• Jennifer Baxter
• Australian Institute of Family Studies

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26 March 2010Parental time with children contributes to children's development and is positively associated with children's wellbeing. However, the amount of parent-child shared time does not necessarily capture its "quality". Parents, in their time with children, might be teaching them, encouraging and nurturing them and physically caring for them. At other times, parent and child may be together but engaging in less developmentally focused activities. While this parent-child time is often analysed using adults' time use data, it is also possible to analyse this time from the child's perspective.

This paper uses just over 5,000 time use diaries of 4-5 year old children, collected in the first wave (2004) of Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). About half the diaries were for weekdays and half for weekends. These diaries captured details both of the children's activities and of who was with them in each 15-minute period. The "who with" data were used to compile measures of parent-child time; that is, times when the mother or the father was with the child. The activity data were used to describe the nature of the parent-child time.

These data were analysed using descriptive techniques to show how the timing of mothers' and fathers' time with the children and children's activities intersect. Further, these data were analysed in respect of parents' and children's characteristics to determine whether certain factors, in particular parental employment, were associated with more or less parent-child time or the nature of that parent-child time. Throughout, mother-child and father-child time were considered separately, as were weekend and weekday time.