Changing Rhythms of American Family Life – By Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson and Melissa A. Milkie
| Author | Oriel Sullivan |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00650.x |
BOOK REVIEWS
Changing Rhythms of American Family Life by Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robin-
son and Melissa A. Milkie. Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 2006, xvii +249
pp., ISBN 0 87154 1369, £37.50
Changing Rhythms of American Family Life illuminates contemporary changes in the
way people in families in the United States spend their time, with a particular focus on
the time that parents spend with their children. The book is the latest in a sequence
which have provided up-to-date, and sometimes surprising, information about the
way in which North Americans spend their time, based on analyses of nationally
representative time-use diary surveys dating from the 1960s to the turn of the 21st
century (notably Robinson and Godbey 1999). The difference is that the focus of this
book is specifically on families with children and the changing ways in which men,
women and children in such families divide their time between paid work, domestic
labour, childcare and leisure. As such, it makes an important contribution to our
understanding of current patterns and of changes in how parents divide their time
between employment, family and leisure, the division of domestic labour and child-
care, and will be of interest to academics in the areas of family research and public
policy alike. A major innovative feature of the book is a presentation of the ‘childcare’
issue from the children’s point of view, with a chapter devoted to how children in
families spend their time. This includes, for example, how much of their own time
children spend with their parents (as opposed to the more usual analysis of how much
time parents spend with their children).
The book is carefully structured, with a good overall summary in chapter 1 pointing
the way to the detailed analyses of the various chapters. Each chapter then contains
an informative chapter summary on topics such as changing overall workloads for
parents, changes in parental time spent with children, feelings about time pressure and
an analysis of how children spend their time. In addition, for those unfamiliar with
time-use diary surveys — an increasingly tried and trusted source of data on how
people spend their time — there is an informative description of the uses of such data
in chapter 2 plus an appendix dealing with methodological issues.
One of the main substantive contributions of the book is the indication that
employed parents, and in particular employed mothers, continue to make consider-
able efforts to spend time with their children, for there is no evidence for a decrease
over time in the time that mothers spend with their children. In a context where female
employment continues to grow, this goes some way to contradict media panics about
‘absent mothers’. Similar findings based on time-use diary evidence have been pub-
lished before, but they have not previously been presented based on such a compre-
hensive source of nationally representative US data. A major question which arises
from this finding that the authors then address is: how could the consistency in
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00650.x
45:4 December 2007 0007–1080 pp. 856–876
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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