Marital Status and Mothers’ Time Use: Childcare, Housework, Leisure, and Sleep

Abstract

Assumptions that single mothers are "time poor" compared with married mothers are ubiquitous. We tested theorized associations derived from the time poverty thesis and the gender perspective using the 2003-2012 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS). We found marital status differentiated housework, leisure, and sleep time, but did not influence the amount of time that mothers provided childcare. Net of the number of employment hours, married mothers did more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers, counter to expectations of the time poverty thesis. Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total and more sedentary leisure time than married mothers. We assessed the influence of demographic differences among mothers to account for variation in their time use by marital status. Compositional differences explained more than two-thirds of the variance in sedentary leisure time between married and never-married mothers, but only one-third of the variance between married and cohabiting mothers. The larger unexplained gap in leisure quality between cohabiting and married mothers is consistent with the gender perspective.

How Does Time Use Differ between Individuals Who Do More versus Less Foodwork? A Compositional Data Analysis of Time Use in the United Kingdom Time Use Survey 2014–2015

“…Our results are consistent with existing work, which suggests that women do more foodwork and housework [26,58,59], and that, while women are increasingly in paid employment, they continue to do more than their share of work in the home [38]. This is of interest to our analysis in considering how women structure their time differently in order to accommodate the work they do.…”

The influence of household composition on leisure time in South Africa: A gender comparison

“…Recently, studies have differentiated between non-market and leisure activities. However, since no standard definition of leisure exists, there are inconsistencies in terms of how leisure is defined and classified in the literature (see, for example, Neilson and Stanfors 2018;Pepin et al 2018;Voorpostel et al 2010).…”

“…Gender inequality in leisure time is not unrelated to gender inequality in labour market access and income, since gendered behavioural expectations affect the ways men and women allocate their time outside of paid and unpaid work (Mattingly and Bianchi 2003). Furthermore, leisure time inequalities are also linked to disparities related to aspects of work that are not traditionally measured, such as unpaid care work, and to inequalities in physical and mental health (Passias et al 2017;Pepin et al 2018). The study of leisure time is also important due to the insights that it provides into the outcomes of intra-household bargaining (Gupta and Stratton 2008).…”

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The meaning of leisure participation: perspectives of children and young people with significant physical disabilities

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