Evaluación integral de las políticas de vivienda

Parents, particularly moms, feel enormous pressure to spend a great deal of time with their children. Over the last couple of decades, a new norm of “intensive” parenting has taken hold among middle, upper-middle, and upper class families, and it is particularly common in the families of “professional workers.”145 _{“Intensive” parenting is the “‘concerted cultivation’ of children}

through organized leisure activities with intense parental involvement.”146

Ironically, intensive parenting took hold just as dual income families became the norm and women started graduating from law school (and other graduate programs) in numbers roughly equal to men.147 _{Worse yet, the norm}

of intensive parenting runs rampant particularly among “highly educated women” “who have the highest earning potential and are also the most likely to work full-time.”148 _{High-flying women “spend the most time in child care,}

particularly in educational and interactive forms of child care.”149 _{In other}

words, women lawyers are among those women who feel the need to spend the most time with their children.

Intensive parenting takes an immense amount of time and energy—far more time than parents spent back in the heyday of stay-at-home moms. In 1965, mothers spent far less time with their kids than mothers do today. First, focus on just the amount of time today that parents spend doing things like feeding, bathing, clothing, taking kids to the doctor, playing with, or reading to their children.150 _{Today, on average, moms and dads together spend an additional}

hour and a quarter a day—or nine hours more a week—than their 1965

counterparts.151 _{Basic childcare, like feeding and bathing, does not drive the}

145. Youngjoo Cha, Reinforcing Separate Spheres: The Effect of Spousal Overwork on Men’s

and Women’s Employment in Dual-Earner Households, 27 AM.SOC.REV.303, 308 (2010). 146. Id.

147. Bianchi, supra note 118, at26(arguing that intensive parenting became the norm “at the very time that families increasingly had all adults in the paid workforce . . . .”); id. at 28 (“At the very time when mothers . . . could least afford to increase their time tending to children’s needs, because they were working more hours outside the home, that is exactly what they did do.”).

148. Raley et al., supra note 102, at 1426; id. at 1447 (finding that regardless of the hours they work, women spend about the same amount of time with their children).

149. Id.; see also id. at 1447 (finding that regardless of the hours they work, women spend about the same amount of time with their children).

150. Bianchi, supra note 118, at26.

151. Id. at 27tbl.1, 31tbl.2(showing time fathers and mothers spent caring for children from 1965 through 2008); see also Kuziemko et al., supra note 84, at 4 (“[L]arge majorities of mothers tell

increase. What has spiked is intensive interaction with kids—playing with them, reading to them, and helping them with homework.152 _{Furthermore, one}

thing bears repeating—this hour and fifteen minutes a day is how much more time parents today spend per day with their kids than in 1965. The total time that parents spend with kids is much higher.

Mothers today spend 40% more time caring for children than 1965 mothers—fourteen hours a week in 2008 up from ten hours in 1965.153 _{That is}

right. As mothers’ average hours in paid work nearly tripled between 1965 and 2008,154 _{the average woman spent 40% more time caring for her children.}155

Compared to 1965 moms, mothers today spend almost three times as many hours in the kinds of activities that typify “intensive parenting”—playing with, reading to kids, and helping kids with homework.156

By some estimates fathers have also tripled their time they spend in active, hands on care since 1965; they have doubled the amount of time they spend doing family related tasks (childcare, housework, and shopping).157 _{Men do}

still spend less time caring for kids than women (eight hours per week compared to fourteen).158 _{Men also do about ten hours less housework than women per}

survey takers that motherhood is harder today than for their own mothers and that they are more involved in their children’s lives than their mothers were in theirs.”).

152. Bianchi, supra note 118, at 26. 153. Id.

154. Id. (reporting that mothers in 1965 spent eight hours doing paid work compared to twenty- three hours in 2008); see also id. at 27 tbl.1 (showing time mothers spent in paid work and caring for children from 1965 through 2008); see also EILEEN APPELBAUM ET AL.,THE ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE OF WOMEN’S RISING HOURS OF WORK:TIME TO UPDATE EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS 8 tbl.2 (2014), https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2014/04/15/87638/the-economic- importance-of-womens-rising-hours-of-work/ [https://perma.cc/X2XL-FGGQ] (reporting that, based on Current Population Survey data, the median number of hours a mother worked in 2012 increased by 260% since 1979 from 600 to 1560 hours a year); cf. Mitra Toossi, A Century of Change: The U.S.

Labor Force, 1950–2050, MONTHLY LAB.REV., May 2002, at 15, 22 tbl.4 (concluding that the gap between the labor participation rate for men and women age twenty-five to thirty-four—i.e., childbearing age—will shrink to 10% in 2015 from 50% in 1970 based on projections for 2015).

155. Bianchi, supra note 118, at27tbl.1(reporting that in 1965 women spent 10.2 hours caring for children compared to 13.9 hours in 2008).

156. Id. at 26; see also Kuziemko et al., supra note 84, at 4 (finding that “associated with child care beyond infancy has been rising, especially for educated mothers.”).

157. Bianchi, supra note 118, at 31tbl.2(showing fathers’ time in household related tasks from 1965 through 2008); PARKER &WANG, supra note 96, at 27 (“Fathers have nearly tripled the time they spend with their children (from 2.5 hours in 1965 to 7.3 hours in 2011).”).

week.159 _{But as the number of hours a mother spends in paid work increases,}

so too does the amount of childcare a father performs.160

B. Women Shield Their Husbands’ Breadwinner Status