Should parents spend less time with their kids?

Focus on quality, not quantity

My old friend and favorite substacker Matt Yglesias recently had a post asking for more writing about parenting from a dad’s perspective. For the occasion of father’s day this year, I thought I’d take up his challenge and write a bit from the point of view of a father of 3 boys about midway through my imperfect journey of raising them. He included a chart from a Pew survey that I had seen before, but is very illuminating about the current nature of parenting and about the evolving gender dynamics around domestic responsibilities:

Between 1965 and 2016, while the number of hours per week men work has stayed relatively similar (46 vs 43 hours), the amount of time they spend on housework has more than doubled (from 4 to 10 hours) and the amount of time they spend on child care has more than tripled (from 2.5 to 8 hours), almost equalling the time women spent on child care in 1965. I suspect that, since the pandemic, the amount of time dads spend with their kids is even higher. This is a remarkable transformation in the role of fathers in the family: we now spend about as much time with our children as moms did in the days of traditional families with stay-at-home-moms in the Leave It To Beaver era.

With men taking up more household responsibilities, one might have expected women to be able to back off on their duties to create a more egalitarian equilibrium. But no- while housework has decreased significantly (presumably due to the widespread adoption of washing machines, dishwashers and other technology that makes housework more efficient), and women are working more (offsetting their decreased housework time) women actually spend more time with their children than they did in 1965, clocking in at 14 hours/week (compared to 10 hours previously).

The net result is that parents are collectively spending way more time with their children - 22 hours now vs 14.5 hours in 1965. I think the conventional wisdom (which even contrarian Matt Yglesias agrees with) is that this change is an unalloyed good - more time spent with one’s children has to be good for both parents and children right? But looking around at the current state of childhood (and of parenting) I’m not so sure. Are children happier than they were in 1965? Are parents happier?? Without arguing that we should return to Don Draper-style absentee fathering of the 1960s, I think it’s worth re-examining whether spending this much time with our children actually benefits anyone.

Parental Burnout

One take-home from the chart above is that parents are way busier than they used to be. Women now spend 57 hours/week on work, housework or child care, while dads spend a whopping 61 hours/week on these tasks. These changes reflect the fact that societal norms are just much more demanding of parents than they used to be. With any free time, we are expected to be engaged in “active parenting”- playing with our children and ensuring they are constantly exposed to what might be considered enriching activities. At the same time, kid’s days are way more scheduled than they used to be, so we spend our time shuttling them between soccer practice, piano lessons, math tutoring, parent-arranged playdates, and so much more.

When you are spending 60+ hours a week on work, house chores and child care, life becomes a grind. There is little time for outside hobbies, exercise, friendships, community engagement or self care. From my anecdotal experience, women seem to be a little better at managing this than men are - they’re able to maintain friendships with other moms, start book clubs, find time to go exercise. I have made a conscious effort to build a balanced life, including maintaining a social life and engaging in self care, with only partial success. A lot of the dads I know in my age cohort honestly don’t have much of a life. I myself struggle to form meaningful friendships with other dads, mainly because it feels like pulling teeth to make any sort of plans with them due to their constant family obligations. The exception that proves the rule: the dad I hang out with the most only has one older child, so it is relatively easier and more guilt-free for him to get away for a beer or a bike ride. Even then, we probably only see each other about once a month. The friend I see most frequently is childless.

This is not a healthy or sustainable lifestyle for fathers, and ultimately it is not good for our relationships with our children. I’ve seen a lot of dads really struggle with mental health issues during this phase of our lives, and I’ve seen these struggles manifest in their interactions with their children. We can’t forge strong relationships with our kids if we are stuck in a low-level mental health crisis because we are not living a balanced life.

Finally, I’ve written before about our rapidly declining fertility rates- while there are many factors that go into this, it can’t help that modern parenting just looks hard from the outside. Younger adults probably notice that their older co-workers with kids never come out for drinks after work or that friends of theirs who have kids early drop out of the social scene. It’s not surprising that more and more young adults are choosing not to have children if they get the impression that doing so requires sacrificing everything else in their lives.

