Parents’ Time with Children: Patterns in Diverse Family Contexts

Hiromi Ono, Washington State University
Pamela J. Smock, University of Michigan

Scholarship on patterns of parental time involvement with children in the U.S. has increased in recent years. Few studies, however, have as their chief aim an understanding of parental time involvement with children across diverse family forms. The key contribution of this paper is to elaborate extant knowledge by examining time spent with children in a diverse array of two-parent family structures. We limit our investigation to households with two coresidential “romantically” involved adults (e.g., first marriage, remarriage, and cohabitation) because a deepened understanding of the heterogeneity of two-parent households as environments for children is important empirically and conceptually. A second contribution of this paper is that we investigate patterns using data at two time points: 1997 and 2003. While this is a relatively short time-span, this comparison provides important leverage on the robustness of patterns that emerge.