Mothers with a youngest child age 4 or younger, by comparison, didn’t see a statistically significant increase in the time they spent on secondary child care in the 2019-2021 period.Īs has long been the case, there are sizable gender differences in the amount of time that parents spend on child care. The 2021 average was still considerably higher than before the onset of the pandemic, even as other aspects of life began to normalize in the outbreak’s second year. Finally, because American Time Use Survey data collection was interrupted during part of the first semester of 2020, we only use data from the second half of 2019, 20.įor mothers whose youngest child was age 5 to 12, average time spent on secondary care increased by about 2.5 hours from 2019 to 2020, from an average of 5.8 to 8.2 hours a day, before dipping to an average of 7.1 hours a day in 2021.

Full-time working parents are individuals working 35 hours or more per week. Because secondary care is only reported for children under 13 years old, we only carry secondary care estimates for parents whose youngest child is younger than 13 years old. The sample used in this analysis includes married and partnered parents with minor children living in the household. The analysis focuses on the time married and partnered parents spent on secondary child care, which the BLS defines as times when parents had at least one child under age 13 in their care while doing activities other than primary child care. Microdata used in this analysis comes from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) provided by the University of Minnesota. This Pew Research Center analysis is based on data from the American Time Use Survey covering the 2019-2021 period and conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

While there was relatively little change in the amount of time parents spent directly caring for their children between 20, the time they spent on secondary child care – that is, supervising their children while doing other things, such as working, doing chores or watching television – went up significantly.Īnd the increased time commitment on secondary care persisted into 2021 for one group of parents in particular: mothers with children ages 5 to 12, according to the analysis, which looks at time use data covering the 2019-2021 period. Those difficulties lasted into 2021 for some parents, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data examining the way parents spent their time before and during the outbreak. The coronavirus pandemic created widespread child care challenges in the United States in 2020. Sarah Yunits checks her daughter Ada’s homework while Cora waits her turn and dad Conor takes a work conference call at their Brockton, Massachusetts, home in March 2020.

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