In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

142 Chapter 8 Children’s Time Use: Too Busy or Not Busy Enough? O UR DESCRIPTION of the changing American family in earlier chapters has almost entirely centered on adults. Although parents clearly play a major role in organizing and making decisions about family life, most observers would probably agree that from a very young age, children are also active participants in the rhythms of everyday family life. When they become teenagers, both their academic and extracurricular activities and their personalities are likely to influence how often, when, and where family time takes place (Lareau 2000). Yet the perspectives and activities of children tend to be overlooked in the mainstream literature on family (Thorne 1993; Skolnick 1991). Contrasting Views of Childhood There are two opposing streams of thought about American childhood in the literature. One is that American children have too much leisure time. They watch too much television, play too many video games, and do too little homework (Hofferth and Sandberg 2001b). In essence, children are not engaged enough in active and productive activities. Many of these arguments are fueled by data on children’s achievement in science, commerce, and technological innovation in other countries. According to this view, children are not adequately prepared to compete in the global marketplace, which is why Americans are no longer unchallenged in business, the sciences and engineering (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983; Salisbury and Lieberman 2003). The second and contrasting view sees children as overscheduled— shuffled to and from activities and pressured to excel in academics with little down time to just “be a kid.” Children in middle-class families often recite a litany of extracurricular activities and lessons in addition to their time spent in school (Lareau 2003). Many of these teenagers may also be juggling part-time jobs. What is common to these two perspectives—that children engage in too much passive leisure and that they are overscheduled—is that both are pessimistic. As such, they may be an extension of the long historical trend of worrying about children. In the 1920s, the Boy Scouts of America and the National Committee for the Study of Juvenile Reading published studies of children’s leisure that suggested that young people had too much leisure time on their hands that was not used constructively . The studies focused on the questionable moral standards in movies and magazines (Wartella and Mazzarella 1990). In the 1950s and following decades, a “moral panic” reemerged over how young people spent their leisure time, and over the influence of television and rock-and-roll music (Gilbert 1986). Concerns about movies, magazines, and rock-and-roll were in time replaced by anxiety over television viewing , video game playing, and Internet use (Wang, Bianchi, and Raley 2005). As early as 1939, an associate of the Child Study Association of America bemoaned what it called the extinction of children’s leisure time by the increase in scheduled and organized activities (Frank 1939, 389–93). These concerns are strikingly similar across the decades—suggesting that there will always be worries about children’s use of time (see Corsaro 2003). The competing perceptions of childhood may also arise from comparisons with the past. Reed Larson and Suman Verma (1999) suggest that the shift from industrial to postindustrial conditions, which was associated with increases in family wealth and universal education, redirected children’s activities from repetitive labor to “new possibilities for learning and psychosocial development” (701). Children thus replaced the large chunk of time spent in household labor activities with time spent in schoolwork and media use (Larson 2001; Larson and Verma 1999). Thus, compared with the past, children may well spend more time both doing homework and watching television. Children’s Diary Activities To explore how children’s day-to-day lives have changed as a response to recent increases in maternal employment and single parenting, we review published estimates of children’s time use acquired from timediary data—as well as findings from the recent 2002 Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement (PSID-CDS), which contains time diaries of children age five to eighteen. These children were sampled both on a weekday and weekend during the 2002 school year. This analysis of the PSID-CDS is restricted to own, adoptive, or stepchildren of household heads or wives of household heads in which both a weekend and weekday diary are available. Children’s Time Use 143 [18.118.1.158] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01:13...

Share