Not at home with your children during the day? Not to worry, says a University of Maryland researcher. She found today’s working mother spends about the same amount of time with her children as moms did in the 1960s.
Demographer Suzanne Bianchi says today’s mothers do less housework, sleep less and sacrifice leisure time so they can spend more time with their children. And mothers of the past overestimated the amount of time they spent with their children, she says, giving the modern mom an unrealistic June Cleaver-type model.
“Our culture almost demands that we look back to the ’50s and ’60s as those halcyon days when moms were home and basically a constant, loving presence in their children’s lives,” Bianchi says. “This research shows today’s moms are just as committed. They value family and time with their children just as much as moms from 25 and 50 years ago; therefore, they make other adjustments in their lives to maintain that necessary level of quality interaction with their children.”
Her research, based on a comparison of time diaries, shows mothers spent an average of 5.6 waking hours per day with their children in 1965 and 5.8 hours in 1998. Bianchi explains the time similarity in a couple of ways. First, mothers today are better educated, and such women tend to spend more time interacting with their children. Second, families are also smaller today, meaning moms’ time isn’t spread so thin. She adds that married fathers spend 1.3 more waking hours with their children today than they did in 1965.
