How Do They Do It? A Time-diary Analysis of How Working Mothers Find Time For the Kids

Abstract

Working parents are obliged to use non-parental childcare. However, parents who make use of non-parental childcare do not reduce their parental childcare time on an hour for hour basis. Since there are only 24 hours in the day, how do parents continue to be engaged in direct care of their own children while also committing significant time to the labour market activities? Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (over 4000 randomly selected households), to compare the time allocation of employed fathers, employed mothers and mothers who are not in the labour force, this paper shows how parents maintain their time commitments to both work and childcare. The strategies available are (1) reducing the time devoted to other activities (principally sleep, leisure, bathing, dressing, grooming, eating) (2) rescheduling activities (from weekends to weekday or changing the time of day at which particular activities are undertaken).