Ingrid reviews Nancy Folbre’s book, Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family (The Family and Public Policy). I really must read this book, but I’m just going to pull out some wonderful statistics from Ingrid’s review.

A child with two parents present enjoys on average 32 hours a week of
active parental care (with either or both of the parents present)
whereas for children of single parents this number is 23 hours.
Children spend much less time alone with their fathers than with their
mother: in two-parent households children aged 0 to 2 spend 19.5 hours
with their mother alone, and 7.9 hours with their father alone – and
this parental gap remains significant when they get older (e.g. 11.4
versus 4.3 hours when they are aged 9-11)…

… the annual cost of parental family care in a two-parent two-child
household would annually amount to $13,352; in a one-parent family
$11,024. (p. 129). If we add to these the direct monetary expenditures,
then the total parental expenditures annually average $23,243 in two
parent households, and $17,125 in one-parent households. The time cost
of parenting takes about 60 to 65% of this total cost.

Having analysed what parents spend on their children, Folbre moves on
to investigate what the government spends on children. She shows that
in the US federal policy provides better protection for the old than
for the young and that there are great inequalities in access to health
care and education. Folbre also lays out the different US public
policies that affect parenting and children; for a non-American
audience this is a very useful overview for those wanting to start
getting a grip on the different types of American family-related
policies.