Today’s Busy Parents Still Spend More Time With Kids — Dave’s Diary

My daughter Kate loves to play games or should I say loves to play games if she wins.  She’s 5.  Get’s it from her dad.  Last night we played a few rounds of her newest game Hi Ho Cherry-o.  It’s about picking fruit so it seemed a good fit for a kid in the Yakima valley.  The little rascal won all three matches fair and square to plenty of parental applause from me and her mom. 

Needless to say she was thrilled…and so were we.  Time with kids is amazing and it makes me wonder how I might be different today if I had more parental time as a kid!

Even though there are fewer stay at home moms and dads these days, parents are still spending more time with their kids than they did in the past and that is certainly my experience. A recent study that analyzed surveys going as far back as 1965 found that mothers averaged just 12 hours a week with their children before 1995. But in 2007, that number increased to 21.2 hours for college educated women and 16 hours for other moms.

Meantime, college educated men now average 9.6 hours of quality time with their kids per week up from 4.5 hours. For less educated men, the number rose from 3.7 to 6.8 hours. Still, parents seem to feel guilty. "It's a function of people working so hard, and they are worried they're short changing their children," says Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute. "I've never found a group of parents who believe they are spending enough time with their kids."