Household Disadvantage and Adolescents' Time Use

Charlene M. Kalenkoski, Ohio University
David C. Ribar, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Leslie Stratton, Virginia Commonwealth University

Adolescents living in single-parent and/or impoverished households tend to have worse schooling outcomes than adolescents in other households. Previous research has focused on parental “inputs” into the production of developmental outcomes, such as parental time, the provision of resources, and parenting practices. In this paper, we explore an alternative explanation that focuses on the time use of the adolescents themselves. We hypothesize that disadvantaged parents may rely more heavily on their adolescent children to contribute to household production and market work than other parents, and that these additional time burdens may come at the expense of such beneficial activities as schooling and sleep. We examine these hypotheses using time-diary data for over 2,400 15- to 18-year-old adolescents who participated in the 2003-2005 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS), estimating multiple-state, multiple-destination hazard models of adolescents’ activity spells conditional on parents’ living arrangements, household income, and other personal, household, and environmental characteristics.