Chapter 2: Childhood Disabilities and Differential Parental Time Investments in Siblings^*

This study evaluates parental time investments in adolescents with disabilities relative to their siblings and to nondisabled youth in other families. Parents with several children must allocate time and attention to each, which may not be equal due to the challenges that arise from child disabilities, possibly reinforcing preexisting differences between siblings. In contrast, parents may seek to compensate for health deficiencies by allocating more parental time to a child with disabilities. Using the nationally representative American Time Use Survey (ATUS) (2008–2019) and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to make across-family comparisons of parental time with disabled children relative to families in which no children had disabilities (N = 18,140), the study further focused on families with a disabled child and used fixed effects regression to evaluate within-family sibling comparisons of parental time investments (N = 648). Results indicate for families with a child with a disability, and parents spend the most one-on-one time with children who have disabilities and less one-on-one time with their other children. One-on-one time with children with disabilities is also higher than one-on-one time in families without children with disabilities. Differences were most pronounced in households in which a child had both cognitive and physical disabilities and in households in which no parent had a bachelor’s degree. Additional parental time for youth with disabilities aligns with theories of compensation and likely promotes development for these youth. Parental time investments may also be a plausible mechanism for explaining some difficulties experienced by siblings of disabled youth.