Investing in working families: which policies promote the best balance of time and money for parents and children?
Michael Bittman and Jenny Chalmers
University of New England
Contact Email:   michael.bittmanune.edu.au

Raising children takes both time and money. However, given there are a finite number of hours in the day, childcare and paid work compete for parents’ time. Research shows that the time costs of children are high; employed parents particularly mothers, experience high levels of objective and subjective time pressure. At the same time an extensive literature documents a substantial ‘motherhood penalty’ in lost earnings and savings over a women’s life course.

Most policy instruments designed to make raising children more compatible with paid work, have different emphases and, therefore, different limitations. In some important respects market services are not perfect substitutes for parental care. Psychological research suggests that children seem to benefit from their parents’ personal attention in the first year of life. While parental leave may appear superior to non-parental care, as Gornick and Meyers have pointed out, absences from the labour market reduce earnings capacity. This paper reports on preliminary results from a study that compares cross-national trade-offs between time-use and earnings, to increase our understanding of the policies that make it easiest for parents to find time for raising children, while minimizing the detrimental effects on earnings capacity and savings.

Paper Download Information (if available):

Copyright © 2009 Social Policy Research Centre.