Monthly Labor Review • October 2009 33 Parenting of Infants The parenting of infants: a time-use study Data from the American Time Use Survey show that parents of infants spend far more time on childcare relative to parents of older children; women spend more time engaging in childcare than men, parents obtain time for childcare from various sources, and time use diverges across lines of socioeconomic status Robert Drago Robert Drago is a professor of labor studies and women’s studies at The Pennsylvania State University. E-mail: drago@psu.edu D o parents of infants spend their time differently than parents of older children? Although an extensive body of research concerns time use among parents, no previous study has directly answered this question. Data from the initial 5 years of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) allow for an investigation of the topic. e analysis in this article provides answers to a series of questions regarding the quantity of time that “coupled” women, coupled men, and single women allocate to childcare; the trade-offs that are made in order to gen- erate time for childcare; and variations among groups of differing socioeconomic status (SES) in time spent on childcare, on housework, and at work. e first question is whether parents devote more time to infants relative to older children. In general, one would expect the answer to be yes. Initially, in- fants generally require more from their caregivers. Few newborns sleep through the night, and they need frequent feed- ing, changing of diapers, rocking, and so forth. Further, infant care is often viewed as more important or valuable to parents and to society than care for older children. is is evident in the paid maternity leave systems that allow mothers to devote themselves to infant care in most nations. 1 e scarcity of paid maternity leave may help explain why coupled mothers of newborns in the United States are often pressured to leave the labor force, or “opt out,” to spend more time on childcare. 2 However, fathers do not appear to fit this pattern. Overall, fathers have increased the amount of time they allocate to childcare in recent decades, 3 but earlier stud- ies provide mixed results in answering the question of whether fathers devote more or less time to younger children than to older children. 4 e second question concerns the “time fi- nancing” of childcare, that is, the reallocation of time spent on other activities to generate additional time for children. Implicit in de- bates regarding opting out is the possibility that the reduction of time spent working for pay is a major source of childcare time—that is, time during which one is engaged in child- care—for new mothers with husbands or part- ners. An analysis of time financing can discern whether mothers of infants commonly pull their time from other sources—such as lei- sure or sleep. For coupled men especially, the sources of childcare time are pertinent given the historical pattern of new fathers increasing the amount of time they devote to employ- ment. 5 If fathers of infants are found to spend more time on both employment and childcare, where does that time come from? For single mothers, the task of raising an infant alone