Abstract
“The cultural image of the American mother has changed from the cheery, doting homemaker to the frenzied, sleepless working mom. The conventional wisdom accompanying this change is that, as today’s mothers juggle the dual roles of worker and family caregiver, they spend less time with their children, and receive little help from fathers.”
Changing Rhythms of American Family Life.

This image is reinforced anecdotally and in media portrayals every day, but does it accurately paint a true picture? Hard data from longitudinal surveys across countries suggest quite clearly that much of what we believe about how families today use time is simply not right. And getting it wrong can have serious consequences for manufacturers and sellers of consumer products as they seek to both create and stock products that meet consumers’ needs and to position them using the right imagery and offers that appeal to key consumer segments.

Facts about today’s American family:

• Parents are busier than they were in the past. Many more are single parents, and two-parent families have seen a dramatic increase in women’s participation in the labor force.
• Total workloads (counting paid jobs and unpaid work at home for both moms and dads) have risen and remain high – parents average up to a 9.5-hour workday every day of the week.
• Despite more hours on average going into paid work, parents’ time with their children has not decreased over the past several decades, and in fact has risen for married mothers and married fathers, and for single mothers for certain kinds of care.
• Although there is still a difference, fathers have come a long way in closing the gap between the amount of time they spend with their children and the time spent by the mother.
• It is not sleep or free time that has been compressed to enable parents both to work more outside the home and to spend more time with their children – it is housework that has been sacrificed.
• Although the mix of out-of-home paid work and in-home unpaid work varies for married fathers and mothers, there is only a minimal gap between them in total work hours.
• The pattern of increased time spent with children is not only a U.S. phenomenon, but also appears in many countries in Western Europe.

International trends
The trends outlined in this article are not unique to the U.S. In fact, of the countries reporting data (outlined below), the American Time Use Survey shows that, by and large, both mothers and fathers around the world are spending more time with their children.

• In Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, and Australia, mothers are spending more time with their children now than in years past. The exception is France, where mothers are spending substantially less time with their children than they did in 1965.
• The same patterns hold for fathers, with only French fathers spending no more time with their children. In 2000, British fathers spent the most time with their children, followed by Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands, with the U.S. trailing all except France. Fewer hours working outside the home for men outside the U.S. can explain at least part of this ranking.

Full Article:
Each year the U.S. Department of Labor conducts the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). Some 13,000 respondents complete a time diary covering all of the activities they engage in during a day. The ATUS has been consistently conducted in the U.S. since at least 1965, and also exists for a number of other countries. A recent book, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, written by a trio of sociologists from the University of Maryland (see the Resources section at the end of this article), examines how the use of time has changed over the past 35 years and comes to some very unexpected conclusions.

Note: Changing Rhythms of American Family Life and this article focus almost entirely on married two-parent families and single women with children. It is recognized that today, there are many kinds of family households that are not represented in this writing, including non-married partners, homosexual couples, and single men with children. These groups, while growing, are either too small to be measured accurately with the ATUS, or are not possible to isolate with the demographic data available.

Work and more work – Is the “second shift” real?
One of the most important trends in family life over the past 35 years has been the huge increase of women in the workforce. In 1965, about 45% of women with children (under 18) were employed: by 2000, over 78% were. The average working mother in 1965 put in 34 hours per week and averaged 38 weeks of employment, while the average mom in 2000 put in about the same number of hours (36), but worked 47 weeks. While the time spent working among women with children has not changed dramatically (same hours, 11 more weeks), the proportion of mothers who work has greatly increased.

Facts about working mothers today:

• In two-parent families, mothers with very young children are less likely to be employed, and if employed, work fewer hours than women with older children.
• Mothers with fewer children are more likely to work.
• The higher their educational attainment, the more likely mothers are to work – 82% of mothers with an advanced degree work an average 41 hours per week.
• Single mothers are more likely to work than married mothers across the board, with highly-educated single mothers nearly as likely to be employed as married fathers.

Work outside the home is, of course, only part of the story. Much of the concern expressed in the media today about working mothers is over the “second shift”, the incremental time that mothers put in doing unpaid labor. While there can be no doubt that families are busier today than ever before – working longer hours, and engaging in a wide variety of other activities – the data show that the total amount of work is very evenly distributed between fathers and mothers.

Combining paid work (i.e., wage/salary jobs and commuting to work) with unpaid work (housework, yardwork, cooking, etc.) the gap between what the mother does and what the father does nearly goes away. As illustrated in the table below, the gender gap is minimal (and the difference is not statistically significant given the survey sample sizes). However, the mix of work does vary by gender, with women getting a higher share of the unpaid work and men taking a higher share of paid work.

Caring for children – Today’s parents have Ward & June beat
The common perception today is that parents do not spend enough time with their children. The assumption that increases in paid work, both for the father and for the increasingly-employed mother, has diminished the time that once went to caring for children. The tendency is to believe that June Cleaver was a better mom because she had the advantage of time – time today’s working mothers spend outside the home on their jobs and careers rather than on their children.

The facts, however, drawn from the ATUS data, simply do not support these perceptions. Surprisingly, both mothers and fathers today are spending more time with their children than they did in 1965 when less than half of women with children worked outside the home. The chart below shows the average weekly hours in primary child care – activities where parents report directly engaging in care giving or other activities thought to promote children’s well-being, and where the main focus is the child.

