What's a More Important Parent Investment: Money or Time?

What matters more to a student's academic future: their parents' time or their money? Two new international studies published online by the National Bureau of Economic Research take different approaches to tease out the influence of various parent contributions on children's achievement.

Each parent was asked about the quality of their children's school and then taken through eight scenarios in which they had to decide how productive it would be for families to invest in time directly helping their children to learn new skills, paying for tutors or enrichment materials, or finding a higher quality school. The parents were also asked what income they expected their child would earn by age 30. 

This was as true of parents in poverty as wealthy families. Interestingly, the parents thought investing increasing time or money would lead to diminishing returns, though they did think it was worth investing more in materials if the student also was attending a high-quality school. 

While prior studies have found parents sometimes invest differently in their sons and daughters, the researchers found no differences in parents' hypothetical or actual decisions to invest money or time, or to change schools based on their child's gender, nor were there differences based on whether the child in question was initially low- or high-performing. Moreover, while education research has repeatedly pointed to the benefits of investing in early education, parents overall favored investing more time and money in older children.

The researchers found that mothers' education generally had more influence on their children's education than did fathers, possibly because in Israel mothers typically spend more time with children than fathers. But, Gould said, "We found that if a mother dies, her education becomes less important for whether her child passes the test, while at the same time the father's education becomes more important. If a father dies, the reverse happens.These relationships are stronger when the parent dies when the child is younger
Moreover, this effect was lessened if a child's father remarried after the mother's death, they found. For divorced families, children's education was more closely tied to the education of the parent they lived with.