I spend a lot of time thinking about how to shrink the pie – how to reduce the overall burden of household labour. In some ways, spending fewer hours on housework and paid work are easy. Those blog posts will write themselves. But child care/ parenting? That’s fraught.
In late 2018 NYT published an article on The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting. It’s worth a read. A few quotes:
- “Over just a couple of generations, parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who juggle jobs outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.”
- The intensive parenting style is “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive”
- “While this kind of intensive parenting — constantly teaching and monitoring children — has been the norm for upper-middle-class parents since the 1990s, new research shows that people across class divides now consider it the best way to raise children, even if they don’t have the resources to enact it.”
- “The time parents spend in the presence of their children has not changed much, but parents today spend more of it doing hands-on child care. Time spent on activities like reading to children; doing crafts; taking them to lessons; attending recitals and games; and helping with homework has increased the most.”
This phenomenon struck me as very American and yet… familiar. Cultural norms seep across the Pacific, particularly among we, the “liberal elite” – case in point, a NYT article has me in a tizz.
So I checked the stats for Australian parents and how much time they’re spending with their children:
- 2006 vs 1997: + 37 minutes a day for mums; for dads, no change. (ABS)
- 2014 vs 2001: + 5 hours a week for mums (+2 hours for dads) AND + 5 hours of paid employment (AIFS)
- Australian parents spend more time on this than any other OECD country, 70% more than the OECD average in 2013. (OECD)
Population data isn’t always helpful as it combines different types of households and employment mixes. But the trend is up. Australian parents, particularly mothers, are spending more time on child care, while also spending more time on paid work.
Yeah, that’s an issue.
This blog is about partnership, not parenting, so I’m not going to comment on helicopter adults, free range kids, tiger moms or flamingo fathers (I made that one up). I’m sure there’s research out there about what’s most effective (that’s Tee’s domain). But I will observe:
- Depending on your source, Australian parents are spending an average of 30-45 hours a week on child care. That’s a lot of hours.
- People don’t have children with the intention of not spending time with them. And maybe some parents are choosing to spend more leisure time with their children.
- There’s a difference between quantity and quality time.
- Given we don’t spend every waking moment with our children, we implicitly believe there’s a line somewhere.
Conclusion: This is a area that warrants serious thinking.
The pull of intense parenting starts early. Here are three examples from my life – and I’ve only been doing this for 5 months!
(1) The temptation to read All The Baby Books (or ask Tee to). Treating pregnancy and parenting as a independent research project is a recent phenomenon, and it’s a culturally-specific one e.g. it’s not a thing in France*.
(2) Home made baby food. (For now I’m categorising this as child care; when he eats ‘family food’ it will be housework.) I’ve been making purees for Buddy. I find it weirdly satisfying. After a decade in Asia, where cooking was optional, I’ve felt my lack of culinary skills a vulnerability. I’m not sure whether it’s primal or socialised, but being able to make food for my kid feels really good. But I’m doing optional work. And anecdotally, women of my mum’s generation bought baby food in little jars.
(3) Active play time. Buddy was easily bored and frustrated despite my constant singing and waving toys. After some googling (and a particular video), I realised that I was overstimulating him. For the past week I’ve just been leaving him to hang out on the floor and entertain himself (the luxury of barely-mobile 6 month old!) – completely different kid. Again, I don’t want to get into parenting philosophy, but I can report that my experience of child care has vastly improved – because I’m doing less of it. There’s less of the work and more of the fun.
* The only baby-related book book I read during pregnancy Bringing Up Bebe, the memoir of an American woman raising children in France. It was a great reminder that many of the things we assume are inherent to babies/ parenting are actually culture-specific. Even in another Western country, there are radically different approaches, expectations and outcomes. I found this mentally freeing. What we see around us is path of least resistance (and sometimes the best way), but if it is really important to you to do things differently, you can.