Vanier Institute of the Family -- Contemporary Family Trends - It Keeps Getting Faster: Changing Patterns of Time in Families

Ever since Charlie Chaplan popularized the notion of being a cog in the wheel of the industrial machine in the film "Modern Times," we have lived with the idea that our everyday routines are hurried, regimented, and largely beyond our control. Urbanization and the taylorization of the workplace led to a feeling of being in a "rat race." Throughout it all, there is a nostalgic tug that draws us back to a longing for simpler times, when life was slower and uncomplicated. Hence, the notion of living in a hurried culture is not an altogether new one: the tension between the rapidity of change associated with modernity and the desire to preserve all that is wholesome and straightforward has been with us for a very long time indeed.

Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that in recent years the pace of change has accelerated dramatically. Advances in information technology, bio-genetic engineering and the globalization of the economy have created an ever-tightening spiral of development that has condensed evolutionary changes taking millions of years to a time scale that has biological and technological revolutions routinely occuring within our lifetime (Russell, 1992). The pace of change has risen exponentially.

Accordingly, there is a growing urgency about time in families. Terms like "time crunch," "time squeeze," "juggling" and "time famine" have entered into our everyday descriptions of family life. For many families, this perceived shortage of time has meant that their lives feel tyrannized by time at every turn. Responsibilities for work, family and community appear to gobble up every morsel of time that is available, leaving working parents feeling hopelessly caught at the end of every day in a recurring paradox between an angst about getting it all done and remorse that they have not done enough with their children and families. Anxiety about too much to do and guilt about not using time according to the nagging shoulds of their family responsibilities are standard fare in the everyday experience of family life.

The demands of time are so paramount in families now that it is almost pure folly to think of families living without sophisticated scheduling tools. The family calendar, usually maintained by mothers, serves a critical and essential function in the family, ensuring a carefully orchestrated set of pick ups and drop offs. In the early morning hours, clock radios chime in unison throughout the household calling both adults and children to their individual temporal routines outside of the home. Where once families were more likely to live and work together in the household, their daily routine is now more akin to a ritual of dispersion with babies being called to the drop-off time for daycare, children to the schedules of school and virtually all parents to the demands of their paid work. At the end of the day, families re-converge on the household, only to face additional responsibilities that include meal preparation, homework, lessons, shopping and scheduling for the next day. The cumulative impact of these bloated schedules is that time has become a more urgent preoccupation in managing the many demands of contemporary work and family life.

Several forces are fueling this growing angst about the availability of time in families:

Time as we know it is a relatively recent invention. Mechanical clocks only took their place in the town belfry in the 14^th century. During the industrial revolution, clocks came into their own as the instruments of production efficiency. Time was to be measured and counted in precise terms in order to evaluate work performance or activity that was being conducted. This sowed the seeds of our current tendency to think of time as money or something that can be spent, wasted, budgeted or squandered. The Protestant Work Ethic imposed a moral meaning to time by equating the productive use of time with godliness. Thinking of time as a precious commodity is still the dominant way that we think about time in our culture. However, there are many other ways that we can think about time and how it is experienced in our lives. Hence before exploring some of the major time trends that affect families, it is useful to look at the many ways of thinking about time:

Cyclical patterns: Circular models of time are driven by nature. Time is viewed as a cycle of seasons, the cyclical rhythm of day and night and through the human cycle of birth and death. Prior to industrialized technology and the wide scale use of clocks, time was experienced as the repetitive periodicity of the weather, tides, seasons and the movement of the planets and the stars. For families, cyclical patterns of work and rest, planting and harvesting, celebration and mourning or growth and decay were, and in some ways still are, tied to the cycles of the natural world.

Linear patterns: Our orientation in everyday life is one of travelling through time with a wake of experience that we call the past and with a bow that cuts into the smooth surface of the future. Individuals and families have linear histories marked by a series of events including birthdays, deaths and anniversaries. While some of the rituals that are used to mark these events are repeatable and cyclical, they typically represent the idea of progression through time - a directionality of success (as in marriage anniversaries), maturity (as in birthdays) or accomplishment (as in graduations). In each of these, movement along a time line is the implicit focus of the celebration. Notions of aging, individual and family development are unidirectional in nature and assume a linear model of time.

