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Chapter 10 Mothers’ Time, Fathers’ Time, and Gender Equal Parenting: What Do We Conclude? THE PRECEDING chapters contain three basic claims from our timediary evidence. Each is novel and will likely be controversial. First is that mothers are spending as much time interacting with their children today as forty years ago when they allocated far fewer hours to paid work. They do this by making children their top priority. They cut back market work when child care demands are highest, they privilege child care activities over other time expenditures (especially housework and time for themselves), and they include children in their leisure activities to maximize time with them. They absorb a higher workload despite a sense of not having enough time for their spouse and for themselves , always feeling rushed, and juggling more than one thing at a time. One important caveat to this conclusion is that we cannot show whether mothers are as accessible in the home as they were in the past, which may be part of why many mothers continue to feel that they do not spend enough time with their children despite their heavy investment in child rearing. Second, we find fathers are doing more in the home, especially more child care, despite their continuing to devote large amounts of time to paid work. How do they manage this? Like mothers, they work long weeks. They seem willing to trade time in personal care, time alone, and maybe even some market work to expand what they do with their children . Moreover, they are increasingly taking on the responsibility for basic, routine aspects of caregiving—diaper changing, feeding, and the like—meaning they are not just participating in the easier or more enjoyable activities of child care. At the same time, many feel they do not spend enough time with their children. Third, we find gender equality across mothers and fathers in overall workloads. If both market work and unpaid work count in what 169 constitutes what we think of as good parenting—and we argue both should be included—fathers and mothers contribute equally. This may be a controversial claim, given the vast literature that argues that it is mothers who bear the brunt of the increased family workload. In other words, fathers as well as mothers are burdened by a second shift. There are several caveats to this claim of gender equality. First, mothers’ greater subjective sense of time pressures may derive from their being the one who continues to orchestrate family life—a reality that is difficult to capture in time-diary data. Second, when children are reared outside a two-parent home, fathers are much less likely than mothers to shoulder the day-to-day responsibility of caregiving—that is, fathers remain more likely than mothers to drop the parental role altogether. At the same time, fathers who live with their children are working as much on behalf of their families as the mothers in those families. Third, women may not easily rebound from reducing paid work as they give their time over to unpaid labor. Lower pensions, forgone careers, and financial instability later in life (particularly in the case of divorce) can be a consequence of time away from full-time employment when children are young. We began this volume by describing the subtle revolution in the latter half of the twentieth century in mothers’ market work. This change reverberated throughout family life. We then proceeded to examine in great detail many of the consequences of this profound change. The time-diary evidence documents changes in family life that could not clearly be reflected in any earlier type of data collection. We have been particularly interested in time spent doing paid work but also in unpaid work for the household—the second shift of interest to family researchers. We have also examined changes in free-time activities that occur in families with children—time with others, not only children but also spouses, families and friends, and time in the community. Our latest diary studies have been embedded in surveys that also ask respondents their feelings about various activities, including parental practices. These allow us to present a picture of not only the behavioral changes but also the subjective dimension of family life to place these changes in a clearer and broader context. We began, in chapter 3, with the question of work hours: have they increased for parents and by how much? We used two data sources that covered the...

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