Research paper No. 45

Abstract

Parental time with children contributes to children's development and is positively associated with children's wellbeing. However, the amount of parent-child shared time does not necessarily capture its "quality". Parents, in their time with children, might be teaching them, encouraging and nurturing them and physically caring for them. At other times, parent and child may be together but engaging in less developmentally focused activities. While this parent-child time is often analysed using adults' time use data, it is also possible to analyse this time from the child's perspective. This paper uses just over 5,000 time use diaries of 4-5 year old children, collected in the first wave (2004) of Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). About half the diaries were for weekdays and half for weekends. These diaries captured details both of the children's activities and of who was with them in each 15-minute period. The "who with" data were used to compile measures of parent-child time; that is, times when the mother or the father was with the child. The activity data were used to describe the nature of the parent-child time. These data were analysed using descriptive techniques to show how the timing of mothers' and fathers' time with the children and children's activities intersect. Further, these data were analysed in respect of parents' and children's characteristics to determine whether certain factors, in particular parental employment, were associated with more or less parent-child time or the nature of that parent-child time. Throughout, mother-child and father-child time were considered separately, as were weekend and weekday time.

About the author

Jennifer Baxter is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), where she works largely on employment issues as they relate to families with children. Since starting at AIFS, Jennifer has made a significant contribution to a number of important reports, including the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) Social Policy Research Paper No. 30, Mothers and Fathers with Young Children: Paid Employment, Caring and Wellbeing (Baxter, Gray, Alexander, Strazdins, & Bittman, 2007) and AIFS' submission to the Productivity Commission Parental Leave Inquiry (2008). She has also contributed several Family Matters articles and had work published in other journals. Her research interests include maternal employment following childbearing, child care use, job characteristics and work-family spillover, breastfeeding, children's time use and parental time with children. She has made extensive use of data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) to explore these areas of research.

Jennifer was awarded a PhD in the Demography and Sociology Program of the ANU in 2005. Her work experience includes more than fifteen years in the public sector, having worked in a number of statistical and research positions in government departments.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank reviewers Lyn Craig (Social Policy Research Centre, University of NSW) and Duncan Ironmonger (University of Melbourne), as well as Matthew Gray and Alan Hayes (Australian Institute of Family Studies), for providing valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. Any remaining errors or omissions remain my own.

This Research Paper makes use of data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, is conducted in partnership between the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, the Australian Institute of Family Studies and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with advice provided by a consortium of leading researchers.