Time as an organizational tool: Time is also a structure that shapes, organizes and constrains the way that people act. Our complex society is only possible with time as an organizational tool. The schedule and the calendar are the central social conventions that organize time so that it can be collectively experienced. Thinking of time as a structure "out there" often gives rise to the feeling that time is beyond our control. Time is structured functionally and is used to control the flow of work, activities and involvement with others. Punctuality is the moral mechanism that maintains the orderly adherence to rigid time structures.Organizations have hours of operation which prescribe when individuals participate in them.

Time as values: To understand time as value is to examine the way that evaluative meanings are attached to time. Any decisions that are made about the allocation of time - whether it be to work in the garden or to go into the office on the weekend - implicitly involve grafting meaning or assigning value to the activity. The nature of the activity invokes questions and assessments about the value and importance of time allocation and expenditure. The effort to harmonize the demands of work, family and leisure raise many questions about the value of time and the choices that we make about time use.

The politics of time. As time becomes more scarce and precious, it also becomes more contentious and open to conflict and competing demands. We think of controlling time, or being controlled by time. A politics of time is concerned with our relative ability to either manage and orchestrate time or to feel relatively powerless over time. It is also concerned with dealing with conflicts over time, competing interests with respect to time use and the negotiations that are a routine part of everyday family life.

Time as a changing and evolving concept: Although the actual duration of a minute or an hour has not changed since the invention of mechanical clocks, the way that those segments of time are experienced has changed rather dramatically in light of changing cultural conditions. For example, the speed of computers has refined the way that we measure time from minutes and hours to nanoseconds. Economically, globalization has uprooted time from its local meanings of "here and now" to an ever-moving flow of trade and exchange that never sleeps. With a growing appreciation for diversity in our culture, we understand that uniform quantities of time are experienced in a qualitatively uneven fashion. Hence the same hour can have very different meanings depending on age, gender, employment status, or ethnicity.

Although the evidence indicates that overall Canadians are working more and having less time for leisure⁽¹⁾, it is important to examine the variations in this overall pattern. Unless otherwise noted, the following trends are drawn from the 1998 General Social Survey (Statistics Canada, 1999):

For example, as indicated in the graph above, full time employed mothers devoted 5.6 hours a day when their child was under 6, declining to 2.3 hours when the children were older than 18 (Frederick, 1995, based on 1992 data).

The acceleration of our culture and the establishment of the dual-earner family as the dominant family form has given rise to a new politics of time. Although the politics of the globe has traditionally focused on the defense of spatial boundaries, the escalating spiral of change has meant that the politics of temporality is taking its place next to the politics of territory (Rifkin, 1987). As time becomes more scarce and more valuable, there are more conflicts - both within families and between families and the broader social order - about time control, allocations to meet responsibilities and entitlements to leisure time.

The idea that time is controlled within families rests on several assumptions. First, in contrast with our everyday operating assumptions that clock time is uniform, linear, continuous, objective and quantitative, time is experienced with different meanings and susceptible to varied interpretation. For example, parents and children stand in a different relationship to time because of their unique biography, history and social status. Second, time is a fundamental medium through which individuals express their values. Hence, when parents choose to work part-time in order to better balance their work and family responsibilities, they are expressing values and priorities through these decisions about time. When parents and children have disagreements or tensions about how time is to be used, they are expressing different values and beliefs about how time may be used. Finally, time is susceptible to varying levels of possession since it is an object of negotiation and exchange. When people work within organizations, they exchange their discretion over time for money, and in so doing, time becomes a commodity that is susceptible to the relations of power and control. When children attend school, they surrender some of their own freedom over time in order to comply with the institutional mandate to educate and socialize. Like other valued commodities, time is an inherently scarce resource that must be managed, controlled and protected from unwanted exploitation. It is in this regard that time is inherently political and open to the dynamics of possession, negotiation and control.

Three key issues are addressed in this section: the gender politics of time as it gets played out within families; the intergenerational dynamics of control between parents and children; and the politics of creating, managing and protecting family time in the face of a demanding work environment that champions speed and efficiency.

