"Where Do They Find the Time?: An Analysis of How Parents Shift and Squeeze Their Time around Work and Child Care"

Parents who undertake paid work are obliged to spend time away from their children, and to use nonparental childcare. This has given rise to concern that children are missing out on parental attention. However, time-use studies have consistently shown that parents who are in paid employment do not reduce their parental childcare time on an hour-for-hour basis. Since there are only 24 hours in the day, how do parents continue to be engaged in direct care of their own children while also committing significant time to labor market activities? Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (4,059 randomly selected households) to compare the time allocation of employed fathers, employed mothers, and mothers who are not in the labor force, this paper investigates how this phenomenon arises. The strategies available are reducing the time devoted to other activities (principally housework, sleep, leisure, bathing, dressing, grooming, eating), and rescheduling activities (from weekends to weekdays, or changing the time of day at which particular activities are undertaken). The paper investigates whether parents use nonparental care to reschedule as well as to replace their own care.

Harmonising extended measures of parental childcare in the time-diary surveys of four countries – Proximity versus responsibility

Measures of childcare drawn from time-diary data are commonly based on the specific childcare activities a parent engages in throughout the day. This emphasis on activities has been criticised as it ignores the large quantity of time parents spend supervising their children. In order to provide more accurate estimates of childcare that incorporate supervisory childcare, researchers have turned to extended measures of care based on being i) in proximity to children or ii) responsible for children. There has been debate about the extent to which these approaches each measure the same aspect of childcare. In addition, it is thought they may be sensitive to the way surveys have been designed, which can affect the extent to which they can be compared crossnationally. We argue that measures of proximity and responsibility are conceptually interchangeable, and demonstrate that they can be harmonised and compared cross-nationally. Finally, we suggest ways in which these extended measures of childcare can be made increasingly comparable cross-nationally.Time-diary data, measurement of parental childcare, cross-national harmonisation of measures of childcare, time geography

Do time use patterns influence fertility decisions? A cross-national inquiry

Birth rates are falling throughout the western world. There is no definitive answer as to why this is so. This paper investigates whether time use analysis could offer a useful perspective. It explores the way parenthood affects time allocation in four countries with different work-family policies, using data from the Multinational Time Use Survey (MTUS) World 5 series to compare the impact of children on adult time in Italy, Germany, Norway and Australia. It considers whether fertility decisions may be influenced by i) the gap between parents and nonparents in total paid and unpaid work undertaken, ii) how paid and unpaid work is divided between mothers and fathers, and iii) the proportion of total male and female work time that is paid before and after parenthood, and conducts multivariate analysis to isolate the effects of nationality, sex and parenthood. The study is very preliminary, but the results suggest that domestic gender inequity and low female workforce participation are associated with lower fertility and may affect parity progression. Further research using more extensive and detailed time use analysis could make an important contribution to understanding of fertility decline.time use, children, fertility decline, gender, work-family, comparative policy analysis

Harmonizing extended measures of parental childcare in the time-diaries of four countries: Proximity versus responsibility

Measures of childcare drawn from time-diary data are commonly based on the specific childcare activities a parent engages in throughout the day. This emphasis on activities has been criticised as it ignores the large quantity of time parents spend supervising their children. In order to provide more accurate estimates of childcare that incorporate supervisory childcare, researchers have turned to extended measures of care based on being i) in proximity to children or ii) responsible for children. There has been debate about the extent to which these approaches each measure the same aspect of childcare. In addition, it is thought they may be sensitive to the way surveys have been designed, which can affect the extent to which they can be compared crossnationally. We argue that measures of proximity and responsibility are conceptually interchangeable, and demonstrate that they can be harmonised and compared cross-nationally. Finally, we suggest ways in which these extended measures of childcare can be made increasingly comparable cross-nationally

The care crisis : a research priority for the pandemic era and beyond

Focusing on two areas of care research - unpaid domestic labour and academic work - this chapter considers points at which the care deficit has been made most apparent or amplified by the coronavirus pandemic. The chapter unpacks the gendered dimensions to the care crisis and argues that family relationships and organisational cultures might mutually reinforce the care gap. Centring on the pandemic recovery but also reimagining our care relationships and infrastructures, recommendations are made for future research and advocacy to address the care deficit

The Money or the Care: a Comparison of couple and sole parent households' time allocation to work and children

Households provide their members with both financial support and caring services. In sole parent households, the functions of earning money and caring for children fall to one individual. Current government policy favours work force participation as the solution to the higher poverty rates in lone parent families, but this may have a mirror effect on their ability to provide care. There is a great deal of research into the financial impacts of sole motherhood, but very little into the amount of time that sole parents' devote to care of their children, and what this means for their total (paid and unpaid) work commitments. In this paper I address this research gap. I analyse the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (over 4000 randomly selected households), to compare sole and couple parents' overall time commitments to paid and unpaid work and to investigate whether time spent with children in lone parent and couple-headed families differs in type or quantity