Coping with education supply shocks: how COVID-19 affected parents’ time spent on children’s education

The COVID-19 pandemic generated an unprecedented educational supply shock due to prolonged schools’ closures. Using time-use data representative of the U.S. population, we examine how parents’ involvement in educational activities with school-age children changed to cope with the shock. We find that parents do not participated more frequently in educational activities with their children during the pandemic but the time they spent in educational activities, especially with younger children, was significantly increased. We also find that wealthier parents spent less time in educational activities with children, likely due to higher opportunity costs. These findings have important implications for educational and distributional policies.