Half Changed World

Almost every parent I know thinks that diaper changing is vastly overrated as the worst part of parenting — it’s the lack of sleep, and the interrupted sleep, that kills you. Shortly after my older son was born I took a grim satisfaction in reading a newspaper article about how a number of accused suspects had falsely confessed to major crimes under the pressure of being kept awake for long periods of time.

A British magazine, Mother and Baby, recently released survey results that have gotten a lot of play on the internet. The statistic that’s gotten the most attention is the claim that 52 percent of fathers either sleep through their babies cries or pretend to, while mothers only get an average of 4 1/2 hours of sleep a day during the first 4 months of their children’s lives. That 4 1/2 hour figure is pretty horrifying; fortunately, it’s almost certainly bunk. I couldn’t find on their web site any explanation of how the survey was conducted, which almost always means that they had the survey in the magazine and readers sent it back. Well, that means you have a highly selected sample — those parents who are worked up enough about sleep to bother sending back a stupid survey to a magazine.

However, the Sleep Foundation has also recently released its survey results, based on a more scientific sample. This is a long, fairly technical report, but it has some interesting findings:

* 71 percent of all infants (under 12 months) wake up at least once per night, and 21 percent wake up three or more times per night. Both the number of wakenings and the length of time that they’re up decreases as kids get older, but 36 percent of preschoolers are still waking up at least once per night.

* This survey agrees that mothers are by far more likely to respond to a child who needs attention in the night, being the primary respondents for 89% of infants, 85% of toddlers, and 71% of preschoolers.

* They found that the average primary caregiver for a child under 2 months slept 6.2 hours a night, and for all children under 10, 6.8 hours a night. Granted, 6.2 hours broken into 3 2-hour chunks is an order of magnitude less restful than a solid 6 hours, but it’s better than 4 1/2. Most parents think they need about 8 hours a night.

*Almost 3 in 10 parents reported having some symptoms of insomnia at least a few nights a week, with nearly half saying they have these symptoms more often since becoming a parent, and about 20 percent saying less often. This hit home, because I’ve been having trouble sleeping this week. I fall asleep instantly, but when I get woken in the early morning — typically by the boys, but Tuesday it was by the cat puking next to our bed — I can’t get back to sleep. It’s the worst feeling, lying there exhausted, unable to get back to sleep, knowing that my alarm is going to go off in just an hour or so.

* 10 percent of parents of an infant say their child’s sleep habits have caused a moderate or significant amount of stress in their relationship with their spouse/partner — much better than the 60 percent who Mother and Baby claims say that it has created “immense stress.”

* There are some interesting statistics comparing infants/toddlers who are put to bed awake versus those put to bed asleep (eg rocked or carried until they fall asleep), suggesting that those who are put to bed awake sleep better. However, I could make the argument that the causation goes in either direction. I’m an agnostic in the sleep wars (cosleeping v. sleep hygiene v. crying it out, etc), believing in doing what works for you. My older son didn’t sleep through the night until he was about 14 months, my younger slept through the night at 4 months; we didn’t do anything differently.

I don’t know anyone who thinks they have enough time to do everything they want to, especially not working parents. The US government just released the first analyses from its new time use study, which attempts to figure out exactly what we’re all doing with the 24 hours a day we get.

As the New York Times points out, it didn’t exactly require a multi-million dollar study to tell us that on average, women do more housework and more child care than men. I’m also not exactly shocked to learn that employed mothers get less sleep on average than non-employed mothers.

They haven’t released the underlying data yet, but there’s still some interesting data in the appendix tables that they did publish, especially Table 6, which breaks respondents out by gender, employment status, and whether there are children of different ages in the household. I immediately turned to employed women, with children under age 6:

Caring and helping for household members (as a primary activity): 2.42 hours a day, versus 3.14 hours a day for non-employed women with young children in the household. That gap is actually quite small, in my opinion, but it’s consistent with previous research suggesting that employed mothers cut out sleep, housework and personal time, rather than giving up time with their children. (Table 8 says that women in households with children under 6 spend an average of 6.94 hours a day caring for household children as a “secondary activity,” while doing something else, but this isn’t split by employment status. First thing on my list of things I’d like to see analyzed when the public use data comes out.)

(By contrast, the numbers for primary care are 1.28 for employed men with young children in the household and 1.23 for non-employed. My guess is that means that non-employed men with children at home are still more likely to be home because they’re disabled or otherwise unemployable than because they’re choosing to take on child care responsibilities.)

Working: 4.34 hours a day. I think these figures include weekends, so this works out to about 30 hours a week. Women, especially those with young children, are more likely to work part-time than men, but Table 4 also shows that women working full-time work an average of about 2/3 of an hour per day less than men working full-time.

Personal care activities (including sleeping, showering, makeup, etc): 9.23 hours a day, less than non-employed mothers of young children, but more than employed men. I guess women really do take longer to get dressed.

