Parental time investment and children formative and behavioural outcomes in intact and non intact families

A vast sociological and psychological literature has showed that children from intact and non intact families have different scholastic and behavioural outcomes. This may be due to the different parental investment both in term of money and in term of time spent with the children.
In this paper we investigate whether living with both parents affects the time devoted by children in more formative activities such as reading and studying and in less formative activities such as watching tv or playing video-games with respect to children living with a singlemother. As explanatory variable we consider also the input in terms of time children spend with their parents in doing _human capital accumulating_ activities.
We use data from the Italian Time Use Survey for the year 2008 that contains a detailed time diary for all family members above the age of three.
We concentrate our analysis on children between 5 and 14 year old and we find that having a single mother reduces the time children devote to readying and studying and this effect turns out to be driven by poor single mothers and low educated single mothers, and the time devoted to less formative activities is higher for children with poor or lower educated single mothers.