Fathers’ juggling time between work, leisure and family

Abstract

While much of the social debate in the past decade has focused on work/life balance and working mothers, less attention has been devoted to scholarship which explicitly examines working fathers in this context. If working fathers are as stressed as research suggests, then how is time experienced by these individuals? This question was addressed through a review of selected findings from the ‘Work/Life Tensions’ project which set out to examine how working parents use and experience time in Australia. Using the ‘Experience Sampling Method’, this paper reports on data gathered via personal data assistants (PDAs) from 83 working fathers in two age cohorts (2470 time use surveys) with a view to providing ‘in -situ’ interpretive information on men’s activity contexts and their subjective experience of time over a 7-day period. These data indicate that there are significant differences in positive affect in time spent in different activities. Post hoc analysis revealed that men engaged in ‘committed’ time (e.g. child care, domestic duties, purchasing good and services or voluntary work) or ‘free’ time activities (e.g. recreation and leisure or socialising) reported significantly higher levels of positive affect than those engaged in activities associated with ‘necessary’ time or ‘contracted’ time. Moreover fathers from the mid-aged cohort (aged 52-57) expressed significantly lower feelings of time crunch and significantly more positive affect than younger fathers aged 25-30. Qualitative data from follow-up interviews with the same sample of parents are used to highlight strategies used to manage time, in the busy daily schedules of this group of working fathers in Australia. By understanding better the experience of work\life tensions in time crunched households, the research seeks to demonstrate associations between time use, life course experience and individual well-being, as well as strategies used by individuals to better manage time.