That women fit themselves to their family shows up in their time strain; married women want more time to themselves because they have adjusted to being there for their children. Cultural expectations about what mothers and fathers should do remains strong, with mothers feeling more of a need to put children and family first as they sacrifice their own need. Overall, it appears that parents are giving themselves over to rearing children to the extent possible given other demands on their time and limited resources in some families. Yet they feel as if their eforts are not enough.
As noted above, these feelings of time pressure are largely the result of normative changes in expectations about good parenting.24 Among both working-class and middle-class mothers, good mothering is defined in terms of devoting unlimited time and resources to their children. As family size becomes smaller, children become a central focus and are seen to require extraordinarily labor-intensive parenting. Intensive mothering is a cultural ideal to which women are expected to sacrifice careers, leisure time, and whatever else is necessary to ensure that their children thrive.
Fathers are expected to be equally involved in care giving. The last half-century has witnessed dramatic changes in men’s attitudes toward parenting and in conceptions of masculinity more broadly. However, the shared belief in egalitarian family relationships has not yet been matched by men’s behavior. For example, the substantial increase in the time fathers spend with children is three times larger on weekends than workdays, with the result that routine child care responsibilities are left to their spouses on days when they must work.25 And, rather than fathers replacing mothers’ time, mothers are present for most of the time that fathers are caring for their children (see chapter 5). While this family time spent together may well be the most cherished, it does result in a gender gap in leisure, as I argue below.
Finally, women’s role as household manager also adds to their feeling of always feeling rushed. Being responsible for managing something as complex as children’s lives and a home, even when away from home, “may also account for the large gender discrepancy between fathers’ and mothers’ feelings about needing more time for oneself, feeling rushed, and feeling like they do more than one thing at a time.”26 Mothers’ greater subjective sense of time pressures may derive from their being the one who continues to orchestrate family life—a reality that is dificult to capture in linear time-diary data.
The Time-Pressure Paradox
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