Scott Alexander

See Table 9.

Adults living in households with at least one child under age 13 spent an average of 5.1 hours per day providing secondary childcare.

That is, they had at least one child in their care while doing activities other than primary childcare.

End quote.

This matches both sources pretty well, so we can consider the discrepancy solved.

BLS goes on to separate its findings into even finer categories.

Here are some graphs.

Women for primary and secondary childcare on weekdays and weekends.

So on weekdays, primary childcare is 2.9 hours, secondary is 5 hours.

On weekends, it's 2.3 hours and 8 hours for primary and secondary respectively.

Men on weekdays do 1.7 of primary and 3.5 of secondary, and on weekends, 2.2 of primary and 7.2 of secondary.

Then there's a graph unemployed versus working, an unemployed father does 2.2, an unemployed mother does 3.2, a working father 1.6, and a working mother 2.2.

Scott captions this, Here, unemployed versus working is a separate analysis that only looks at primary childcare and doesn't divide by weekend versus weekday.

I include it only to emphasize that these numbers are surprisingly similar for both categories.

The former includes, though is not limited to, homemakers or deliberately stay-at-home parents, and it's probably not worth worrying too much about this distinction.

The weekend numbers add up to 19 hours of childcare a day, which is longer than most children are awake.

Probably this is because both parents provide some secondary childcare together.

I don't know if these numbers count childcare provided, in quotes, when the children are sleeping.

For example, you're watching a movie at 9pm after putting your kid to bed.

I put more effort into finding these numbers than can be justified by curiosity alone.