As the above trends would suggest, there are many disparities and conflicts that women and men experience over time. Within dual earner families, both women and men strive for full participation in both paid and unpaid work responsibilities. Nevertheless, they both carry residual values and expectations from the past. According to current cultural norms, women are expected to be committed to their paid work just like men, while at the same time, they are expected to maintain a priority to family. By today's standards, fathers face a similar contradiction: men are expected to be committed to family just like women while at the same time, they have carried over a residual set of values that has kept them locked in as primary providers in the family. As this would suggest, a politics of time is not a simple matter of incompatible time allocations that arise from the demands of family and work, but involves a range of competing and often contradictory values that underlie the decisions that women and men make about time.

In spite of dramatic changes in the number of women in the paid labour force, it would appear that there are still strong residues of the traditional division of labour. While there is less asymmetry in the world of paid work than there once was, men typically still spend more time on the job. Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly, women contribute, on average, less than one-third of the family income. The implication is that women continue to give priority to their families and men continue to give precedence to their work. Continuing gender discrepancies in pay and job status indicate that women's time is still devalued and men enjoy greater advantages in the control of their time. One implication of this is that family responsibilities for women are more likely to "spill-over" into their work time, resulting in more day-to-day tensions in the management of the work-family balance. This has resulted in women having to be more adaptable than men in meeting the care needs of their children. Women are more likely than men to arrange their work schedules in a way that will accommodate the demands of family caregiving.

Within the domestic sphere, men are increasing their commitment to the tasks of housework and childcare, but women continue to do the majority of these tasks. Employment status is an important variable for understanding the distribution of household chores: employed mothers devote significantly less time to household work than do non-employed mothers. Time devoted to employment seems to reduce the amount of time that is available for household work. In light of the acceleration of time that accompanies the increased work load in families, women have become the "time and motion" experts in families. Women are more likely than men to carry responsibility for both routine and emergency scheduling in the family. This is consistent with the traditional division of household tasks which indicates that women take responsibility for the daily reproduction of family life while more of men's housework time is spent on the long term maintenance of the home or the car. The major consequence of this difference is that men have more discretion in the allocation and distribution of their household time. Women have responded to the demands of the double day with a variety of strategies including extending the hours of the day, doubling activity in the same period of time, or eliminating chores altogether.

When men do increase their contributions to work in the domestic sphere, it is usually in terms of time spent interacting with the children. Men have increased their responsibility to participate in child care activities while women have held a steady course in their responsibility for both child care and household work. While the research indicates that men are committed to increasing their share of domestic work, it would appear that they feel constrained in their efforts to do so. Many forces come into play in perpetuating the discrepancies between the domestic work of men and women: real time constraints imposed by the demands of work; beliefs about mothering and competence in the household; and the constraining effects of what constitutes a display of appropriate gender behaviour.

Trends with respect to leisure time indicate that employed women have the least amount of leisure time, non-employed women have the most and employed men seem to fall somewhere between. In spite of these differences in the amount of time, there appear to be dramatic differences for men and women in their respective entitlements to use leisure time as they wish to use it. In light of the fact that domestic labour is most likely to be seen as women's work, the demands of household responsibilities are more likely to intrude on women's leisure time. This is especially the case for women who are full time housewives. While they typically have the greatest amount of leisure time, they have the greatest difficulty separating that leisure time from their domestic work. By contrast, employment seems to legitimize the right to leisure for women because in addition to having control over money, they are better able to compartmentalize their day to include leisure. Nevertheless, men continue to see leisure as a right whereas women, regardless of employment status, experience considerably more ambivalence about their entitlement to leisure.

Studies of gender distributions in time use over the life span suggest the disparities in the use of time begin early on in the life cycle and continue into old age. While the research points to a nearly universal leisure disadvantage for women throughout the life cycle, there are some indications that both women and men experience very limited amounts of leisure during the early stages of parenting. Ironically, breadwinner fathers, who are often thought of as having the greatest time advantages, seem to have less leisure time than their counterparts in dual-earner families.

Persistent gender disparities in the responsibilities and entitlements associated with time draw our attention to the political essence of time use. Inequality, conflict and differential entitlements continue to lie at the root of the experience of time for women and men in families.

