Passages for Summaries & Precis
Modern Mums Still Doing Time For The Kids
Jacqueline Salmon has some good news for working mothers.
Some good news for 21st-century moms - they may think they spend less time with their children than moms did, but it ain't necessarily so.
A University of Maryland study has found that today's mothers spend just as much time with their children as mothers did in 1965.
The study, by sociologist Suzanne Bianchi, reported that mothers said they spent 5.8 waking hours a day with their children in 1998, compared with 5.6 hours in 1965 - a result Bianchi found striking, considering that three-fourths of women with children younger than 18 are in the work force.
Bianchi said her research shows that "today's employed moms are just as committed" as the housewives of yore. "They value family and time with their children just as much as moms from 25 years ago."
Since no one has yet invented the expandable day, where are
working mothers getting the time to spend with their children?
They steal it from themselves, said Bianchi, sleeping five or six hours less each week than non-employed moms, with 12 fewer hours of free time, according to a study. They also tend not to vacuum as much. "Things they would have done in the past, maybe, around their home, they don't do; or sleep they would have gotten, they don't get," said Bianchi.
In other words, said Kathleen Christensen, who directs the programme on working families at the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, a New York philanthropic trust, working mothers are scraping together time for their children by "taking it out of their own hide".
Absolutely, say working moms.
Lisa Sarbach, an executive and single mother, says she gets by on 5 � to six hours of sleep a night and runs errands during her lunch hour in order to have more time with her 5-year-old son, Jonathan, at night and on weekends.
Jonathan "expects the time with me now, because I have set that standard," she said.
There's no time for hobbies or socialising. "I can't tell you the last time I went out," Sarbach said.
Bianchi's research is based on the responses of 300 mothers across the US who were asked in a 1998 survey how they had spent the previous 24 hours. The findings are part of a 40-year research project taking an in-depth look at how Americans use their time now, compared with years ago.
Another reason the amount of time mothers spend with their children hasn't changed much is that, contrary to our fuzzy childhood recollections, it was never that high to begin with, said Bianchi.
Years ago, at-home moms were loaded down with chores, and they often relied on their older children to take care of the little ones. - The Washington Post.
Exercise
Write a short article for your school magazine in which you set out why mothers today are just as good as thirty years ago. Your editor has asked you to keep your article to sixty words or less!
