Despite 'Mommy Guilt,' Time With Kids Increasing

Manik explained that it would expose her daughter to culture and athletics, help give her every opportunity to find her niche in life.

"That's the way it is now," she told her mother.

What Kind of Time Is It?

Not all time spent with children is the same, so the Maryland researchers looked at it in several ways.

There is primary time, when a child is the focus of a parent's attention. There is secondary time -- helping with homework, for example, while cooking dinner. Then there is a third category: just being with children.

Looking back to 1975 -- the earliest year that diaries captured this level of detail -- they found, again, that mothers gave more time than in the past.

For married mothers, hours with children rose from 47 a week in 1975 to 51 a week in 2000. For married fathers, the increase was greater: from 21 to 33 hours a week. Time spent by single mothers slipped from 50 hours a week to 44.

What the researchers could not capture was what they think of as "accessibility": when a parent might be uninvolved but is around to be called on -- inside the house, for example, when the children are in the back yard.

This may help explain why some mothers still feel their time with children is not enough, Doherty said. "You may get home from work at 4:30 and spend hours interacting with your child, but you may feel bad that you weren't around all day."

Sociologist Kathleen Gerson of New York University points out that parents of the 1960s worried about mothers smothering their children with attention.

Now, she said, "the concern is: Are children getting as much face time as they need, as much quality time?"

Time-mindedness is clearly part of family life.

In Fairfax County, there is Janine O'Rourke, a working mother of two who sometimes feels weeknights are too heavy on homework-checking and meal-making, with too few trips to the playground and evenings of board games. "It just seems like a lot of routine," she said.

Like many parents, O'Rourke and her husband include their children in their free time. Fridays are movie nights: the family of four, at home, with popcorn and Junior Mints. Weekends are for family time, too, even if some outings are only to Costco.

There is Lisa Pierce, who thinks of herself as "a stay-at-home mom who never stays home," instead driving to schools, running errands, doing volunteer work, shuttling to sports or Scouting activities.

Pierce said she generally feels she gives her children enough time. But one recent day, she found herself reconsidering the kind of time she was giving.

It had snowed, and her children were out of school. So she took them with her -- for errands, shopping, haircuts. Then she felt a tinge of regret.

Maybe she should have played in the snow with them instead, she thought. Or taken them to a movie -- something fun. "I spend all of this time doing things for them," she concluded, "and not doing things with them."

That, she would change.

Making Life Changes

Cynthie Bush often works 9 1/2 -hour days as a teacher, which leaves her thinking about how to make the most of what is left. Several years ago, she changed jobs and cut her commute from 40 minutes to five.

Then she and her husband decided to give up some housework -- not all of it, but the four hours a weekend they had spent scrubbing bathrooms and washing floors. They wanted to give the time to their children -- ages 4 and 7 -- so they hired out the job, in spite of the cost.

Bush, 36, has not found the time to reclaim her love of soccer and track or her tennis games with her husband.

"The little time we have," Bush said, "we want to give the kids."

It was that sense of time's limitations, she said, that made it harder to get out the door when she and a friend recently went to a PTA book talk by a local author, Devra Renner.

Later, Bush chuckled to herself as she thought about the evening: She had almost been too guilty about missed time to get to a lecture about "Mommy Guilt."