Leisure and Learning - Activities and Their Effects on Child Skill Development

This paper studies how variations in leisure time allocation help explain the variations in school children's cognitive skills. We use representative data on the time use of American children from the Child Development Supplement (CDS) to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Our findings suggest that 1) including time use data significantly contributes to explaining the variation in math and reading test scores; 2) in a relative ranking of the effect of raising the time spent on a given activity on the math test score music is placed at the top, followed by learning, reading, sports, watching television, attending school and sleep (in descending order). For the reading test score music ranks first again and reading second, before learning, school, television, sports and sleep; 3) when comparing the effect of child activities with that of parental investments on test scores in the PSID data, it turns out that activities have no less explanatory power than investments, proxied by an established investment measure, with higher explanatory power for the production of math skills.