Time with the Kids

Ann Hulbert's NY Times Magazine piece on how much time people spend on child care is frustrating. Of course, how could it be anything but frustrating when the first paragraph ends with a sentence like this:

What I wouldn't take the time to explain is that although this sounds like a lovely balance of special solicitude and unexpected solitude (a mother's dream), I seem more susceptible to feeling parental stress than newfound leisure.

I have no right to carp about lengthy sentences with a plethora of adjectives, adverbs, and other frills (all that alliteration and the "solicitude"/"solitude" thing? definitely frilly), but that is simply confusing (how, exactly, does one feel leisure?). As is much of the rest of the article, which is too bad, because she ends up with some important issues.

The article is about recent research on how people spend their time which suggests that we have more leisure time than we used to and that we spend more time on child care, but also that it's hard to tell how much time we spend on child care. One big problem with the first part of the article is that she never defines child care. As I started reading, my first reaction was to wonder what 10 1/2 hours a week of child care (the average time spent by mothers employed out of the house) means, because if you're just talking about washing hair and putting to bed, you're talking a lot less time than if you're talking about making snacks, sitting on a bench at the playground watching a kid on the monkey bars, and reading stories (all of which, yes, it's true, we mothers employed out of the house do too).

Later in the article, Hulbert makes it clear that how we define child care is precisely what is at issue:

Examining the signs of superconscientious nurturing in the ATUS figures, they suspect measurement bias at work: the survey's interest in caretaking may result in hours being categorized as child-focused that in the past would have been coded differently — as leisure pastimes, for example. So the economists lump all child care — from the basics to kids' sports and homework help — in their "preferred definition of leisure."

Hulbert frames the different definitions of child care in terms of gender, posing "the laid-back-dad view of child-rearing as the realm of fulfilling activities, not chores" against "the more momlike emphasis on the unremitting responsibility of parenthood" (she does acknowledge that this comparison runs "the risk of a sexist caricature"). This is all interesting and thought-provoking, but the article would have been better if it were more readable.

Stylistic prejudices aside, the nature of child care is a tangible issue for us. I spend a lot of time with the children alone (less than I used to, but still a lot). When I finish work, I pick them up from school, take them home, feed them, referee arguments, organize homework and clarinet practice, set up baths, and put them to bed. Of course I also go to the playground and play cards and watch Dora and talk on the phone with my friends and sometimes even read the newspaper, but because I am alone and thus tethered to my children, the whole thing feels like child care, even though really it's just life. When we are all together, we are often off doing genuine leisure: dinner with friends, ice skating, a hike. But then when we are all at home and S is making dinner while I check my email and the children play, is there no child care happening, or is he doing child care because he responds to their constant requests for snack? If he takes the girls to the park to ride bikes and I go for a run and meet them at the park, is that child care? Does he owe me the equivalent in life apart from children that he gets, or is it mitigated by the fact that he is at work (I'm at work a bunch too, but he is only caring for children when I'm at work for about three hours a week)?

No answers here, as yet.

[Note: This is all observation, not complaint.]

[Edited to add: Thinking about this some more, I realized that a big piece of the issue is that S and I are calculating different variables (not that it's all a calculated equation, but there's certainly a piece of that). For him, there is a lot of time at work, and then for most of his time at home, all of us are present, unless I leave or the children are out with friends. For me there is less time at work, there is some time without the kids by myself (though I end up working a good part of that time), there is some time with all of us, and then there is a lot of time with the kids. I would wager that he understands his life as work/home, whereas I see mine more as kids/no kids. I'm purposefully not going to calculate the actual hours of any of it, though, because that will inevitably depress me. At any rate, the point is...eh, I don't know what the point is, it just seems to matter.]

[Edited some more to add: If you're only making dinner because there are children to feed, because on your own you would just have a slice of bread and butter, is that child care? If you're doing mountains of the children's laundry, while yours would just be a small hill, is that child care?]