PARENTS these days spend a lot more time with their offspring, or at least middle-class parents do. One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59.
At the same time a gap has opened between working-class and middle-class parents. In 1965 mothers with and without a university education spent about the same amount of time on child care. By 2012 the more educated ones were spending half an hour more per day. The exception is France, where the stereotype of a bourgeois couple sipping wine and ignoring their remarkably well-behaved progeny appears to be accurate.
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MisterJose on November 28th, 2017 at 17:08 UTC »
My mother talks about how, at any party or gathering, there was always the 'children's table', and the 'children's room', and you were sequestered there the whole time while your parents smoke and drank and had fun with their friends. You were never to show your face except to other children. Nowadays if I go to a friend's party, everything will be focused on the children.
celpal on November 28th, 2017 at 14:53 UTC »
So I guess if you were born in Denmark in the sixties your parents just gave you Lego and then you met them again on your 30th birthday.
1ndy_ on November 28th, 2017 at 14:18 UTC »
Mothers (but not fathers) are spending less and less time for childcare in France. Why is France such an odd outlier?