Overparenting Is Bad For Kids

I think most parents happily take on these increased burdens because we believe that our children will benefit from it. But we might actually be doing our children a disservice by spending so much structured time with them. It is clearly true that children are struggling more now than they have in the past - just look at the skyrocketing rates of mental health issues. I think this is mostly due to factors beyond parenting practices (ahem, smartphones), but I also don’t see any evidence that parents spending more time with children actually benefits them.

The best childhoods are those that have space for exploration, experimentation, learning through peer groups, and, frankly, some boredom. I have fond memories from my own childhood wandering through the woods behind our house with my brother for hours at a time, nary a parent to be seen. As parents, when we are constantly engaged with our children, especially in structured activities, we are stifling these important learning experiences for our children¹. They would probably be better off with a bit of benign neglect, forced to come up with their own activities and chase their own curiosities (not ours).

When children spend their entire childhoods under active supervision from parents, they fail to grow the necessary skills to become independent young adults. I found this graphic from a recent survey pretty shocking:

We have a 10 year old who has done all of these things for a couple of years now; our 7 year old regularly does most of them, and our 5 year old is well on his way. If we don’t trust 11 year olds to find an item in the grocery store, how can we expect them to develop the independence to drive when they’re 16 or live on their own when they’re 18?

Finally, when we are singularly focused on being with our children, we are serving as poor role models for them. One of our most important tasks as parents is to lead by example- they learn from us how they should behave when they grow up. We should be modeling how to live a balanced, healthy adult life, including focusing on building adult relationships, engaging with our community, exercise, and prioritizing time to maintain a healthy relationship with our spouses. When we fail to do these things in the name of spending time with our children, we are failing in our job to show them what a healthy and enjoyable adult life can look like.

Gardeners, not Carpenters

It’s worth stepping back to remind ourselves of what our job is as parents. I did not come up with this analogy, but I agree that too many modern parents see ourselves as carpenters- viewing our job as building our children up one beam at a time into a final, fixed structure. Carpentry requires constant work - measuring, cutting, hammering, precisely fitting all the pieces together to match a predetermined design.

But parents should really be more like gardeners. The essence of who our children are is preordained by the genetic material in their tiny seed (Anyone who has been a parent knows that children have a fairly immutable personality from day one). Our job is to make sure that seed grows into its potential - we supply fertile soil and water, perhaps remove a few weeds that threaten to choke the child’s growth. Sometimes we need to train the plant to grow on a trellis, sometimes we need to trim unhealthy branches (hopefully not literally). But if we dote too much on the plant, we stifle its natural growth. Overwatered trees don’t develop the deep roots they need to be sturdy and resilient when they become full grown. So instead of constantly tending to our garden, we should mainly just sit back and watch the natural manifestation of our child’s infinite potential.

Freed from the hard labor of carpentry, parents are able to focus more on enjoying our children the way we enjoy spending time with other people in our lives. If a Pew researcher called me tomorrow, I’m not sure I would characterize much of the time I spend with my children as “child care”. I would describe it as “going for a bike ride” or “watching a movie” or “playing a board game” (though, full disclosure, there is still inevitably still a bit of “wiping poop off a butt” and “pleading with them to go the fuck to sleep”). The more we think of our time with them as building a lasting relationship with another human, rather than as an 18 year construction project, the easier and more fun the whole endeavor feels.

I don’t pretend to have this all figured out - as a classic physician control freak I have a natural inclination to be a carpenter and try to actively sculpt my children. And like most parents, we’ve let our kids get a bit overscheduled with activities. But I’ve learned a lot from my wife (who is the most natural gardening parent I’ve ever seen) and, halfway through raising our three boys, we’ve come to a place where parenting no longer seems like a burden. We treasure our time with our children, but also give them a lot of space to play with each other and with their friends. If parents are able to liberate ourselves from the constant feeling of having to attend to our children, not only will we enjoy the journey more, we will yield happier, more independent and more resilient kids.

1. There is even evidence that such unstructured play time actually improves executive function.