Neither market income nor consumption expenditure provide a complete picture of individual standard of living. It is non-market time use which is a further brick to a more comprehensive picture of individual well-being. In our study we focus on a prominent part of non-market services: it is parental child care which contributes not only to individual but also to societal well-being.

Within a novel approach we ask for multidimensional polarization effects on parental child care where compensation of time for parental child care and income is interdependently evaluated by panel estimates of society’s subjective well-being. The new interdependent 2DGAP measure thereby provides multidimensional polarization (for the poor and the rich) intensity information and disentangles the single time and income contributions ensuring at the same time the interdependence of the polarization dimensions. Socio-economic influences on the polarization pole risk and intensity are quantified by two stage Heckman estimates.

The analyses are based on the German Socio-Economic Panel and the German Time Use Surveys 1991/92 and the just released actual 2012/13. The empirical results discover the interdependent relations between parental child care and income under a common evaluation frame and contribute to the question of dimension specific targeted policies in a multidimensional polarization approach.