Our traditional way of thinking about time in families is to place parents as the masters of the schedule and children as the compliant ones who are to be taught the rules of punctuality and organization. In this light, we have thought of children's time as being highly structured, monitored and controlled by the timetables set up by adults. This is in contrast to romanticized notions that childhood is a period of unencumbered free time. For the developing child, the temporal limits of activities are gradually modified from physiological needs to conventional patterns (Moore, 1963). From early on, children are taught to be punctual and to exercise self-constraint in relation to time (Elias, 1992). In the process, children learn the fundamental time values of the Western world: "be on time" and "use your time wisely." As children grow older, there are more intergenerational conflicts around timetables where children increasingly want privileges while parents wish to maintain control (Roth, 1963).

One of the manifestations of the control that parents exercise over their children is found in the "hurried child syndrome" (Elkind, 1981). At a time when wage earning single parents and dual earner families are the norm, there is an inevitable conflict between the pace of a child's life and the imposed pace of a parent's schedule. In this regard, time awareness in the family can be like a collective bargaining agreement whereby "children gradually learn to ignore their own natural rhythms... and absorb the messages and attitudes about time sent by their busy parents" (Erkel, 1995, p. 36). When stress induces parents to put their own needs ahead of children's, then children are expected to adapt to adult schedules and timetables rather than adults adapting themselves to the pace of childhood (Elkind, 1981).

As more women have entered into the paid labour force in recent years, there has also been a tendency for the institutional control of children's time to shift downward. While it is taken for granted that children's time is highly scheduled and controlled at the elementary school level, it is a more recent phenomenon that the preschool child is exposed to a more regimented day. As a result, there is a tendency to hurry very young children in the same way that older children have been hurried.

The bureaucratic control of children's time is "stretching its arms beyond the public arena of schooling" into children's leisure time (Qvortrup, 1991, p. 29). The activities of children after school have become more structured due to the work commitments of both parents. The formal organization of children's leisure time into after-school programs, sports, and lessons of all sorts results in the further regulation of their time. Even summer camps have shifted to more specialized forms of training for children including training programs in languages, computers or tennis. This control over their time amounts to a "planned spontaneity" that excludes children from experiencing through their own explorations in favour of an organized experience of time that is "motivational, structured and role-oriented" (Qvortrup, 1991, p. 29). The problem, according to Elkind (1981), is that children need the opportunity to play their own games, make up their own rules and abide by their own timetable and adult intervention interferes with the crucial learning that goes on when children express this autonomy.

The effort on the part of parents to control their children's time ironically results in a control of their own time (Qvortrup, 1991). As the temporal demands on parents intensify, children are more likely to be seen as time consuming objects. This is particularly acute in light of the fact that parenting standards have risen at the same time. In the days when families were large and parenting psychology was not part of the mass media, children helped to parent each other while parents got on with the job of getting the housework done and the money brought home. For today's families, there is a new kind of diligence required in parenting. Children must be monitored for their safety from the perceived dangers of abduction or crime. Parents now are expected to play with their children, invest quality time in their development, be involved in their schooling and overall ensure that they are spending sufficient time with their children. Even when parents send their children to day care, the expectation is that the "responsible" parent will invest a good deal of time exploring options and monitoring quality. The effect, however, of

these rising standards of parent care is that parent's time is increasingly controlled by the demands of their children.

Getting children to do housework provides a good example of children controlling parents time. The time that parents commit to ensuring that their children complete household chores is often perceived to exceed the amount of time that it would take to complete the chores themselves (Zelizer, 1985). The message here is that the time spent socializing children to do housework involves a time commitment of the parenthood role that is greater than the time that might be freed up by virtue of the child completing the task. Nevertheless, controlling children's time in this way is perceived by parents to be part of their moral responsibility to their children. In a study which examined why parents ask their children to do housework, White & Brinkerhoff (1987) found that the actual work accomplished was a secondary consideration and that it was for the children's benefit that they assigned them chores. For approximately three-quarters of the sample of parents, doing chores "builds character, develops responsibility and helps children learn" (White & Brinkerhoff, 1987, p. 210). The actual amount of household work that children do has been referred to as "negligible" with children under the age of 19 averaging 3 to 6 hours per week (Demo & Acock, 1993).

In some of my own research, I have sought to explore the dynamics of control between parents and children as it operates in relation to the family's experience of time (see Thorpe & Daly, 1999). The traditional view of time in families is that it operates in a hierarchical, unidirectional fashion: children's time is highly structured, monitored, and controlled by the timetables set up by adults, and children, for the most part, are seen as relatively passive. The data from this qualitative study of 15 dual earner and 10 single parent families suggest that there

are a number of ways that children control the time of their parents, while at the same time being controlled by decisions that parents make.

