MYTH: SINGLE MOTHERS HAVE LESS TIME AND ENERGY TO GIVE THEIR CHILDREN THAN MARRIED MOTHERS

Fact: "[After accounting for maternal and child personal characteristics], single mothers spend significantly more time in primary and routine child care activities than married mothers and spend similar amounts of time in interactive child care activities and total time with children as married mothers. Single mothers have higher rates of employment and tend to be less educated, both of which are associated with reduced child care time. Controlling for these two factors, in addition to controls for maternal age, age of youngest child, number of children, and race/ethnicity, eliminates or reverses differences in child care time between married and single mothers. Cohabiting mothers do not differ significantly from married mothers..."

Sarah M. Kendig and Suzanne M. Bianchi, Single, Cohabitating, and Married Mothers' Time With Children, Journal of Marriage and Family Volume 70 Issue 5, Pages 1228 - 1240 (2008)

Comment: "The current policy focus on marriage and disadvantages of children in single-parent families seems to miss the important fact that all mothers try to privilege investments in their children over other things, to the extent they are able. It is conceivable that spending time with their children may become especially precious to single mothers and the focus of their energies. Single mothers do not have the support for parenting from a partner that married mothers have. At the same time, they also do not have to negotiate with a partner about expenditures of either their time or money and may often make children the central focus of both."

Ibid.

Fact: "Utilizing the 2003 and 2004 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), this study examines the relationship between family structure and maternal time with children among 4,309 married mothers and 1,821 single mothers with children less than 13 years of age. Single mothers spend less time with their children than married mothers, though the differences are not large. Marital status and living arrangement differences in time with children largely disappear or single mothers engage in more child care than married mothers after controls for socioeconomic status and other characteristics are introduced. Thus, less maternal time with children appears to be mainly attributable to the disadvantaged social structural location of single mothers rather than different proclivities toward mothering between married and single mothers."

Sarah M. Kendig and Suzanne M. Bianchi, Single, Cohabitating, and Married Mothers' Time With Children, Journal of Marriage and Family Volume 70 Issue 5, Pages 1228 - 1240 (2008)

Fact: Not necessarily. And it's not directly correlated with employment of the mother, either. Being married and maintaining a household with a man itself consumes a significant amount of mother's time and attention, both directly to the relationship as well as in heavier homemaking burdens (even men who "help out" in the home seldom contribute equivalent to the chores they create.) In addition, "Engle and Breaux (1998) have shown that some fathers' consumption of family resources in terms of gambling, purchasing alcohol, cigarettes, or other nonessential commodities, actually increased women's workload and stress level."

Louise B. Silverstein and Carl F. Auerbach, "Deconstructing the Essential Father," AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGIST, Vol. 54, No. 6 397-407 (June 1999.)

Fact: The studies look at this issue more honestly when it's a man other than the children's father, e.g.:"[T]he two-adult structure of a coresidential or cohabiting arrangement might benefit children, providing more adults to supervise, monitor, and be emotionally involved with children. At the same time, cohabiting males or stepfathers may compete with children for mothers' time and resources, thereby diminishing children's well-being."

Living arrangements of single-mother families: Variations, transitions, and child development outcomes. Ariel Kalil, University of Chicago Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies

Fact: "Our major finding is that union formation and/or the disruption of new unions have very few effects on mothering. Mothers' and children's reports sometimes produce different results, but the patterns do not suggest that children's reports are any more or less accurate than those of mothers. The most consistent effects of union change indicate that the presence of a partner reduces mothers' time with children... Remarriage or repartnering is not good if we value time for and supervision of children. Children in intact unions at the second survey report spending less time with their mothers than children whose mothers were single."

Thomson, Elizabeth, Jane Mosley, Thomas L. Hanson, Sara S. McLanahan, REMARRIAGE, COHABITATION, AND CHANGES IN MOTHERING Center for Research on Child Wellbeing Working Paper #98-14

Fact: "[H]usbands seem to create more labor in the household by their mere presence - as much as eight hours more labor per week - despite the work that they do perform in the home. In other words, even when a man's labor in the household has been taken into account, he causes eight additional hours of labor for his spouse (South and Spitze 1994)."

Why Don't Low-Income Single Mothers Get Married (or Remarried)? Kathryn Edin University of Pennsylvania Department of Sociology 3718 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19119

Fact: "Controlling for work hours, single parents are not more likely than married parents to feel that they spend insufficient time with children."

Melissa A. Milkie, Marybeth J. Mattingly, Kei M. Nomaguchi, Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson (2004) The Time Squeeze: Parental Statuses and Feelings About Time With Children Journal of Marriage and Family 66 (3), 739-761.

Fact: "Marriage increases the amount of time that women spend in household labor (Bianchi et al., 2000) and decreases the amount of time that men spend in household labor (Gupta, 1999). Not surprisingly, marriage curtails women's free time and has few effects on men's free time (Mattingly & Bianchi, 2003). Upon the birth of a child, the household division of labor becomes even more traditional (Gjerdingen & Center, 2005; Sanchez & Thomson, 1997; Thompson & Walker, 1989) and the gender gap in free time becomes even more pronounced (Mattingly & Bianchi). These household demands affect women's work. Married women are more likely than married men to report that family demands have caused them to turn down overtime hours and beneficial work assignments (Keene & Reynolds, 2005).

Rebecca Glauber (2007) Marriage and the Motherhood Wage Penalty Among African Americans, Hispanics, and Whites Journal of Marriage and Family 69 (4), 951-961.

Fact: "Employed and full-time mothers generally engage in the same array of child care activities, with the exception that full-time mothers watch more television with their children (Bryant & Zick, 1996; DeMeis & Perkins, 1996). Mothers holding employment do not spend less time with their children than full-time homemaker mothers (see Bianchi & Robinson, 1997). Further, many employed mothers "compensate for their absence from the home during work hours by increasing the amount of time they spend in intense interaction with children during nonwork hours [Mischel and Fuhr, 1988]" (Amato & Booth, 1997, p. 60)."

Terry Arendell (2000) Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship Journal of Marriage and Family 62 (4), 1192-1207. ("Single and married mothers spend roughly the same amount of time in total family and child care responsibilities (Bianchi & Robinson, 1997; Duxbury, Higgins, & Lee, 1994").

Fact: Women first shave time from their own personal activities when there is a deficit because of employment or other factors, not from the children. Even in circumstances in which lone mothers have less time for their children than they would if married, the studies all are quite clear that lone fathers spend even less parenting time with children. So flipflopping children in joint custody won't alleviate this situation -- it merely will rotate the children from one parent who is devoting less time than she formerly did to another who is devoting even less time.

Terry Arendell (2000) Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship Journal of Marriage and Family 62 (4), 1192-1207. ("Single and married mothers spend roughly the same amount of time in total family and child care responsibilities (Bianchi & Robinson, 1997; Duxbury, Higgins, & Lee, 1994").

Also see: Huston, A.C. & Aronson, S.R. (2005). Mothers' time with infant and time in employment as predictors of mother-child relationships and children's early development. Child Development, 76, 467-482. "...working mothers tended to compensate by sacrificing other activities, like housework or socialising, and by spending more time with their children at weekends than non-working mothers."

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