Source: Telegraph >> Read full article and comment
A study shows that the amount of time we spend on childcare has increased. Is that, wonders Cassandra Jardine, a good thing for our children?
No doubt frightened of being told to go to bed while I read my book, my 11-year-old son asked on Tuesday night if we could watch a DVD together. He gave me a choice of two: Michael McIntyre Live at Wembley – oh please not – and the 1986 film that launched River Phoenix’s brief career, Stand By Me: a story about four 12-year-old boys who go off together down a railway line to find a dead body.
Yes, I said, eager like any guilt-ridden working parent to tick the box called “childcare” while also doing the crossword, lying on my bed, and running a bath. We cuddled up together cosily for an hour and a half – less if you subtract the times when I had to leave the room for fear that one of the other children was about to be mown down by a train. But that happy evening left me with a problem of definition when I opened yesterday’s newspaper. Could film-watching with one armed draped around a child be reckoned among my working mother’s childcare minutes, as quantified by Dr Oriel Sullivan?
The Oxford University sociologist gave a paper at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference in which she looked at how much time parents spend on childcare, and how this has changed since 1975. There appears to have been a dramatic shift: men are up from 8 mins per day (scarcely enough for a bedtime story) to a princely 32 to 36 mins (enough for two stories and a fight about bedtime). … Continue reading
