"Maternal Employment and Time with Children: Dramatic Change or Surprising Continuity?" by Suzanne M. Bianchi, in Demography (Nov. 2000), Carolina Population Center, Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Univ. Sq., CB#8120, 123 W. Franklin St., Chapel Hill, N.C. 27516–3997.

Even though many more American still spend about as much time—an average women with children have gone off to of five and a half hours a day—with their offwork in recent decades, today’s mothers spring under 18 as mothers did in 1965. So time diary studies show, reports Bianchi, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.

How can that be? Mainly, she maintains, because mothers today, for the most part, continue to do what they must to ensure their family’s well-being, as well as their own.

For one thing, many working mothers cut back on outside work when their children are very young, Bianchi notes. Only one-third of new mothers return to full-time work within six months of their child’s birth, or "remain firmly attached to fulltime work during their childbearing years."

At the same time, Americans are having fewer children, so mothers are able to give more individual attention to the children they do have. In the past, not only did mothers with larger families have less time for each child, but they often called on older children to mind the younger ones. They also did more cleaning and cooking than today’s women. Now, even stay-athome mothers do less housework than in the past—25 hours a week in 1995, compared with more than 37 hours in 1965. Working mothers, who did nearly 24 hours of housework a week in 1965, have cut that to less than 18 hours.

Working mothers have also cut back on volunteer work, leisure pursuits, and even sleep. In a 1998 study, working moms reported having 12 fewer "free time" hours a week than the stay-at-home mothers reported, and getting six fewer hours of sleep.

(A recent, much publicized University of Michigan study, based on children’s time diaries, kept with parental aid in some cases, found that working mothers with children ages three to 12 in 1997 spent only 48 fewer minutes a day with them than stay-at-home moms did—and about the same amount of time as stay-at-home moms spent in 1981.)

Even stay-at-home mothers aren’t with their school-age children much of the day, of course. And in recent decades, moms have increasingly waved goodbye to their younger "preschool" children, too. In the late 1960s, less than 10 percent of children ages three to five were in nursery school or some other form of preschool. But by 1997, the number was several times greater. Fifty-two percent of the children of working mothers were enrolled in preschools (including child care settings with educational programs)—and so were 44 percent of the kids of stay-at-home mothers. With fewer brothers and sisters today, Bianchi observes, children "are often judged to ‘need’ prekindergarten socialization to launch them on their educational careers."

For children lucky enough to live in intact families, she points out, there has been a bonus. Married fathers spent nearly four hours a day with their kids in 1998, an hour more than they did in 1965.