The influence of parental employment on how children spend their day

Abstract

There is a longstanding controversy about the impact of parental employment, particularly maternal employment, for pre-school aged children on developmental outcomes such as reading, vocabulary and mathematics. Relatively few studies have examined the ways in which parental employment, including paternal employment, directly impacts upon the daily lives of children, as viewed from the child?s perspective. This paper uses diary data from the 4-5 year cohort of the first wave of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to examine the relationships between the time that both mothers and fathers spend in market work and the time children spend in developmentally important activities such as reading and play and in potentially detrimental activities such as watching television and engaging in problematic or aggressive behaviors.