Spending Time with the Kids: Meanings of Family Time for Fathers

Abstract

Based on intensive, qualitative interviews with 32 men, this study reports on meanings of time for fathers from intact families with young children (under age of 6). Men's experience of time provides some insight into why they have been slow to increase their time commitment to family activities, even when their wives enter labor force. The fathers in this study believed in priority of spending time with their children but, at same time, lamented that making time for family was costly, fixed in amount, and largely beyond their control to change due to demands of their paid work. In order for men to have a different experience of time, changes are required at three levels: individual attitudes about time, control over time in work place, and systemic realignments in parenting practices. Studies of men and family time have traditionally focused on measuring how much time men commit to activities like child care and housework. These studies gained momentum as more women entered paid labor force on supposition that, as women's balance of family and work changed, so, too, would men's. Specifically, frameworks such as resource theory (Blood & Wolfe, 1960) and subsequent time allocation studies (e.g., Robinson, 1977) have tended to treat time as a quantifiable resource that operates according to a kind of accounting ledger system. With this approach, historical changes in men's and women's roles have been examined in terms of how time in each of columns has been redistributed. The studies that examine men's participation in domestic activities typically demonstrate that men have changed at a slow but minimal rate in past 25 years (Barnett & Baruch, 1987; Berardo, Shehan, & Leslie, 1987; Coverman & Sheley, 1986; Geerken & Gove, 1983; Hoffman, 1989; Pleck,1993; Rachlin, 1987; Volling & Belsky, 1991). For example, Shelton (1992) reports that, whereas in 1975 men did 46% as much housework as women, this number had risen to 57% in 1987. When focus is on parenting behaviors only, one study found that mothers spent 19.5 hours compared to 5.5 hours for fathers in time spent alone with their children (Barnett & Baruch, 1987). This result is consistent with reviews of fathers' engagement time with children, which indicate that fathers spend about one third time that mothers do (Pleck, in press). This research has given rise to a political discourse that laments reluctance of men to commit more of their time to family experience. It has been expressed in terms of women working the second shift (Hochschild, 1989), an ethical inconsistency whereby men receive a double set of privileges and women a double set of obligations (Komarovsky, 1992, p. 304), or a continuing inequity that is part of transitional double standard (Hood, 1986, p. 354). Although large time-use surveys show ongoing disparities in men's and women's allocations to family work, they do little to explain why this is case (Perry-Jenkins & Crouter, 1990). Several explanations have been offered for slow increase in men's participation in family work. One explanation is that men and women have fundamentally different frameworks that structure their choices with respect to paid work and family work. For example, whereas women are more likely to see their commitments to jobs and children in terms of a trade-off involving ongoing choices, men are more likely to view their commitment to work and parenting as independent of each other and do not view themselves as having to make a choice between two (DiBenedetto & Tittle, 1990). The implication is that women experience more conflict in ongoing management of family-work balance. In keeping with this experience of greater conflict for women, fair is not a notion that men use when talking about distribution of family work, but, rather, it is a word that their wives use especially when they are upset with their husbands for not doing enough (Marshall, Heck, Hawkins, & Roberts, 1994). …