Household Composition and Gender Difference in Parental Time Investments

Recent research documents considerable gender gaps in non-cognitive skills among children and adolescents raised in single-parent households. However, determining the source of these gaps is complicated due to the presence of many interrelated and often unobservable inputs. One potential explanation for such gaps is that boys and girls receive different levels of parental time investments. If correlated with household structure differentially by gender, time investments could help explain gender differences in non-cognitive skills, as well as the sensitivity of outcomes and behavior of boys to household composition. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and accompanying Child Development Supplement (CDS), I estimate gender differences in parental time investments, defined as the amount of time parents spend participating in activities with the child, around changes in household composition. I find that, although both boys and girls experience reductions in parental time investments following a change from a two-parent to single-mother household, boys experience a larger reduction than girls. The largest difference is found in fathers’ time investments on weekdays, for which boys lose an additional 24 minutes per day (35% of average paternal weekday investments). Moreover, there is little to no evidence that single mothers compensate for the loss by increasing time investments to boys relative to girls.