Scaling short days: Even limited childcare can transform family labor. Guest post by Dyah Pritadrajati

This is the 12^th in this year’s series of posts by PhD students on the job market.

Three hours of kindergarten may not sound like much. Yet across many emerging economies, early-childhood programs often run for only part of the day—and policymakers wonder if that’s enough to matter. In Indonesia, those short sessions quietly reshape the rhythm of family life. My research shows that even limited, predictable childcare can shift how families divide their time—and who gets the chance to earn, learn, and care.

The puzzle

Policymakers often see early-childhood education as valuable only when it runs full-day or year-round. But for most families in low- and middle-income countries, programs are short, community-based, and part-time. Does that make them too small to matter, or just the right scale to relieve daily time pressures? Indonesia offers a rare chance to find out. Kindergarten there lasts only three hours each morning. I use the country’s strict age-eligibility rule to compare families whose youngest child just qualifies for enrolment with those who are still waiting, drawing on two decades of nationally representative household survey data from SUSENAS (2001–2023) to trace how that timing shapes work and care inside the household.

Kindergarten enrolment is potentially endogenous—parents who anticipate returning to work may enroll earlier, while others delay. To address this, I instrument the youngest child’s enrolment with an indicator for age eligibility, exploiting quasi-random variation in birth month around the policy cutoff. This classic two-stage least squares design isolates exogenous shifts in enrolment probabilities generated by the age threshold rather than parental preferences. The first stage captures the discontinuous increase in enrolment at eligibility, while the second stage recovers the local average treatment effect for households whose youngest child’s attendance is induced by this policy-driven variation.

What happens when the youngest starts kindergarten

When a child becomes age-eligible and starts kindergarten, daily routines shift across the household. The local average treatment effect on mothers suggests that they are about 13 percentage points more likely to work and spend around 5 percent more hours on the job. Fathers’ work hours and earnings rise slightly, while older siblings—especially girls—are more likely to be in school instead of helping at home. Household spending increases modestly, driven mainly by non-food items such as transport and personal expenses, potentially reflecting a shift in household time use and spending patterns from home production toward market-based work and consumption.

These changes appear once children reach kindergarten age and then remain remarkably stable over time. Using data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS), which follows households across multiple years, I track how mothers’ employment evolves as the youngest child grows up. Figure 1 shows how maternal employment begins to fall several years before eligibility, coinciding with pregnancy and intensive early childcare, then reverses sharply at the age-4 kindergarten threshold. After entry, employment stays higher for several years.

Figure 1

However, the new jobs mothers take up appear to be mostly informal, short-term, and lower-paid. The limited three-hour window simply does not fit the rhythm of full-time employment. Kindergarten eases time pressure, but deeper barriers such as rigid work schedules and limited childcare coverage are likely to still constrain mothers’ access to better jobs.

Complementing, not replacing, family care

Indonesia’s families often rely on a wide network of relatives—grandparents, older siblings, aunts, and uncles—who share childcare responsibilities within the household. One might expect that formal kindergarten would crowd out this support, but it does not. Instead, the short school day fits around existing routines: mothers work more, older siblings stay in school, and other kin face fewer daytime demands. Rather than replacing family care, kindergarten appears to amplify what families already do by giving them a predictable block of time.

When access is scarce, the gains are larger

The benefits are strongest in villages where kindergartens are scarce and publicly provided. Using linked village administrative data, I examine heterogeneity in the local average treatment effect by kindergarten supply and provider type. Estimated effects are larger in areas with limited supply, consistent with stronger marginal impacts where coverage remains low. Labor supply responses are also higher in areas dominated by public programs, which are typically lower cost and offering more predictable hours than private providers.

How big are the effects, economically?

The effects are modest for any single household but meaningful in scale. Mothers’ employment rate rises by about 13 percentage points, which is roughly a 26 percent increase from the baseline rate of 50 percent, when three hours of reliable childcare become available each morning. This implies a labor-supply elasticity of around 0.6 to 0.7 with respect to available care time. The magnitude is comparable to, or slightly higher than, estimates from childcare expansions in high-income countries, where baseline female participation rates are higher. Average hours worked increase by about five percent, implying an elasticity of roughly 0.1, which suggests that most adjustment occurs on whether mothers work at all rather than on how long they work once employed.

A modest program with clear limits

Three hours of kindergarten each morning create space for mothers to work but only within tight constraints. The program’s short duration rarely enables a shift toward full-time or formal employment, and indicators of household decision-making show little change. Labor outcomes for other relatives remain stable, and estimates show no change in the probability that mothers are reported as the primary daytime caregiver, indicating that mothers fit work around existing care responsibilities rather than shifting them. For many women, this means continuing to juggle employment and care, though the benefits remain most evident among less-educated, rural, and low-income households, where even a few predictable hours of childcare ease daily pressures.  

These results point to a common policy question: is it better to give more families a few hours of care or to offer longer days for only a small group? Evidence from Indonesia suggests that reaching more households with short, reliable programs can be a powerful starting point. For governments building childcare systems under tight budgets, investing in predictable, part-day programs is a practical first step that can open time, opportunity, and choice for families who need them most. The results align with a setting in which many women sit near the labor supply margin, such that even modest improvements in childcare access lead to measurable increases in employment.

Dyah “Prita” Pritadrajati is a PhD candidate in Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, Australian National University (ANU).