Beyond the Market Designing Nonmarket Accounts for the United States (2005) / Chapter Skim
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4 The Role of the Family in the Production of Human Capital
4 The Role of the Family in the Production of Human Capital
Pages 79-92
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From page 79... ...
While parents may purchase assistance with the care of their children, market care cannot fully substitute for their personal attention. Some observers appear to view family care as akin to sunlight, available without cost in effectively unlimited supply and thus of no economic interest.
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From page 80... ...
Parental time inputs that create a foundation for learning can be viewed as skill-enhancing investments in human capital. Likewise, family care augments the inputs of the medical care system in the production of health, another investment output that yields a flow of future benefits.
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From page 81... ...
Measures of output valuation can be derived from the cost of analogous market services, as is done, for instance, for child care in the home production satellite accounts developed by the Office for National Statistics of the United Kingdom. But this approach is quite distinct from that suggested for satellite accounts to value the outputs of the education and health sectors, in which the production of human capital is treated as an investment yielding a future flow of income or utility.
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From page 82... ...
. Many of these soft skills are related to underlying personality traits that are partly inherited and partly shaped by early childhood experiences.
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From page 83... ...
Based on research to date, there is an emerging consensus that long hours of nonmaternal child care for children under the age of 3 can have adverse effects on children's development, but much depends on the quality of that care relative to maternal care, which itself is highly variable across individuals (see National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Child Care Research Network, 1997; Love et al., 2003)
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From page 84... ...
. Children growing up with highly educated, economically successful parents enjoy environmental advantages that are independent of the level of parental effort and attention they receive.
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From page 85... ...
Still, that literature provides no basis for specifying a production function relating child outcomes to parental inputs, if indeed the process is so deterministic. Further research devoted to identifying the causal effects of different parenting behaviors on children's cognitive and noncognitive development is warranted.
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From page 86... ...
While the deficiencies in knowledge are real, in answering questions about schools' effectiveness in promoting skill capital, it matters very much what parents and other family caregivers are contributing to the development of preschool-aged children. In seeking "responsibility" within public schools -- and looking at the financial expenditures, the curricula, and the quality of teaching staffs, and then using test scores or other output measures to assess the effectiveness of those "inputs" -- it is important to remember that important non-school "inputs" from the family or the home affect the measured outputs.
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From page 87... ...
One could argue that simplifying assumptions are a necessary feature of any national income accounting framework. But one implication of this discussion is that many empirical estimates of the contribution of formal education to national income may be misspecified in two countervailing directions.
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From page 88... ...
Statistics Canada opted for a national time-use survey that omits consideration of secondary activities but includes stylized questions regarding care time. The Bureau of Labor Statistics adopted a similar strategy for the ATUS, asking
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From page 89... ...
These data show that increases in maternal employment cause only a small reduction in maternal time in activities with children. Moving from out of the labor force into a 35-hours-per-week job is associated with a decrement of only 7 hours a week in mothers' primary child care time (Gauthier et al., 2001)
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From page 90... ...
Interestingly, because fertility rates have fallen over the course of the century, even if maternal time devoted to child care remains roughly constant, the amount of parental time spent per child may actually have increased (Bianchi, 2000)
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From page 91... ...
Many families benefit from the assistance of paid caregivers for part of the day, but a child who is raised entirely by paid caregivers may be less likely than one who also enjoys consistent parental attention to develop into a productive, healthy adult. If so, the appropriate replacement cost to use in valuing parental time inputs into the care of their children, at least at the margin, could be significantly higher than the wage paid to child care workers.
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From page 92... ...
What we do not know much about, however, is the strength of the relationship between the productivity of parents' market time and the productivity of the time they devote to child-rearing activities. As an aside, it may also be worth noting that the opportunity costs of parental time devoted to child care -- or more broadly, taking responsibility for their children -- may go beyond any potential earnings forgone as a consequence of spending a marginal hour in child care rather than market work.
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