Abstract
Parental time investments in early years are essential to children's socio-emotional and cognitive development, but they are often not accurately measured in child development studies. Following a recent approach, we designed an app-based time use survey instrument to collect time diaries of adults describing their allocation of time over the 24 hours spectrum. We illustrate the time use diary app and assess its validity leveraging data on a sample of parents of pre-schoolers enrolled in the mindful parenting app-based project MinUTo. We show that our instrument delivers estimates of parental time allocation which are comparable to those obtained with ISTAT time-use data. Finally, we exploit contextual information on child's involvement in the activity and child's positive feelings to define alternative measures of parental time investments and analyse their weekly, weekday and weekend day patterns.