The summer parental investment gap? Socioeconomic gaps in the seasonality of parental expenditures and time with school-age children

Abstract

Inequalities in parental investments can shape inequalities in children’s outcomes and life chances. Scholars have theorized how socioeconomic status (SES) may moderate how parents use parental investments to respond to the loss of the provision of public schooling during the summer. We investigate the seasonality of SES gaps in parental investments of both money and time in the United States using the 1996–2019 Consumer Expenditure Survey and the 2003–2019 American Time Use Survey. We find SES gaps in parental investments of both money and time during the summer, and that SES gaps in expenditures are larger in the summer than during non-summer months. We find little evidence that any of these gaps have grown substantially over time. Finally, we find evidence that SES gaps in summer paternal investments of time are driven by investments in younger rather than older school-aged children. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the link between public and parental investments in children, address a key mechanism in the debate about the summer learning gap, and provide new evidence on how parents may target investments in children towards the ages when they are most consequential.