Children's Time Use and Educational Achievement: Assessing Evidence from the Japan Child Panel Survey

This paper investigates the relationship between how children spend their time and parental socio-economic status, and the relationship between time spent for learning outside of school and academic achievement drawing on the Japan Child Panel Survey (JCPS). From the wide range of activities for which children spend their time, we focuses on watching TV (DVD), playing video games, doing homework, and total extra-curricular learning time by children, and delineates how time spent on each activity vary according to parental socio-economic status and change over the age of the child. First, time spent watching TV tends to be shorter with a higher level of parental educational background and total extra-curricular learning time tends to be longer with higher parental income. Second, while the effect of household income on how children spend their time was found to be limited, it did have a positive correlation with time spent doing homework and children's learning time. Third, the analysis which took into account the child's fixed effect found that household income had no influence on total learning time outside of school but that there was a positive relationship between students' learning time and academic achievement in mathematics and Japanese language.