Parents’ Sleep Across Weekdays and Weekends: The Influence of Work, Housework, and Childcare Time

2021 ◽  
pp. 0192513X2110179
Author(s):  
Leah Ruppanner ◽  
Ben Maltby ◽  
Belinda Hewitt ◽  
David Maume

Children increase time demands with important consequences for sleep. Here, we test whether parents’ paid and unpaid time demands and the presence of young children equally reduce mothers’ and fathers’ sleep, comparing the married/cohabiting to unmarried. Applying data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS, 2003–2016), we find married/cohabiting mothers report less sleep when young children or multiple children are present; they are employed; their spouses are employed; and they spend more time in housework and childcare. By contrast, unmarried mothers report less sleep when children are present because of their larger domestic loads. For married/cohabiting fathers, the presence of multiple children is associated with less sleep but doing more housework results in more sleep. Finally, unmarried fathers’ employment time explains the association of children on their sleep. Parents report a sleep deficit relative to the childless but the reasons vary by gender and the co-presence of a partner.

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 237802311986027 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Ruppanner ◽  
Stephanie Moller ◽  
Liana Sayer

This study investigates the relationship between maternal employment and state-to-state differences in childcare cost and mean school day length. Pairing state-level measures with an individual-level sample of prime working-age mothers from the American Time Use Survey (2005–2014; n = 37,993), we assess the multilevel and time-varying effects of childcare costs and school day length on maternal full-time and part-time employment and childcare time. We find mothers’ odds of full-time employment are lower and part-time employment higher in states with expensive childcare and shorter school days. Mothers spend more time caring for children in states where childcare is more expensive and as childcare costs increase. Our results suggest that expensive childcare and short school days are important barriers to maternal employment and, for childcare costs, result in greater investments in childcare time. Politicians engaged in national debates about federal childcare policies should look to existing state childcare structures for policy guidance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (17) ◽  
pp. 2553-2581 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cadhla McDonnell ◽  
Nancy Luke ◽  
Susan E. Short

Parenting is emotionally demanding and highly gendered. We use data from the American Time Use Survey to examine mothers’ and fathers’ momentary affect during childcare activities. We observe a gender imbalance in the emotional rewards of childcare: Fathers report more happiness, less stress, and less tiredness than mothers. We introduce the “care context”—defined as the type of childcare activity, when and where it takes place, who is present, and how much care is involved—as an explanation for these gender differences in parents’ affect. The analysis reveals that most dimensions of the care context vary between mothers and fathers. We also find that the care context fully accounts for differences in mothers’ and fathers’ happiness, partially explains differences in stress, and does little to explain differences in tiredness. Thus, the gender imbalance in the emotional rewards of childcare is partially due to parents’ highly gendered engagement with their children.


Author(s):  
Michael Osei Mireku ◽  
Alina Rodriguez

The objective was to investigate the association between time spent on waking activities and nonaligned sleep duration in a representative sample of the US population. We analysed time use data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), 2015–2017 (N = 31,621). National Sleep Foundation (NSF) age-specific sleep recommendations were used to define recommended (aligned) sleep duration. The balanced, repeated, replicate variance estimation method was applied to the ATUS data to calculate weighted estimates. Less than half of the US population had a sleep duration that mapped onto the NSF recommendations, and alignment was higher on weekdays (45%) than at weekends (33%). The proportion sleeping longer than the recommended duration was higher than those sleeping shorter on both weekdays and weekends (p < 0.001). Time spent on work, personal care, socialising, travel, TV watching, education, and total screen time was associated with nonalignment to the sleep recommendations. In comparison to the appropriate recommended sleep group, those with a too-short sleep duration spent more time on work, travel, socialising, relaxing, and leisure. By contrast, those who slept too long spent relatively less time on each of these activities. The findings indicate that sleep duration among the US population does not map onto the NSF sleep recommendations, mostly because of a higher proportion of long sleepers compared to short sleepers. More time spent on work, travel, and socialising and relaxing activities is strongly associated with an increased risk of nonalignment to NSF sleep duration recommendations.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Hensvik ◽  
Thomas Le Barbanchon ◽  
Roland Rathelot

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kamila Kolpashnikova

In this paper, I will demonstrate how to create tempograms using the original American Time Use Survey data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics2. For this project, the 2003-2018sample of diaries is used (file names: atusact0318 and atussum0318).Additionally, I identify the bottleneck, where the performance of Stata’s underlying functions could be optimised to improve the work with time-use data for researchers who use Stata.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0252843
Author(s):  
Kamila Kolpashnikova ◽  
Sarah Flood ◽  
Oriel Sullivan ◽  
Liana Sayer ◽  
Ekaterina Hertog ◽  
...  

Time-use data can often be perceived as inaccessible by non-specialists due to their unique format. This article introduces the ATUS-X diary visualization tool that aims to address the accessibility issue and expand the user base of time-use data by providing users with opportunity to quickly visualize their own subsamples of the American Time Use Survey Data Extractor (ATUS-X). Complementing the ATUS-X, the online tool provides an easy point-and-click interface, making data exploration readily accessible in a visual form. The tool can benefit a wider academic audience, policy-makers, non-academic researchers, and journalists by removing accessibility barriers to time use diaries.


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