Pamela Kruger

March 20, 2007

Mothers Spend More TIme with their Kids Than Ever

Mother today spend more time with their kids than their counterparts did forty years ago. That was confirmed in researched, published in the Washington Post today. The chart is most interesting, showing that mothers today do dramatically less housework and fathers do more childcare than they did in the 1960s.
Of course, mothers today still feel that they don't spend enough time with their kids, and researchers suggest that may be because the ethic of mothering has changed. Whereas women in the 1960s worried that if they paid their kids too much attention, they'd "smother" them (this was the era, after all, of bottle propping!), now mothers today worry about not being involved enough with their kids. This has been called the culture of "intensive mothering."
Worth reading.