Gender Disparities in Increased Parenting Time During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Research Note.

Public health measures aimed at curbing the transmission of COVID-19 increased parenting responsibilities during the early stages of the pandemic. This research note examines time-use data from the American Time Use Surveys to provide several fresh insights as to how mothers took on a disproportionate share of this responsibility compared to fathers during this period. First, the gender gap in total parenting time narrowed by 18%. Meanwhile, the gender disparity in time in educational activities increased by 113% and was not explained by changes in mothers' labor force participation. Mothers also took on 20% more time in secondary caregiving compared to fathers. Estimates among working parents indicated that the amount of time in which mothers coupled paid work with caregiving increased by 346% compared to fathers. These results highlight how fathers marginally increased their caregiving responsibilities compared to mothers, but not in activities that parents tend to rate as more stressful or intensive, such as supervising children's schooling and multitasking at work. The estimates provide clear evidence of the unequal caregiving burden placed on mothers during the pandemic.

Trends in Mothers' Parenting Time by Education and Work From 2003 to 2017.

Scholars have been increasingly concerned about the rise in "intensive mothering" and its implications for the well-being of children and women and for inequality more broadly. These concerns, however, reflect a key assumption: that socioeconomic disparities in mothers' parenting time observed in earlier eras have continued to grow. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003-2005 and 2015-2017 (n = 13,755), we test this assumption by examining whether maternal education gaps in active time spent with children have persisted across the 2000s. We pay particular attention to the continued socioeconomic bifurcation in women's access to full-time stable work, assessing whether changes in the education-related time gap are due to changes in who works and how much. We find that the gap in active childcare time between mothers with a college degree and those without has closed dramatically. Although some of this narrowing was driven by declines in time among college-educated mothers, most was driven by increases among mothers with less education. These trends, however, are observed only among mothers who were not employed full-time. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses further reveal that although most of the increase in active care time among nonworking mothers with less education was attributable to behavioral change, 58% of the decline among nonworking, college-educated mothers was a result of sociodemographic compositional changes. These findings illuminate population-level trends in mothers' active parenting time, provide insights into the driving factors, and help update theories, qualitative findings, and policy considerations related to mothers' and children's well-being.

Can Increased Educational Attainment Among Lower-Educated Mothers Reduce Inequalities in Children's Skill Development?

A rich tradition of stratification research has established a robust link between mothers' education and the skills in children that forecast children's own mobility. Yet, this research has failed to consider that many U.S. women are now completing their education after having children. Such a trend raises questions about whether increases in mothers' educational attainment can improve their children's skill development and whether these gains are enough to reduce inequalities in skills compared with children whose mothers completed the same degree before they were born. To answer these questions, we draw on a nationally representative sample of mothers and children participating in the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLSY79 and CNLY), random- and fixed-effects techniques, and repeated measures of children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Contrary to existing research and theory, our results reveal that educational attainment obtained after children's births is not associated with an improvement in children's skills. Such findings offer substantial refinement to a long-standing model of intergenerational mobility by suggesting that the intergenerational returns to mother's education are weaker when education is acquired after children are born. Results also highlight the limits of two-generation policy approaches to reducing inequality in future generations.

Multigenerational: Households and the School Readiness of Children Born to Unmarried Mothers.

Following the ongoing increase in nonmarital fertility, policy makers have looked for ways to limit the disadvantages faced by children of unmarried mothers. Recent initiatives included marriage promotion and welfare-to-work programs. Yet policy might also consider the promotion of three generational households. We know little about whether multigenerational households benefit children of unwed mothers, although they are mandated for unmarried teen mothers applying for welfare benefits. Multigenerational households are also becoming increasingly common. Thus, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (N = 217), this study examines whether grandparent-headed coresidential households benefit preschool-aged children's school readiness, employing propensity score techniques to account for selection into these households. Findings reveal living with a grandparent is not associated with child outcomes for families that select into such arrangements but is positively associated with reading scores and behavior problems for families with a low propensity to coreside. The implications of these findings for policy are discussed.

Children's early child care and their mothers' later involvement with schools.

Theory and policy highlight the role of child care in preparing children for the transition into school. Approaching this issue in a different way, this study investigated whether children's care experiences before this transition promoted their mothers' school involvement after it, with the hypothesized mechanism for this link being the cultivation of children's social and academic skills. Analyses of 1,352 children (1 month-6 years) and parents in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development revealed that mothers were more involved at their children's schools when children had prior histories of high-quality nonparental care. This pattern, which was fairly stable across levels of maternal education and employment, was mediated by children's academic skills and home environments.

Mothers' Out-of-Sequence Postsecondary Education and Their Health and Health Behaviors.

Ample research suggests that the links between higher education and heath are robust and growing in strength. This research, however, tends to assume education was completed prior to assuming other adult roles. Importantly, the life course framework raises the question of whether "out-of-sequence" college completion conveys similar health returns. I investigate this question among a population for whom out-of-sequence schooling has grown more common: lower-educated mothers. This focus is also important given the growing education gap in women's health and the links between maternal and child health. Data come from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,898). Analyses involve random intercept and fixed effects models and diverse health measures. Findings suggest that postsecondary education does not improve mother's health, except for reduced smoking among mothers with high school degrees or less that earned bachelor's degrees. These findings inform health policy debates and theories linking education to health.

Concentrated Poverty in U.S. Schools and Adolescents' Risk of Being Overweight.

