Family Investment in Children--A Reply to Kenneth Macdonald

This letter is a reply to the European Sociological Review article ‘Family Investments in Children: What the Interactions and the Data Do Not Say’ by Kenneth Macdonald (doi: 10.1093/esr/jcr021) In our article, ‘Family Investments in Children—Productivities, Preferences, and Parental Child Care’ (European Sociological Review 2010, 27, 43–55), the aim is to show that preferences provide a better explanation of caring decisions than do market productivities. In addition, our analyses suggest that parental education and parental educational homogamy are important determinants of care. Macdonald’s critique of our paper includes one point that we can readily accept: we erred in the way we interpreted the interaction term between education and sex of the child. Such interactions, as is well-known, show the level-difference between the two values of the dummy-variable: in our case, the level of education (tertiary versus non-tertiary levels of education). The implication is that high-educated fathers spend more time caring for their children than do non-tertiary educated fathers—regardless of the child’s sex. In any case this does not alter the key point, namely that the education effect reflects parenting preferences rather than differences in market productivities. It must be remembered—as we explain in the article—that we control for earnings so as to help ‘cleanse’ education of its productivity dimension. So, as far as we can see, the main conclusions we offer remain valid

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