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Chapter 7 Feelings About Time: Parental Stress and Time Pressures W E HAVE concentrated on the behavioral or activity component of time in working families—what parents report actually doing with their time. However, busy and overworked are also subjective classifications. How people feel about their time allocations—the meaning they give to their prioritization of activities— is also of great interest. We have become particularly fascinated with the apparent disconnect between what parents actually do with their time and how they judge the balance in their lives, much as Robinson and Godbey (1999) found for adults in general. We thus focus here on the subjective dimension of the time allocations we have documented in earlier chapters. The cultural landscape of family life today is one that continues to be strongly shaped by gendered beliefs—that is, ideas about the ways in which men and women ought to behave and their expectations of how they should feel within families. Indeed, the cultural ideals surrounding motherhood and men’s roles in families continue to influence decisions parents make about how to allocate their time and, more fundamentally, for what we will examine here: mothers’ and fathers’ feelings about the way they apportion that time. Here we examine two major facets of the emotional texture of contemporary parents’ lives, and, to the extent possible, assess how these parents’ feelings have changed over time. First, we look at how parents feel about their time allocations to their children, their spouses, and themselves. We focus mainly on feelings about time spent with children because of the public lament about parents not spending enough. How do parents actually feel about the time they allocate to their children? Similarly, do they spend enough time with their spouse or on themselves ? Related to this, how often do mothers and fathers experience feeling rushed? How often do they feel as if they are doing two things at once? For mothers, differences in all of these feelings are examined based on their employment status. 125 A second major facet regarding the parental experience is their more general assessment of their work and family lives. How do employed parents feel about the degree to which they have been able to balance work and family life? Have they had to make sacrifices in either paid work or family life to strike a comfortable balance?1 Time with Children in Twenty-FirstCentury America—The Power of Ideology Do parents spend enough time with their children? The popular answer to this question is an emphatic “no.” According to the 1990 General Social Survey, fully 85 percent of Americans agree or strongly agree with the statement that “parents today don’t spend enough time with their children .” Yet, as we discussed in chapter 4, if anything, parents spend more time interacting with children compared with earlier generations, not less. Why might today’s parents (paradoxically) feel that they don’t spend enough time with their children? There are two key reasons. First, as we suggested in chapter 1, the cultural ideologies of intensive parenting may be even more prominent today. The belief is that larger quantities of parental time are not only morally right, but also critical to the proper development of the child. Second is the nostalgia for a mythical past—one in which family time is believed to have existed as relatively uncomplicated , freely chosen, and rejuvenating. First, ideals about intensive mothering, involved fathering, and childcenteredness may cause parents to feel as if they do not have the time they need because these ideals prescribe that good parents spend large quantities of time with children—that children are priceless. Intensive mothering is a cultural ideal to which women are expected to sacrifice careers, leisure time, and whatever else is necessary to ensure that their children thrive. Hays (1996) argues that the belief has become even more prominent today. Among both working-class and middle-class mothers, good mothering is defined in terms of being there for children. Paid caregivers cannot fully substitute for mothers’ time because these substitutes do not provide enough love and commitment to the child. Many of Hays’s respondents believed that even fathers’ time did not adequately compensate for mothers’ time, because fathers did not properly attend to children when left alone with them. This may contribute to mothers’ feelings that the time they give to their children—especially when they are employed— is never enough. The child becomes a central focus, with needs...

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