The Value of Unpaid Child Care in the U'S' in 2003

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The Value of Unpaid Child Care in the U.S. in 2003
Nancy Folbre and Jayoung Yoon University of
Massachusetts Amherst
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The American Time Use Survey (ATUS)

• Began collection in 2003. Appended onto the
  Current Population Survey
• Will be administered annually (2004 results now
  available)
• Includes an important measure of child care time
  NOT based on an activity, asking if and when
  children 12 and under were in your care
• For more information go to www.bls.gov/tus/

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Three Steps in Estimating the Value of Unpaid
Child Care
1. How many hours of child care did adult men and
women provide per day, on average, in 2003? 2.
How did these hours vary in terms of intensity
and skill? 3. How does the value of these
hours, estimated by multiplying a specialist
replacement wage times the number of hours,
compare to the value of paid work?
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Child care is more than an activity. It is also
a responsibility that imposes constraints on paid
work, household work, and leisure.
As Margaret Reid, pioneer of the economics of
household production, put it in 1934
Even though she the household worker may not
be on active duty, evidence of her labor is about
her she is continually on call. Much so-called
leisure has a string attached. Economics of
Household Production, p.319.
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Estimates of the value of unpaid child care
should include consideration of the value of in
your care
Frazis and Stewart (2004) include valuation of
secondary care time that did not overlap with
other non-market work. They found that it
accounted for about one quarter of the total time
spent in nonmarket household production, and
slightly more than one-fifth of the value of
non-market production when a specialist wage is
used.
Also relevant differences in the intensity and
skill of different kinds of direct child care,
including the indirect costs that children
impose in the form of additional domestic
labor. Rather than simply adding primary and
secondary care we categorize time according to a
care continuum for both direct and indirect
care.
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The Care Continuum
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Average Adult Time Devoted to Children in the
U.S. in 2003 by Household Characteristics (hours
per day)
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How to Value Non-Market Child Care Time?
Value to whom? Lower-bound value to parent is
opportunity cost or foregone wages. Value to
society is what it would cost to replace the
service with a service of comparable quality. I
interpret this as care in the home with a similar
adult-to- child ratio. A recent National
Academy of Science report, Beyond the Market,
recommends such a replacement cost estimate.
Different types of child care are assigned
different hourly wage rates e.g. minimum wage
for supervisory child care, childcare workers
wage for physical care, kindergarten teacher wage
for developmental care.
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Table 3. Hourly Replacement Wage Rates
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Survey conducted by the International Nanny
Association in 2003-2004 Average annual pay
reported for nannies that did not live in and
receive part of their pay in the form of rent was
30,680 per year.
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Directions for Future Research

• Examine sensitivity of these estimates to
  alternative definitions of the care continuum and
  alternative wage rates. Add consideration of time
  children are sleeping.
• Provide estimates for more disaggregated groups
  (e.g. married and single parents living with
  children versus others).
• Weight hours of care by the average density of
  care, defined as the square root of the average
  number of adults to children in each category of
  care.