Women armed with college degrees and career opportunities have increasingly morphed into soccer moms, dedicated to carting their children from activity to activity over the past two decades. University of California, San Diego (UCSD) economist Valerie Ramey discovered she was falling into this description until her family asked her to dial back the stress. Interested in the way parents allocate their limited resource of time, Ramey, along with her husband, Garey, began researching the amount of time parents nationwide spent with their children from the 1960s to the present and found the number of hours have skyrocketed in the past two decades. Parents were gradually spending less time with their children from the 1960s through the early ’90s before the trend reversed. College-educated mothers began spending nine hours more per week with their children than in the previous decades, while non-college-educated women spent four to five more hours per week with their children. Fathers also began spending more time with their children, although the increase was less. “Nine hours per week is a quarter of a full-time job,” Ramey said. “That’s just the increase that [mothers] experienced.” The Rameys searched for answers to explain the data and discovered evidence points to one factor: parents are worried about their children getting into top universities and are on a mission to cultivate them into standout individuals from an early age. The Rameys dismissed the following theories because they couldn’t be corroborated with the data available: a) Parents spend more time with their children now than in the decades before because they are more worried about their safety; b) people have more say in becoming parents and only people who love children chose to have them; and c) parents have more flexible work schedules than in the past. Ramey delved into the college hypothesis. She found more people were graduating from high school and heading to college in the mid-’90s but prestigious colleges were not increasing their acceptance rates. “People perceived that there was much more competition for slots at good colleges like the Ivy League, UC schools and good liberal-arts colleges,” Ramey said. Ramey checked her hypothesis against time spent by parents with their children in Canada, where the culture and language are similar. but the hierarchy and competitiveness among colleges is vastly different. “Most people in Canada go to the college in their province,” Ramey said. “There are no SATs, no AP classes and extracurricular activities count for zero in terms of getting into college compared to the U.S.” Ramey found the amount of time college-educated Canadians spent with their children from the late ’80s to the present remained flat during the same time it skyrocketed in the U.S. when compared to the previous decades. When Ramey discussed her research on radio talk shows, she said she found that family therapists agreed with her conclusion. “They say they have people coming into their office completely stressed out because they have no time, and because they feel they need to spend all this time catering their kids to various activities and worrying about their education,” Ramey said. Ramey, a Stanford-educated economist, worries about the implications of her findings on the careers of women. She recognizes the benefits of children playing sports but questions the need for parents to enroll their children in three sports or sign them up for multiple extracurricular activities. “It represents a huge reallocation of resources,” Ramey said. “Historically, women didn’t participate much in the labor force because they spent so much time doing home production activities … If, for some reason, parents feel that the amount of time they need to put into their children has gone up, it could have dramatic effects on the labor market.” Ramey said her entire family is happier since she realized she had gone overboard in orchestrating the lives of her children and has since changed her habits. Ramey said her research didn’t address the impact of the time spent on children but pointed to a survey conducted by researcher Ellen Galinsky in which children told her the one thing they would most like to change is that their parents are less stressed. The survey was published in 2000 in Galinsky’s book, “Ask the Children.” “The children didn’t ask for more time with their parents,” Ramey said. Ramey dubbed her study “The Rug Rat Race.” Read it at http://econ.ucsd .edu/~vramey.