Quality of time, not quantity, matters with kids

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck

If you’re a working mom or dad who feels guilty about not spending enough time with your children, sociologists from the University of Toronto have some advice for you: don’t.

In fact, in a new study currently available online and scheduled to be published in the April edition of the Journal of Marriage and Family, they explain that the amount of time that parents spend with their sons and daughters when they are children has virtually no impact on how they will turn out, and only a minimal impact on their lives when they are adolescents.

According to the Washington Post, the groundbreaking study (which is said to be the first large-scale longitudinal analysis of parent time) flies in the face of conventional wisdom, and looked at all aspects of a youngster’s life, including their academic achievement, their behavior and their overall well-being. Largely, they found no relationship between the amount of time that a parent spent with their children and better outcomes for those young men and women.

The study did find one situation in which parental engagement had an impact on their kids, but it wasn’t a positive one, the newspaper noted. When parents, especially moms, feel sleep-deprived, stressed, guilty or anxious, they could actually harm their kids by spending time with them.

“Mothers’ stress, especially when mothers are stressed because of the juggling with work and trying to find time with kids, that may actually be affecting their kids poorly,” said co-author Kei Nomaguchi, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University, told the Post.

“I could literally show you 20 charts, and 19 of them would show no relationship between the amount of parents’ time and children’s outcomes. . . . Nada. Zippo,” added Melissa Milkie from the University of Toronto. “In an ideal world, this study would alleviate parents’ guilt about the amount of time they spend, and show instead what’s really important for kids.”

What is important, she explains, is quality, not quantity. It is important for parents to spend time with their kids, and there is plenty of research showing a correlation between quality parent time (reading to a child, eating family meals together, talking to them, etc.) and positive outcomes for their kids. However, the quantity of time spend doing those things is apparently irrelevant.

However, the study does not explain how much of that quality time is enough to generate those positive outcomes. Matthew Biel, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Georgetown University Medical Center, told the Post that he was unaware of “any rich and telling literature on whether there’s a ‘sweet spot’ of the right amount of time to spend with kids.”

He added that researchers have shown that in stressful urban environments, kids who have parents that are highly involved and even strict is linked to a reduction in delinquent behavior. Milkie’s study and others have found that a family’s income and the educational level of the mother are more closely associated with a child’s future success than the amount or quality of time spent with a child or adolescent.

“If we’re really wanting to think about the bigger picture and ask, how would we support kids, our study suggests through social resources that help the parents in terms of supporting their mental health and socio-economic status,” she told the newspaper. “The sheer amount of time that we’ve been so focused on them doesn’t do much.”

—–

Follow redOrbit on TwitterFacebookGoogle+, Instagram and Pinterest.