School closures and unpaid care work under Covid19

As the Covid19 pandemic spreads across the globe, many governments are closing schools entirely or replacing in-person education with distance learning that students do from home. In either case, hours a day that children used to spend at school in the care of paid teachers and other school personnel, they instead spend at home with parents and other family members.

With school closures and other large-scale disruptions, there is a clear need for data on how these closures impact unpaid care work and paid work in households. Those data will come when nationally representative time use surveys are fielded again to compare with those from before pandemic-related closures. In the meantime, CWW does have tools to help us estimate the scale of the impact. How much will adults’ unpaid care work increase due to time spent supervising children out of school?

Taking data from Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, we estimate that students spent 22-26 hours per week in school during months when school is in session, depending on the level of schooling. For high school students, it is less likely that they will require adult supervision so we will estimate their time at only 13 hours per week.  Multiplying these estimates by the total numbers of children of each age by the hours per week estimated for their level of schooling gives us an aggregate amount of time shifted from schools to households.  If we assume that these hours are provided in the same proportion as childcare hours are provided now, we can use CWW’s estimate of childcare production by age and sex to distribute those hours to adults.

The results look like the figure below, for a set of 17 countries in the CWW project. Men are shown in the blue lines, women in the red. 

Hours per day of additional childcare due to school closures, for men in blue, for women in red. Some time may be supervisory and not direct interactive care. (Source: CWW estimates and OECD data on average schooling hours)

The increases fall mostly on women because they provide most of the direct care in these countries.  There is a wide range of potential increases for two reasons: 1. some countries have many children relative to the number of adult caregivers and some countries have fewer, and 2. some countries share caregiving responsibilities more evenly between men and women and more evenly over the age range.  At peak ages for childcare in Bangladesh and Senegal, school closures could result in more than three additional hours per day in childcare. In Spain and Colombia, it could be less than an hour per day.  Of course, this is averaging across parents and non-parents, as CWW estimates are averages across all persons of a particular age and sex.  Further exploration within each country would be needed to find the impact per parent instead of per adult.

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Research in Brief: The Age Profile of Invisible Transfers

These one-pagers summarise key findings of research on gender, time-use and National Transfer Accounts.

Paper Authors: Róbert I. Gál, Endre Szabó and ​Lili Vargha

Publication Date: May 2014

Abstract: We argue that the institutional composition of funding consumption in the two dependent sections of the lifecycle, childhood and old age, are different. To put it sharply, children are raised by their parents, the elderly rely on society. Since the reallocation of resources within households are not registered in National Accounts, the majority of the resources transferred to children are not visible in contrast to resources flowing to the elderly, which are almost entirely observed in public statistics. For our analysis we apply a recent extension of National Accounts, called the National Transfer Accounts, which include intrahousehold transfers; and a further, experimental extension, the National Time Transfer Accounts, which quantifies the value of time transferred among household members in the form of unpaid household labor. We show that about one third of the full transfer package flowing to children is registered in the National Accounts and another roughly one third is made visible by the National Transfer Accounts. The remaining one third, which is the value of parents caring for their children, is made visible by the National Time Transfer Accounts. The corresponding shares in funding old age are quite different: nearly 90 percent is observed in public statistics and the two accounting extensions unfold only a bit more than 10 percent.

The original working paper to which this Research in Brief corresponds can be obtained from the Hungarian Demographic Research Institute here.