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Missing time with parents: son preference among Asians in the USA

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Abstract

We study prevalence of son preference in families of East and South Asian origin living in the USA by investigating parental time investments in children using American Time Use Surveys. Estimates show that East and South Asian mothers spend an additional hour of quality time per day with their young (aged 0–2 years) sons than with young daughters; son preference in mothers’ time allocation declines as children get older. East and South Asian fathers’ time with young children is gender neutral. We find gender specialization in time with children aged 6–17 with fathers spending more time with sons and mothers spending more time with daughters.

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Notes

  1. See for instance, Chen et al. (1981), Chung and Das Gupta (2007), Coale and Banister (1994), Das Gupta et al. (2009), Guilmoto (2009) Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2011), Marcoux (2002), Nishikiori et al. (2006), Pande (2003), Sen (1990), UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2005), and World Bank (2012).

  2. Indian immigrant women in the USA who seek prenatal sex selection services cite pressure from family members, threat of abuse, and an upbringing that emphasizes the importance of sons as reasons for the women’s desire for sons (Puri et al. 2011).

  3. Studies of gender discrimination in China and India find that improved earnings and employment opportunities for women are linked to decreased female child mortality (Ram 1984; Rosenzweig and Schultz 1982), increased investments in education of girls (Jensen 2012; Qian 2008), and improvement in girls’ nutrition (Jensen 2012).

  4. Female infanticide—the starkest manifestation of parental bias—has also been observed in parts of East and South Asia but it is often difficult to establish its prevalence (George et al. 1992; Miller 1987).

  5. Pabilonia and Ward-Batts (2007) find that Asian immigrants to the USA work less, compared to whites, after the birth of a son versus that of a daughter, and they attribute it to decreased specialization within Asian families after the birth of a son. Gangadharan and Maitra (2003) find that couples of Indian descent in South Africa wait longer to have another child after the birth of a son which is not the case for couples from other ethnic backgrounds.

  6. According to ATUS documentation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “a designated person is selected randomly from each household to participate in the interview. An eligible person is a civilian household member at least 15 years of age. All eligible persons within a sample household have the same probability of being selected as the ATUS designated person. No substitutes or proxy responses are allowed. All responses must be obtained directly from this designated respondent.”

  7. About 4% of the respondents in our sample are grandparents; all others are parents. For convenience, we use the term parents to describe both.

  8. In our data only 7% of East and South Asian families are headed by single parents compared to 21–23% single parent headed families for the other three groups. In supplementary analysis, we repeated our analysis including all family types and the results were similar and we discuss some of the results in footnote 16.

  9. Restricting the analysis to US non-Hispanic Whites leaves the results largely unchanged.

  10. Following Price (2008), quality time are activities coded by ATUS as “physical care for children,” “reading to/with children,” “playing with children, not sports,” “arts and crafts with children,” “playing sports with children,” “talking with/listening to children,” “looking after children,” “homework,” “home schooling of children,” “eating and drinking,” “attending performing arts,” “attending museums,” and “participation in religious practices.”

  11. All analyses in this paper use unweighted data.

  12. We also ran models with year of observation and weekend/weekday controls, and the results were similar to models that did not include these controls.

  13. We ran models with the restrictions and the results were similar to those without the restriction.

  14. It may also result in a disproportionate fraction of two-child families with first-born girls and second-born boys. We checked our data and find that the proportion of families with first-born boys is almost the same in the two samples: 50.32% in the fixed effects sample and 51% in the entire sample.

  15. To test this assumption, we examine whether observed family characteristics jointly predict the gender of the child for three groups of children: all children less than 18, all children less than 6 and all children less than 2. The p value for a test that all covariates are jointly zero is 0.001 for all children, 0.24 for children < 6, and 0.69 for children < 6. This suggests that family characteristics do a poor job at predicting the gender of young children.

  16. We did all analyses using total time spent and the results were qualitatively the same as those for quality time.

  17. In additional analysis, we studied prevalence of gender bias in West Asian/Middle East families and found no evidence of son-preference among fathers and some daughter preference among mothers from West Asia and the Middle East. The results from these analyses are in Table 7. The sample of first- and second-generation immigrants of West Asian/Middle-Eastern origin has 59 female respondents with 78 children aged 0–5 years, 66 male respondents with 89 children aged 0–5 years, 85 female respondents with 154 children aged 6–17 years, and 89 male respondents 166 children aged 6–17 years. Because the sample size is small, these results should be interpreted with caution.

  18. We also conducted the analysis presented in Table 2 on all families, i.e., including single-parent families, and obtained similar results.

  19. We also estimated model 1 for other outcomes. The results were similar to those reported using model 2. For brevity, we do not present those results but they can be provided upon request.

  20. The majority (86.5%) of East and South Asian mothers of children aged 0–5 are first-generation immigrants.

  21. We also conducted this analysis restricting samples to families with first born children aged 0–2 years. The point estimates were similar but mostly statistically insignificant.

  22. These results are not presented for the sake of brevity but are available from the authors upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editor, Junsen Zhang, the four anonymous referees, Lisa Bates, Lena Edlund, Irwin Garfinkel, Robert Kaestner, Julien Teitler, and conference participants at the Columbia Population Research Center and Population Association of America for their valuable comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Neeraj Kaushal

  2. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 536 George Street, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Felix M. Muchomba

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  1. Neeraj Kaushal
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Correspondence to Felix M. Muchomba.

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Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang

Appendix

Appendix

Table 6 South and East Asian children by respondent’s (i.e., parent’s) country of origin
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Table 7 Estimates of son preference in parental quality time (in minutes)
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Table 8 Estimates of son preference in one-on-one quality time with children
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Table 9 Estimates of the association between parental quality time with children aged 0–5 years and years in the USA, among East and South Asian first-generation immigrant families
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Table 10 Test for son-biased fertility stopping using current population survey (CPS–annual social and economic supplement) data for 2003–2012
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Kaushal, N., Muchomba, F.M. Missing time with parents: son preference among Asians in the USA. J Popul Econ 31, 397–427 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-017-0668-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-017-0668-6

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