The economic segregation of U.S. schools undermines the academic performance of students, particularly students from low-income families who are often concentrated in high-poverty schools. Yet it also fuels the reproduction of inequality by harming their physical health. Integrating research on school effects with social psychological and ecological theories on how local contexts shape life course outcomes, we examined a conceptual model linking school poverty and adolescent students' weight. Applying multilevel modeling techniques to the first wave of data (1994-1995) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health; n = 18,924), the results revealed that individual students' likelihood of being overweight increased as the concentration of students from low-income families in their schools increased, net of their own background characteristics. This linkage was connected to a key contextual factor: the exposure of students in high-poverty schools to other overweight students. This exposure may partly matter because of the lower prevalence of dieting norms in such schools, although future research should continue to examine potential mechanisms.

Mothers' depression and educational attainment and their children's academic trajectories.

In this study, we take a dynamic approach to studying the connections among mothers' education, their depression, and their children's academic trajectories during elementary school. Applying latent growth curve modeling to longitudinal data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,012), we find that maternal depression does not mediate the association between mothers' education and children's achievement. Instead, maternal education moderates the association between maternal depression and children's achievement. Specifically, maternal depression only predicted lower achievement for children of women who did not pursue higher education. These results highlight the role of mothers' mental health in the intergenerational linkage between mothers' and children's educational experiences.

Doing it All? Mothers' College Enrollment, Time Use, and Affective Well-being.

The rising share of women in college with dependent children and growing emphasis on two-generation policies for reducing socioeconomic inequality have galvanized research aimed at determining whether mothers' increased education can improve their and their children's well-being. Yet as part of this effort, scholars have overlooked signs that mothers' college enrollment may not be unequivocally good for families. This research brief aims to bring greater attention to this "side of the story." To do so, we analyze time diary (2003-2015) and well-being data (2010, 2011, 2013) from the American Time Use Survey. We find that mothers in college experience a time squeeze that limits their time in caregiving, self-care, and work, on one hand, and school-related activities on the other. This time squeeze may explain why mothers enrolled in college (compared to mothers who were not in school) also reported less happiness and more fatigue during activities with their children.

Health-Related Parenting among U.S. Families and Young Children's Physical Health.

Parenting is a constellation of behaviors, yet investigations of the link between parenting and children's health typically focus on singular behaviors. Thus, patterns of health-related parenting among U.S. families, associations between patterns and children's physical health, and the prevalence of such patterns among different sociodemographic groups remain unknown. Applying latent class analysis to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (2001; n=8,550) revealed six parenting patterns. The pattern characterized by high levels of television watching was associated with the worst overall health; the pattern characterized by the highest consumption of food and amount of outdoor play was linked to the highest odds of obesity. Children of less educated mothers and Black mothers were more likely to experience both of these patterns than the patterns associated with the best child health, but these patterns did not differ for Hispanics (versus Whites). Income differences only appeared for patterns associated with children's general health.

Exploring New Life Course Patterns of Mother's Continuing Secondary and College Education.

A mounting body of evidence suggests that the life course sequence that once defined contemporary U.S. women's lives is changing as an increasing number of women now complete their education after the transition to motherhood. Despite such evidence, we know little about this changing pattern of life course events for many U.S. women. The aim of this study, therefore, is to produce population-based estimates that describe the prevalence of mothers' school reentry and secondary and college degree attainment, the timing of women's post-childbearing education vis-à-vis their transition into motherhood, and the characteristics of mothers who pursue additional schooling. To do so, the study draws on data from a nationally representative cohort of U.S. women participating in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (n=4,925) and descriptive and event history techniques. Findings suggest that a substantial proportion of mothers (17%) completed additional education after the transition to motherhood, especially mothers who had the lowest levels of education at their time of first birth (high school dropouts) (43%). These mothers, who overwhelmingly earned high school degrees/GEDs, were most likely to do so within five years of giving birth, while mothers pursuing higher levels were more likely to do so when children were older. Mothers who pursued schooling after the transition to motherhood were remarkably more disadvantaged than women who followed the traditional sequencing of life course events. Compared to women who had the same education upon being mothers, they were also younger, more often poor, and had greater job instability but higher cognitive test scores.

Early child care and illness among preschoolers.

The majority of young American children regularly spend time in nonparental care settings. Such arrangements are associated with their experiences of common childhood illnesses. Why this linkage exists, how it varies across the socioeconomic spectrum, and whether it has implications for how parents arrange care are all important theoretical and policy issues. In this study, therefore, we applied a fixed-effects design within structural equation modeling to data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (n = 1,364). Results revealed that children were sick more often when cared for in a center and had more peer exposure in their primary care settings, although this latter association was observed only among children of the least educated mothers. Net of such factors, children in multiple arrangements did not experience more illness, but illnesses tended to decrease subsequent peer exposure as parents changed children's care arrangements.

Maternal Education, Early Child Care and the Reproduction of Advantage.

The social and human capital that educational attainment provides women enables them to better navigate their children's passages through school. In this study, we examine a key mechanism in this intergenerational process: mothers' selection of early child care. Analyses of the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development revealed that maternal education was positively associated with configurations of child-care characteristics (i.e., type, quality, quantity) most closely linked to children's school readiness. This association was not solely a function of mother's income or employment status, persisted despite controls for many observable confounds (e.g., maternal cognitive and psychological skills, paternal characteristics), and, according to post-hoc indices, was fairly robust in terms of unobservable confounds.