crucial inputs in the production of child wellbeing (Becker 1981). Parent-child interactions create social capital, or the social interactions that facilitate the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and skills (Coleman 1988). Conversely, theories in developmental psychology contend that long periods of daily separation, particularly during early childhood, can be disruptive, leaving parents less sensitive and responsive to their children's needs, thus leaving children less exposed to the stimulation necessary for their cognitive development (Vaughn et al. 1980; Belsky 2001).More importantly, the literature points to key disparities in the quantity and type of parent child interactions-the verbal interactions and the type of activities performed together, for example-that suggests that children are socialized in ways that reinforce existing inequalities (Lareau 2003;Hoff 2003). These studies suggest that there may be important differences in how time is used and that these differences may contribute to socioeconomic disparities in child outcomes.In spite of these studies, research that has sought to establish an empirical link between time with children and child outcomes is relatively limited. This article provides a brief review of the literature on parental time and child cognitive outcomes, relates recent, new findings by the author to this literature, and discusses how these findings may help guide future research. Disparities in Time UseResearch based on both naturalistic and laboratory settings show key disparities in the content and quantity of parental time children receive. These studies generally point to two important distinctions in how parents relate to children: language use and time use.

Many argue that hegemonic gender norms depress boys' performance and account for the gender gap in achievement. I describe differences in the emergence of the gender gap in academic achievement between white and Asian American youth and explore how the immigrant experience and cultural differences in gender expectations might account for observed differences. For white students, boys are already underperforming girls in kindergarten, with the male disadvantage growing into high school. For Asian Americans, boys perform as well as girls throughout elementary school but begin underperforming relative to girls at the transition to adolescence. Additionally, I show that the Asian American gender gap is larger in schools with stronger male-centric sports cultures and where boys' underachievement is normalized. I speculate that model-minority stereotypes, the immigrant experience, and standards of masculinity that promote pro-school behaviors in boys act as protective factors in early childhood but wane at the transition to adolescence during a period when the dominant peer culture plays a larger role in shaping gender identities. The study offers evidence that the gender gap in achievement is not an inevitable fact of biology but is shaped by social environment.

Data from the Worker and Iron Status Evaluation are used to examine gendered patterns in children’s time in market and nonmarket work, schooling, and leisure in Indonesia (N= 2,929). Boys spend more time in market work; girls spend more time in nonmarket work. Work responsibilities increase with age as well as gender differentials in children’s time use. By age 18, girls spend nearly 1 more hour per day working and enjoy significantly less leisure time, but the gender gap in schooling is not significant, suggesting that parents and children are committed to both work and schooling. Additionally, Tobit regression results suggest that parents’ education, household income, and rural residency are important predictors of children’s labor and schooling time.