ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the financial cost of children and estimates the time costs of children. Time-use data's unique contribution to research is to provide direct information about the private sphere, particularly by quantifying unpaid work, which is largely invisible to usual data collection methods. Studies have attempted to identify factors, such as education, income, workforce participation, hours worked, social class, race, relative financial contribution and feminist values, which ameliorate the unequal division of labour. The invisibility of unpaid domestic work has implications at both a personal and a social level. At a macro level, the economic value of home production is overlooked, despite an estimated value equivalent to over 60 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Welfare is more commonly compared in the metric of money than of time, but the problem of balancing work and family is arguably more about time constraints than about the scarcity of money resources.
