Time spent with children, measured rather than felt

Time use surveys ask people to record their activities in ten or fifteen minute slots on a randomly drawn day, rather than to estimate a weekly volume.

That method greatly reduces global estimation bias, but it imposes conventions: primary and secondary activities are distinguished, and time of mere presence is coded separately from time of interaction.

In France, INSEE, the national statistics institute, has run this type of survey since the 1960s, at intervals of about ten years, which provides comparable series over several decades despite changes in classification.

Long series, notably American and European, show an increase in time devoted to children since the 1960s, among mothers as among fathers, despite rising female employment. The work of the sociologist Suzanne Bianchi did much to establish this result in the United States, and comparisons covering some ten rich countries later found it fairly generally.

The rise is markedly larger for fathers in relative terms, starting from a very low base, and the absolute gap between mothers and fathers remains substantial in every country studied.

Several mechanisms are proposed: the fall in the number of children per family, which concentrates available time, the fall in time devoted to housework, and a shift in the trade-off towards personal time and sleep.

To which is added a change of norm: activities shared with the child are more highly valued, which raises both their real frequency and their probability of being recorded as such in a diary.

The rise is unevenly distributed. Several studies show it is larger among parents with higher education, which opens a gap that did not exist in the 1960s.

That gap by education receives opposing interpretations: a differentiated investment in children's education, or a norm effect, the most highly educated parents also being those who most embrace the idea of a time-demanding parental role.

The composition of time also differs: surveys distinguish care time, transport time and shared activity time, and those three items have not moved the same way across social groups.

The same surveys record a rising sense of time pressure, while measured time increases. That gap is one of the most stable results in the field.

Proposed explanations bear on the fragmentation of activities, on rising expectations attached to the parental role, and on measurement itself: feeling time-constrained is not the same as counting its minutes.