Department Colloquium: Liana C. Sayer on Cross-National Variation in Mothers’ Weekday and Weekend Child Care & Housework Time

Liana C. Sayer is Director of the Maryland Time Use Laboratory and Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. Her research explores vital questions on when, where and how time use matters, and for whom, over time and space.

The “time availability” perspective theorizes the more time spent on paid work, the less time available for housework and childcare. It has support from studies in multiple countries and time periods (Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Cooke and Baxter 2010). Research is limited because it does not consider how time constraints may vary by type of day, type of housework and childcare, and across countries with distinct institutional and cultural contexts. We address these limitations using weekday and weekend 24h time diaries from Finland, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. We find employment hours reduce weekday routine childcare in all countries, but developmental childcare only in France, Finland, and the UK. Employment hours reduce weekday core and occasional housework in all countries, but there is no evidence of weekend “catch-up” on housework or developmental childcare. We see a negative association of employment with weekend childcare in Finland and the UK.