Making Time for Kids

Wednesday, April 1st, 2015

Do American mothers spend enough time with their children?

In fact, it appears the sheer amount of time parents spend with their kids between the ages of 3 and 11 has virtually no relationship to how children turn out, and a minimal effect on adolescents, according to the first large-scale longitudinal study of parent time to be published in April in the Journal of Marriage and Family. The finding includes children’s academic achievement, behavior and emotional well-being.

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In fact, the study found one key instance when parent time can be particularly harmful to children. That’s when parents, mothers in particular, are stressed, sleep-deprived, guilty and anxious.

So, what does matter?

In truth, Milkie’s study and others have found that, more than any quantity or quality time, income and a mother’s educational level are most strongly associated with a child’s future success.

Hmm…

Comments

  1. Carl says:

    Yet another social science study that would benefit from some minimal understanding of IQ. I would bet that the mother income and educational level correlation would disappear if they controlled for IQ.

  2. Marc Pisco says:

    How do they measure “how kids turn out”? The happimeter? Divorce rate?

    Or just income in adulthood?

    Children of divorce are made desperately unhappy by it at the time, and they never really get over it in most cases. We are being told not to worry about that, because it doesn’t affect their odds of eventually owning a BMW.

    The technical term for this is “humanism”, I think.

  3. Isegoria says:

    The study looked at “behavioral, emotional, and academic outcomes” — and did not look at income in adulthood.

  4. The Practical Conservative says:

    Ok, I glanced at the study. It basically says that letting up when the kids are little is ok, and that mothers need to save their energy to engage during adolescence, since that appears to be when lots of mom-time keeps girls from getting knocked up and boys from knocking girls up (and other various delinquent stuff).

    But a caveat has to be put forth that this is a cohort study of people with kids starting in 1968, and I think we all know even white demographics have changed massively since then in America.

    The larger issue I think is that this levels a blow to the idea that a SAHM’s most important function is to spend massive amounts of sheer time with the kids, as the ones doing it these days are usually quite exhausted and stressed (which the study says are bad for the kids even if mom’s home).

  5. Alrenous says:

    Is ‘spending time’ == ‘helicoptering’?

    Imagine someone did a study and found that businesses function best if their employees didn’t spend too much time at work. Shall we count the absurdities? I’ll go for two.

    1. What they’re doing there matters.
    2. Businesses in trouble will ask their employees for more time to try to fix it. This won’t always work, but asking them to spend less in these cases is probably not wise.

  6. Marc Pisco says:

    Isegoria:

    Well, there it is. But it’s hard for me to believe that every anecdotal case I know of just happens by chance to be an outlier in the same direction.

    This is what so many people, including social science researchers, badly want to hear, I wonder.

    But I’ve been wrong before.

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