oa Betaalde arbeid en zorg voor kinderen; concurrerend of complementair?

Complementarity and competition in time spent on paid work and childcare

Time spent by parents on child care can be considered as a form of investment in the development of children. By offering leave arrangements, the Dutch government endeavours to stimulate parents to combine paid work and child care and to intensify parent-child interaction. In this paper we analyse the plausibility of the hypothesis that a (temporary) reduction of work time leads to a (temporary) increase of time spent on childcare by means of tobit regressions of time use data for the Netherlands. We scrutinised the period from 1975 to 2000. The results show, in line with the international literature, that a reduction of work time leads to an increase of time spent on child care, both for men and women with at least one child under the age of five. However, this increase turns out to be quite small. Furthermore, the results show for women with young children that the amount of working hours hardly affects the time spent on children; women in fulltime jobs appear to spend approximately twenty minutes less on child care compared to women who are not working. For men this difference is approximately five minutes.