As described throughout the analysis, parenting was an all encompassing experience in the lives and times of the participants. We used the term "parented time" to describe the all encompassing experience of structuring and organizing time to meet the needs and expectations of their children. Fundamental to the experience of parented time is the dialectic that exists between parents being "in control" of time within the family, and yet being controlled by the responsibilities involved in caring for their children. Although it appears that the control over time is unidirectional insofar as the caregiver is seen as the one who makes decisions about the allocation of time, caring relationships require reconciling a number of time demands that arise from all family members who are involved. For example, one single mom described the experience of driving her children around and trying to "fit it all in". Ironically, while she was in the driver's seat, she talked about being driven by the endless list of demands that are placed on her by her parenting responsibilities.

When we asked parents directly about who controls time in the families, there was a deep ambivalence expressed about their own control of the family timetable and a strong assertion that their children's activities, needs and schedules were the prime mover in the family system. From the time that they first experienced becoming a parent, they had the experience of redefining time in the service of children. This involved relinquishing some control over the decisions they made about their own time use. It also involved living the tension between their own efforts to structure and control the way that their children used their time and the experience of being controlled by the obligation and responsibility to their children's schedules. The data strongly suggest that with respect to the critical dimension of controlling time in families, children play a strong and determining role in the organization of family time. Control over time in these families was characterized as a dialectical interplay that involved negotiating and reconciling, on a daily basis, competing demands, contradictions and needs between children and parents.

In the face of mounting responsibilities and growing time scarcity, family time is at once precious and evasive. As a result, efforts to find and preserve family time present many families with the enormous challenge of guarding the boundary against the hungry temporal demands of their work and community. Parents are at war on a daily basis as they endeavour not only to meet all their responsibilities for work, caregiving, and the household, but to hold on to some precious time that they can call their own.

Although our current ideals of family time tend to coalesce around notions of family togetherness and solidarity, this has not always been the case. In the 19th century, for example, community togetherness during key celebrations was viewed as a much more important source of fulfilment than spending time alone in families. Occasions such as Thanksgiving and Christmas were more focused on attending parties and dances than in celebrating family solidarity (Coontz, 1992). Indeed, it would seem that families are continuously creating and maintaining the myth that families in the past were more concerned with maintaining custom and tradition and did a much better job of holding on to "quality family time" that is currently seen as being so threatened and under seige. (Gillis, 1996). Through a careful analysis of the history of family time, Gillis (1996) raises the spectre that there was never a "golden age" of family time when families realized the cherished ideals of togetherness.

As these historical analyses would suggest, "family time" is coloured by some of the ideological debates that are carried out with respect to the family itself. In the same way that families of the past have been romanticized and idealized, so too has "family time." In the same way that "family values" are championed as a political touchstone, so too is the investment in, and preservation of, family time put forward as the epitome of moral fortitude. The hegemonic view of family time reflects the romanticized version of family life through its emphasis on the importance of intact families spending "quality" time together that enhances their collective well-being. Even when the concession is made that there is a diversity of family structure and experience, family time is still held out as a central ideal. As this would suggest, family time is not only a descriptive term that offers a perspective on some aspect of family togetherness, it is a prescriptive term that directs families to act in certain ways.Consistent with this, Gillis (1996) has suggested that everyone lives in two families: one that they live with and one that they live by.

In response to the fast pace of technology and the dramatic increase of women in the paid labour force, family time has been idealized as the private still point in an otherwise frenzied life pattern. For example, many work/life initiatives are premised on the assumption that employees want to spend more time with their families. This is rooted in a cultural attitude that work is a greedy institution that takes too much of our time with the result that family gets too little. When family time is assigned the label of scarcity, then it is automatically elevated to a position of greater demand. As a consequence of this "demand mentality," people appear to be engaged in an endless pursuit of family time: parents complain that they don't have enough of it; politicians leave their positions claiming they will commit more of their lives to it; and companies develop work-life strategies that will help their employees gain access to more of it. Indeed, national surveys in both Canada (Frederick, 1995) and the United States (Bond, Galinsky & Swanberg, 1998) indicate that the majority of employed mothers and fathers feel they do not have enough time to spend with their families.

