Felt deficits in time with children: Individual and contextual factors across 27 European countries

A sizeable portion of parents say they lack time with children—an important social problem given that time strains link to parental well-being. Extending perspectives on the demands and rewards of parenting beyond the individual level, we provide a contextual-level window onto mothers' and fathers' time strains. Based on data from the European Quality of Life Survey 2016/17 (n = 5,898), we analyze whether parents feel they spend enough time caring for their children using multilevel models. We first observe that country context matters in that perceptions of time only moderately or weakly relate to hours with children across countries, especially for fathers, suggesting varying social expectations across Europe. Second, in multivariate analyses examining micro- and macro-level factors, we show that at the individual level, feeling too little time with children is more frequent among fathers and those who work more hours, even when controlling for estimated weekly hours spent caring for children. At the country level, parents' time strain is higher in countries where employees have less time and place flexibility, typically in Central and Eastern as well as Southern Europe. Gender norms matter as well. Extending contextual perspectives, we argue that how gender-work-family regimes color felt time strain is a promising future research direction

Fathers stepping up? A cross-national comparison of fathers’ domestic labour and parents’ satisfaction with the division of domestic labour during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted work and family life around the world. For parents, this upending meant a potential re-negotiation of the ‘status quo’ in the gendered division of labour. A comparative lens provides extended understandings of changes in fathers’ domestic work based in socio-cultural context–in assessing the size and consequences of change in domestic labour in relation to the type of work-care regime. Using novel harmonized data from four countries (the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands) and a work-care regime framework, this study examines cross-national changes in fathers’ shares of domestic labour during the early months of the pandemic and whether these changes are associated with parents’ satisfaction with the division of labour. Results indicate that fathers’ shares of housework and childcare increased early in the pandemic in all countries, with fathers’ increased shares of housework being particularly pronounced in the US. Results also show an association between fathers’ increased shares of domestic labour and mothers’ increased satisfaction with the division of domestic labour in the US, Canada, and the UK. Such comparative work promises to be generative for understanding the pandemic’s imprint on gender relations far into the future

Beyond Childcare: Changes in the Amount and Types of Parent-Child Time over Three Decades

Parents’ time with children has increased over the past several decades, according to many scholars. Yet, research predominantly focuses on childcare activities, overlooking the majority of time parents spend with children. Using time diaries from the 1986-2015 Canadian General Social Survey, we examine trends in the quantity and distribution of parents’ childcare time and total contact time in the company of children, as well as the behavioral or compositional drivers of these trends. Contact time with children increased sharply since the mid-1980s, by 1 hour per day for fathers and 1.5 hours for mothers. This rise was driven not only by childcare activities but also parents’ time in housework and mothers’ time in leisure with children present. Decomposition analyses indicate that changes in parenting behavior primarily explain these increases in contact time. This study expands knowledge on intensive parenting through a more comprehensive understanding of parents’ daily lives with children