Impact of Mother's Time Allocation on Child's Health

Abstract

The time parents devote to caring for their children is an enormous and component of society's investment in human capital. These investments may be at risk mainly due to the growing proportion of women entering the labor market. This paper investigates the determinants of mother's time spent in childcare activities and the impact of mother's time on children's health and nutritional status, using data from surveys undertaken in the Bicol region of Philippines for the years 1983 and 2003. It focuses in particular on the effects of mother's childcare time on children's health status in order to evaluate the importance of the under-appreciated maternal time input.The paper presents a theoretical model as well as an empirical analysis of the time mothers spend in childcare activities and its impact on child health. However, the estimation for mothers' childcare time is endogenous and there may be measurement errors in the available indicators for mothers' childcare time and child health. Two stage least squares method uses instrumental variables to solve the estimation problems that lead to substantial misunderstanding of the true effects in the model.The results suggest that the only statistically significant variable effecting mothers' time on childcare activities is mothers' height. The results from the second part of the study investigate the relationship between mothers' time in childcare activities and children's health, using child height as the indicator of child health. The empirical results show that the only positive and significant impact on child‟s health is mothers' height. This study then sets out to investigate the effects of mother‟s time allocation in childcare activities on child's health outcomes. It concludes that the overall effect is not very significant. Child health outcomes are mostly related to their genetic health endowments.