Embedded in this pursuit of family time is a set of unanalyzed and problematic assumptions: We assume that we know what "family time" is; we assume that there is some kind of uniformity of experience associated with it; and we assume that it is equally desirable for all members of the family. Hochschild (1997) gave us pause when she upturned our beliefs about what people were really pursuing in their lives when she reported that a significant portion of her sample were not pursuing refuge by spending time with their families, but rather, by spending time at work. For approximately 20% of her sample, work time, not family time, was the valued occasion for feeling like their life had some order, companionship and support. This is consistent with other research which indicates women have a more positive experience of paid work than activities in the home sphere (Barnett & Rivers, 1998; Larson, Richards and Perry-Jenkins, 1994). This was an enormously important finding - not because it indicated that work was more important than family, but because it shook at the foundational, taken for granted belief that family time is something that we all universally aspire to have more of.

It was within the context of these ideas that I became interested in examining the way that women and men in different kinds of families talk about the meaning of family time. Based on interviews with 28 dual-earner and single parent families, I explored the relationship between people's expectations and experiences with respect to family time. Hence, questions were asked about memories, hopes, ideals, and everyday experiences. Three categories emerged from the data regarding the ideals of family time: the social production of memories, happy togetherness and valuing spontaneity.

The ideals of family time: The pursuit of family time was colored by a quest to find an experience of family togetherness that was typically rooted in their past. When I asked questions about what family time means to people or what their ideal family time would be, their answers were often nostalgic in nature. People talked about "wanting to carry on traditions," "remembering fondly the times when they used to play board games together" or remembering how their "parents would sit around after a big meal and tell stories by candlelight." It wasn't so much the actual content of these memories that seemed to matter; rather what seemed to have greater urgency was the felt obligation that they honour their parent's traditions through the manufacture of their own traditions for their children. In this regard, it was the nostalgic mood or the memory itself that seemed paramount - for it seemed to anchor them to a secure past. The data suggested that there was a kind of preoccupation that these families had in the manufacture of a positive experience of family time that both they and their children could remember. The pleasure of family time was not in the present moment, but was expected to be available as a kind of dividend somewhere down the road.

The meanings that were given to family time represented a set of beliefs about what family time should be and what families should do. Two gold standards emerged in these data with respect to family time: togetherness and a positive valence. Regardless of the type of family structure, parents talked about their yearning for happy togetherness in their experience of family time. Critical in this regard was not only being together but wanting to be together.

One of the most commonly expressed expectations for family time was that it be spontaneous and unscheduled. Due in large part to the highly scheduled nature of their lives, these parents emphasized the importance of family time that would bring them together in a way that was gracefully natural and unconstrained. Furthermore, it was an experience that because of its very spontaneity was considered more genuine or authentic and as a result, more affirming of their family relationships. Within the context of highly scheduled lives, family time was valued for the antithetical qualities of spontaneity and non-demand. Parents talked about the importance of simply being with one another in some way or another in the absence of obligations to be somewhere else, dress a certain way, or do some things. For example, they emphasized the importance of protected "down times" on the weekends because it was then that they could sleep in, not go to childcare, eat with mom and dad, have late breakfast, play, and watch TV. In short, they too valued the opportunity to get off schedule and be with their family.

The reality of family time: The most common lament associated with the experience of family time was that there was never enough. Even children, when asked about this during their circle time at day care, echoed their parents lament that they don't seem to have enough time together. One mother reflected in the interview that their lives seem to be speeding along and when she reflected on the last couple of weeks, she felt like she had hardly seen her children. Inasmuch as family time was critcally important to them, there was a feeling that they were somehow missing it.

For many parents, there were very strong tones of obligation that entered into their discussion about having family time. Often in the same breath, they spoke about how critically important family time was, but how difficult it was to orchestrate on any kind of regular basis. They wanted the positive togetherness of family time, but often felt tired at the end of their day from their paid work and felt the need to be geared up in order to deal with all of the responsibilities on the home front. In the midst of mutiple demands and responsibilities, family time took on the tone of obligation as something they should try to fit in over the course of their busy day. This sense of obligation was often justified by making reference to the multiple demands that they experienced for their time. For example, a full-time employed single mother with two children at home commented how she felt selfish when she was unable to give out anything more to anyone at the end of the day and looked forward to putting her children to bed.

