How the Allocation of Children’s Time Affects Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Development

The allocation of children’s time among different activities may be important for their cognitive and non-cognitive development. In our work we exploit time use diaries from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children to study the effect of time allocation across a wide range of alternative activities. By doing so we characterize the trade-off between the activities to which a child is exposed. On the one hand, our results suggest that time spent in educational activities, particularly with parents, is the most productive input for cognitive skill development. On the other hand, non-cognitive skills appear insensitive to alternative time allocations. Instead, these skills are greatly affected by the mother’s parenting style. ∗We wish to thank Frank Wolak, Katrien Stevens, Jennifer Bowes and seminar participants at the NBER summer institute 2010, the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney, Queensland University of Technology and the University of Wollongong for helpful comments.