The drops seen in the chart, from 1965 through 1985, can mostly be explained by the sweeping changes experienced as the size of family households fell from the heights of the Baby Boom. As the average number of children per household fell during this period, so did the time parents spent with children. However, it is interesting to note that while the average family size has continued to shrink post 1985, the hours parents spend with their children, in primary child care, have risen steadily.

The increase in child care time is seen for both employed mothers and those who do not work outside the home. Interestingly, mothers who work the most outside the home, those with college educations, are also those who spend the most time with their children, averaging nearly 14 hours a week in primary child care. Fathers with less than college educations spend the least time with their children at 5.8 hours per week (though up from 2.2 hours per week in 1985).

The ATUS also separates out routine child care activities (e.g., feeding, dressing, etc.) from interactive activities (e.g., talking with children, playing with them, reading to them, etc.). A common perception is that fathers have increased their involvement in the interactive activities, while leaving the more mundane care-giving activities to mother. Again, the data do not support this commonly held view.

Facts about time spent with children:

• Parent time in both routine and interactive activities has increased steadily since 1965, for both fathers and mothers.
• For routine time, mothers only show a 5% increase from 1965 to 2000, while fathers show a 209% increase.
• For interactive time, mothers show a 124% increase and fathers a 94% increase.
• Still, mothers put more hours into routine care than fathers (9.5 hours per week in 2000 versus 4.1 in 1965).
• In married couple families, mothers account for 58% of the interactive child care time with 42% spent by fathers.

More work time & more time for children – What gives?
The short answer is housework. In 1965 the average married mother spent over 34 hours per week in primary housework (cooking, meal cleanup, housekeeping, and laundry). That’s only 1.5 hours less than the average mother employed outside the home spends at work today. Between 1965 and 2000, the average married mother went from doing 34.5 hours of housework per week down to 19.4 hours. This breaks down to decreases in time spent:

• Cooking meals – down 47%
• Meal cleanup – down 75%
• Housekeeping – down 41%
• Laundry & ironing – down 49%

On average, married mothers have increased their time spent on outdoor chores, repairs, garden, and animal care by nearly 19% from 1965 to 2000. Married fathers have also stepped up, increasing their total time spent in core and other housework by 229%, from 4.4 hours per week in 1965 to 10.9 in 2000.

Convenient solutions
It is not possible to tell from the data how much of this drop in housework comes from increases in efficiency (more and better cleaning equipment, better cleaning products, etc.) and how much comes from outside or hired help. Both no doubt contribute. But with today’s larger homes, it also seems quite likely that things are perhaps not quite as clean and orderly as when June was on the case.

It is interesting to note that single mothers have not benefited from this trend. They are spending nearly as much time in core housework today (13.9 hours per week) as they did in 1965 (15.6 hours per week). This small decrease is offset by an increase in the amount of time they spent on other home-based chores (repairs, finances, etc.), such that single mothers are spending the exact same amount of time on primary housework activities today as they did in 1965.

Less time spent sleeping and eating
Personal-care activities (sleeping, eating, and grooming) by and large have not seen big drops since 1965. Married fathers spent 73.4 hours per week in these activities in 1965, and 69.5 in 2000 – the slight drop is attributed mostly to a decrease in the amount of time spent eating. Married mothers are very similar, dropping from 73.6 hours in 1965 to 71.5 today, with the declines coming from time spent eating (down 1.2 hours per week) and grooming (down 0.9 hours). Single mothers have taken the biggest hit, losing nearly 5 hours of sleep, 2.2 hours from eating, and 1.3 hours from grooming per week.

Beyond housework, other kinds of activities also show declines in temporal importance, providing more hours for work and child care.

• More time is spent multi-tasking – married fathers up 134% since 1975, married mothers up 89%, and single mothers up 104%.
• Married partners are spending less time alone together, down 26% since 1975.
• Married partners are spending a bit less time with friends and relatives (down about 6% since 1975), but single mothers are down 25% in the same time frame.
• Civic and social activities have also taken a hit.

How can marketers respond better?
As the proportion of U.S. households that have children continues to shrink, and as that market grows more fragmented, marketers will need to respond both through their products and their positioning.

The consumer products revolution of the past 50 years appears to have been a tremendous enabler of the lifestyles that busy families enjoy today. Products that save people time, either in housework or the preparation of meals, have allowed married-couple families to expand the amount of time they spend with their children even while increasing the hours they work. But consumers have short memories and tomorrow’s products will be pressured to exploit these key benefits even more.

Families have replaced the decline of mealtime with other activities that generate time with children, but savvy marketers who can continue to squeeze time here for busy parents should do well. Positioning products as something to be enjoyed during quiet family time at meals may be out of touch with today’s realities. Providing wholesome nutrition on the go, outside the context of a sit-down meal, could work well with today’s families.

Marketers cannot ignore the ever-increasing share of family households headed by single parents – nearly one-third of households with children today. The strategies employed by married couples have not been as successful for single parents. Single parents have not gained time from a reduction in housework hours, and in many cases, are burning the candle at both ends. Limited financial resources also stress this market segment, but its size will force marketers to analyze and understand its needs.

Resources:
The material in this article is drawn from a recent book called Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, written by Suzanne Bianchi, John Robinson, and Melissa Milkie, all currently at the University of Maryland. This study of how our use of time has changed over the past several decades is a volume in The American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology and was published in 2006. Unless otherwise noted, all findings and data included in this article are drawn from this book.