Time together is central to family life, and the question of how much time parents spend with children is vital to scholars. Although parents’ reports of time with children are taken as standard and reliable, assessing different family actors’ perspectives on time together may challenge this notion. Using the American Time Use Survey (2003-2018), we provide a unique window into parent-adolescent time, via a novel examination of precise questions about co-presence and emotions during daily activities. Comparing parents’ and teenagers’ reports of the amount and emotional valence of time spent together, we reveal considerable perceptual gaps – reflecting “ambiguous” rather than “objective” togetherness. Mothers report 24 hours per week of co-presence (“in the room with”) compared to adolescents’ 15 hours – a gap greater than an entire school day; father-teenager discrepancies are comparable. Discrepancies vary by parents’ employment status, with larger discrepancies between stay-at-home parent and adolescent reports. Though the perceptual gap is sizeable, the emotional one is not: both generations experience reported time together as more meaningful, happier and less stressful than time apart, partly due to the nature of activities and presence of other people. Employed parents and the more educated receive more of a well-being boost from adolescent co-presence compared to their counterparts. Ultimately, generational position and social statuses shape perceptions of co-presence, in the form of “creating” versus “negating” classifications of togetherness.
Reliability, Validity, and Variability of the Subjective Well-Being Questions in the 2010 American Time Use Survey