Many domestic workers are employed not because people do not have the time to do their own domestic work but because they want to avoid doing the chores themselves and therefore gain the time for extra leisure. In other words, the cash-rich, time-rich—and not just the cashrich, time-poor—also employ domestic workers. Those who do the work are often poor women with heavy child care responsibilities, hardly “time rich” themselves.
While hiring domestic labor to perform routine household tasks raises normative issues about the boundaries of self-maintenance, the outsourcing of care for family members (whether for children and adults) is far more controversial. Time may be squeezed, but both men and women have increased their participation in child care in recent decades (see chapter 3). Unlike routine housework, which goes down as paid work hours go up, mothers retain their child care time by cutting back on their own leisure, personal care, and sleep. This suggests that employed mothers are unwilling to delegate their child care duties. For example, highly educated women, who have more financial resources, average more child care time than do less educated women, and this also holds for highly educated men.26 It seems that middle-class parents both feel compelled and are able to do more than do working-class families, as they subscribe more whole-heartedly to current parenting advice to “concertedly cultivate” their children.27 While class diferences in parenting style are discernible, compared with past times, parents are involved in more aspects of their children’s lives, such as their education and friendships, and are less likely to let them play unsupervised.
Contemporary expectations about what constitutes proper parenting have thus intensified. Here I want to look in more detail at which child care activities parents perform and the distinctive temporality they involve. This will lead into a more general discussion about how to conceptualize the slow time of caring. It is precisely this special quality of caring time that sets limits to the automation of caring, the subject for the final section of this chapter.
Looking at time-use data from Australia, Denmark, France, and Italy, Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan set out to explore how routine housework is divided from nonroutine housework, and whether couples care for children in the presence of their spouse (copresence) or on their own (solo).28 Child care was divided into two categories by activity type: (1) talk-based care, defined as face-to-face parent-child interaction that includes talking, listening, teaching, helping children learn, reading, telling stories, and playing games; and (2) routine, physical care and accompanying a child, defined as face-to-face parent-child interaction that includes feeding, bathing, dressing, putting children to sleep, carrying, hugging, soothing, transportation to school, visits, sports training, music and ballet lessons, school nights, meeting trains and buses, ensuring their safety, and handing them over to substitute caregivers.
Chapter five
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