Understanding the Importance of Parental Time With Children: Comment on Milkie, Nomaguchi, and Denny (2015)

Abstract

The premise of the research article by Milkie, Nomaguchi, and Denny (2015)-Does the Amount of Time Mothers Spend With Children or Adolescents Matter?-should be evaluated in the context of a large literature in economics, sociology, and developmental psychology that investigates the role of family background in shaping children's development. A key fact that this literature demonstrates is that gaps in educational attainment between rich and poor children open up early in life and remain largely constant through the school years (Duncan & Magnuson, 2011). For instance, at age 4, children from families in the poorest income quintile score on average at the 32nd percentile of the national distribution on math, the 34th percentile in a test of literacy, and the 32nd percentile on a measure of school readiness compared to children in the richest quintile, who scored at the 69th percentile on math and literacy and at the 63rd percentile on school readiness (Waldfogel & Washbrook, 2011). Gaps in conduct problems and attention/hyperactivity are also apparent, albeit less pronounced. On measures of hyperactivity, for instance, children from families in the poorest income quintile score, on average, at the 55th percentile of the national distribution (in this case, higher scores indicate higher levels of behavior problems) compared to children in the richest quintile, who scored at the 44th percentile (Waldfogel & Washbrook, 2011). These gaps change very little over the course of the school years.Because these gaps are present well before children begin formal schooling, one must conclude that they arise from differences between low- and high-income parents in either nature or nurture or the combination of the two. A large body of research makes it nearly indisputable that nature and nurture interact to produce almost all outcomes, leaving a large role for parental influence on the things that matter for children's development. Understanding what about matters for children's outcomes is of key importance to social scientists and policy makers. Milkie et al. argue that we can rule out maternal time spent with children because it does not matter. Their abstract states, childhood and adolescence, the amount of maternal time did not matter for offspring behaviors, emotions, or academics (p. 355). In arguing forcefully for this conclusion, they imply they are doing mothers a service by allaying mothers' perceptions of inadequacy about the amount of time they spend with their children.There are important problems with the authors' theoretical framework, measures, estimation models, and interpretation of the results. Consequently, the Milkie et al. article provides little insight into the question of whether maternal time with children is beneficial to child outcomes. The article sets up a weak straw man that mothers (implicitly highly educated mothers) are trapped in a pattern of time-intensive parenting that diminishes their health and well-being and provides no benefit to their children because of a false belief that a mother's time is uniquely beneficial to children. The very first sentence of the abstract states, Although intensive mothering ideology underscores the irreplaceable nature of mothers' time for children's optimal development, empirical testing of this assumption is scant (p. 355). We agree that the evidence is scant, but this might be because not all that many mothers actually believe this rhetoric. After all, the share of child care time put in by married fathers has been increasing at about the same pace as the increase for married mothers (Parker & Wang, 2014). Mothers are responsible for more of the total child care mainly because fathers are not present in so many families. But that does not imply a dominant ideology of the uniqueness of mothers' time.Setting aside the issue of the strength of their straw man, the authors provide no definition of intensive and make no attempt to measure it. …