Eating and drinking: 1.06 hours a day, exactly the same as non-employed mothers of young children. The key thing to note here is that at any given time respondents were only allowed to indicate one activity (except for childcare), so all the times that you eat while driving, working, watching tv, etc. don’t show up in the survey. Someone who works on the study told me earlier this year that when they were testing the instrument, they discovered that a significant number of people didn’t report any eating in the course of the day because it was never their primary activity.

Household activities (e.g. housework, cooking, etc.): 2.00 hours a day, substantially more than any group of men, employed or non-employed, with or without children, but less than non-employed women. A clean house and homecooked meals are among the things that get sacrificed to the time crunch. Interestingly, mothers of young children, regardless of employment, did slightly less household activities than mothers of only school-age children. Shopping is a separate category, coming in at 0.9 hours a day

Leisure and sports: 3.25 hours a day, the lowest of any of the subgroups reported. This is actually higher than I would have guessed. However, this figure has to be read in conjunction with Table 8, which says that women with children under 6 spend an average of 2.43 hours of leisure a day in conjunction with child care. The overall pattern for this one is pretty clear, with men consistently reporting more leisure than women, non-employed more than employed, people without children more than people with children, and people with only older children more than people with young children.

I haven’t been able to figure out whether there was some recent statistical release that led to the publication of three articles about fertility statistics in three different publications in the past couple of weeks. It’s interesting to see the different takes on the same subject.

The New York Times’ article appeared in the Week in Review two weeks ago, noting that population growth has slowed worldwide, leading the UN to lower its prediction for the plateau level of world population to 9 billion, down from its 1968 projection of 12 billion. Most of this decrease is driven by poorer countries, where the combined effects of urbanization, women’s education and employment, and reduced child mortality have all acted to drive fertility down. While noting variation in fertility levels from country to country, the article’s main thrust is about how widespread the overall downward trend is.

The Economist emphasized the divergence in the trends between Europe and the United States. They point out that while American fertility rates fell during the 60’s and 70’s, by the mid 80’s, they had started to rebound. At present, the U.S. has fertility rates just below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman, while Western Europe’s fertility rates are around 1.4 children per woman, and projected to keep dropping for another 10 years.

The Economist article discusses some possible consequences of this divergence in detail, which I won’t rehash (although it’s worth reading). I’m intrigued by the causes, and the relationship between fertility rates, women’s labor force participation, and government policies to subsidize the costs of childbearing (e.g. paid parental leave). It strikes me as ironic that the U.S., which doesn’t have a child allowance, nonetheless has a higher birthrate than many countries that do. In some cases, such as Singapore, the causality may run in the other direction — governments adopted pro-child policies BECAUSE their birthrates were low — but my impression is that the child allowances in Europe date to before the recent declines in fertility.

The third article was a slightly bizarre op-ed piece in the Washington Post, about how religous conservatives have a competitive advantage over liberals, because they have more children. The article struck me as mostly a way for the author, Philip Longman, to promote his book about how declining birthrates are, contrary to conventional wisdom, bad for the world. The article struck me as misleading because it ignored both the role of immigrants, who tend to support Democrats, and the electoral college. It also included the statement that “African Americans, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, now have a lower average fertility rate than whites.” I haven’t been able to find this anywhere on the NCHS website and it’s not consistent with anything else I’ve read.

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Follow-up: I emailed Longman to ask him about the statistic and here’s his reply:

“Thank you for your query. Since I wrote the piece, I have become aware that NCHS has revised its fertility statistics. The latest numbers show the Black, total fertility rate at 2,051.0, and the White at 2,040.0. This amounts to a difference of just over one-one-hundredth of a child per woman, so if I were writing the piece today, I would say that the Black fertility rate has fallen to point that it is virtually the same as the White rate.

“For more information, see: Revised Birth and Fertility Rates for the 1990s
and New Rates for Hispanic Populations, 2000 and 2001: United States, National Vital Statistics Report, Volume 51, Number 12, Table 3: Crude birth rates, general fertility rates, total fertility rates, and birth rates, by age and race of mother based on the 1990 and 2000 censuses, and percent difference: United States, 1991-2001.

“By the way, this same revision shows that Black fertility has fallen 17 percent since 1991, while White fertility has risen by 1 percent.”

Today was my older son’s first day of preschool. It’s the same school he attended last year, and he was eager to get going, happy to see his friends and teachers. It’s amazing to me to think of how much he’s grown in the past year, and what he’ll be like a year from now.

One of the things that never gets talked about in the endless discussions of whether child care is good or bad for children — which are typically framed as being about whether or not women should work outside the home– is that non-employed parents use child care as well. We send our son to preschool because he likes it, because it’s a good opportunity for him to learn social skills (sharing, taking turns), because it gives our other son a chance to have some one-on-one attention, and because it gives my husband a break.

Child care is expensive, of course, so it’s mostly affluent non-employed parents who use it — full- or part-time nannies if their children are infants, preschool if their children are older. Very low-income parents may also be able to send their children to Head Start, which was explicitly designed to try to make up the gap in the learning opportunities available to poor children before they start school.