Scott Alexander

Equally startling is that mothers spend more time parenting today than in 1960, even though in 1960 they were much more likely to be full-time homemakers.

I can't reach Kaplan's specific source, Bianchi et al., Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, but his claims broadly match the data in Dotti, Sani and Trias, 2016.

Here's a graph.

How much time do parents spend with their children per day?

This includes washing, feeding and preparing food, putting to bed, supervising and playing with children.

Mothers, there's lines for university-educated and non-university-educated, and fathers, likewise, in the United States...

It looks like between 65 and 2010 there's been a big increase.

For fathers, both the university-educated and non-university-educated lines seem to start around 20 hours, 20 minutes per day, and by the end of the graph they've gone up to around 55 to 75 minutes, so they've diverged slightly with university-educated males spending more time.

For mothers, they've remained above fathers in terms of time spent throughout the entire period.

The lines diverge in the same way, and they started at around 55 minutes per day at the beginning, in 65, and by the end in 2010 they've gone up to around 90 and around 120 minutes for non- and university-educated respectively.

Scott writes, All these numbers are kind of low, aren't they?

Do both parents combined really only spend three hours a day with their children?

My wife and I combined spend approximately 4,000 hours per day with our kids.

Is that what we're doing wrong?

The dragon that we must slay before we enter Kaplan's easy parenting paradise?

My wife eventually found Wilkie and Cullen 2023, an alternate data source which bins responses by child age.

Here's a more complex graph.

It has a y-axis which shows parent-child time in minutes per day,

And then along the x-axis we have the age of the child, presumably, from 0 to 18.

There are four different graphs.