Many of these parents talked about the creation of family time for the sake of their children. It was in this respect that parents' needs, desires for and satisfactions from family time were secondary to an assessment of their children's needs and satisfactions. In this regard, the reality of family time for most of these parents involved conceding to their children. With a kind of sacrificial tone, many parents talked about the importance of family time in order to make the children happy now, and that their time for more selfish pursuits would come later.

The discordance between the ideal and the real: The descriptions of actual family time that were given by these families did not line up very well with their own ideals for what family time should be. The construction of family time for these families was based on the expectations of togetherness, positive engagement and future gratification. While these expectations were very much a part of their everyday language of family time, they tended to be more reflective of an ideal than a reality. Rarely did they have enough family time, when they did, they tended to emphasize the effort that was required to pull it off, and for the most part, the effort was seen as being of primary benefit to children.

The discordance between their ideals and experiences of family time meant that many of these parents lived in a state of chronic guilt. They expressed guilt because they were working, guilt because they did not spend enough time with their children, guilt for getting babysitters, guilt for being too tired when they were with their children and guilt when they were too busy. As a result of their difficulty in being able to reduce the number of competing demands for their time, many talked about learning to live with the guilt that they could not change. Although these parents talked about the demands of work and childcare being largely beyond their control, they didn't talk about changing the ideals that they have for family time. The ideals of spontaneity, togetherness and positive experience seemed to go unchallenged. In order to reduce the discordance between the real and the ideal of family time, then, either the realities of family demands or the ideals of family time need to change. The dominant cultural response is for parents to at least think about doing less, even though few seem to be successful in following through on this. However, if parents are unable to change the nature of their demands in order to come closer to the ideal, then it leads one to question whether the ideals themselves need to be opened to re-examination.

Families are facing unprecedented demands in their time use. The proliferation of technology has created impatience, an intolerance for slowness and expectation of instantaneous response. Contrary to expectations that we would have more leisure, the work ethic has intensified. Families are both caught by, and contribute to a cult of busy-ness that seems only to intensify.

It is tempting for family members to think of these time stresses as "personal troubles" (Mills, 1959) that are capable of such private solutions like better time management or an electronic palm organizer. Indeed, there are many choices about time in the course of a day that could help to alleviate some of the time crunch that families feel. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness of some of these stresses, especially among full time employed parents in the 25-44 age category, suggests that this is not just a personal trouble, but a systemic dilemma that requires a public response. To this end, it is instructive to be aware that other countries, most notably in Europe, are much more deliberate about actively discouraging the culture of overwork. A variety of approaches are being used to reduce and redistribute work time including legislation, tax incentives, collective bargaining and a variety of leaves for social, education and family needs (Hayden, n.d.). For example, France and Italy have taken the lead in legislating the 35 hour work week supported by tax incentives and fines. Collective bargaining by steel and iron-working unions in Germany have been successful in reducing work weeks to 35 hours in the last decade with current efforts seeking to further reduce the work week to 32 hours. In Belgium and the Netherlands, the 35 hour work week has been successfully negotiated by unions in many of the main industries. Here in North America, there has been little attention given to the question of work reduction at the legislative level. However, many companies have become more attentive to work-family policies and practices in order to be more responsive to the time stresses experienced by working families.

Time use in families has become increasingly political - both within families and between families and the work organizations of which they are a part. The battles of time must be waged on two fields: first, by all individuals on a daily basis involving choices about what they value in life; and second, in the public arena of social policy and the workplace in order to question, challenge and develop a set of cultural practices and values that are aimed at alleviating the time stress in families.

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1. The terms used in the following discussion are defined as follows:

Leisure time consists of time that is not allocated to personal care (sleep, eating, grooming) or paid or unpaid work. It is further broken down in the GSS survey to include socializing, active and passive leisure.

Average time is calculated on the basis of a 7 day week; as a result, an 8 hour day averaged over 5 days, will appear as 5.7 hours, averaged over 7 days.

Paid work includes all activities associated with market related work and includes commuting time.

Unpaid work includes household chores, family care, shopping and volunteer work.

2. Time stress was measured in the social survey by asking 10 questions about time stress, including, for example: "Do you feel trapped by daily routine?" "Do you worry that you don't spend enough time with your family or friends?" "Do you consider yourself a workaholic?"

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