Fathers' Childcare Time: Concerted Cultivation?

Ivan Sanidad, University of Hawaii at Honolulu
Yean-Ju Lee, University of Hawaii at Honolulu

Fathers spend increasingly longer time in childcare. This study asks whether the quality of fathers’ childcare also matches to that among the mothers, i.e., whether fathers engage in those parenting practices broadly called “concerted cultivation” as mothers do. Data are from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003 to 2011. Childcare is divided into five different categories: basic care, play, teaching with reading and conversing, teaching assisting educational activities, and management. These activities are further divided by the presence of the spouse: solo versus double. The youngest child's age is grouped into 0-2, 3-5, and 6-13. The findings confirm the hypothesis: compared to their less educated counterparts, more educated fathers invest more time in childcare and more strictly adjust their time allocation among different types of care activities to best meet the developmental needs of the children as they grow older, in solo as well as double activities.