Do children suffer when both parents are working?

A typical working parent spends just 19 minutes a day looking after their children, official figures revealed yesterday.

The startling research shows the devastating impact that working full-time has on children who hardly see their parents.

With less than 20 minutes spent with their parents every day, this is only enough time to eat a quick breakfast together or have a couple of bed-time stories.

The Office for National Statistics looked at nearly 4,950 people over the age of 16 in Britain to find out what they do all day.

The findings make grim reading for working parents who already worry that they spend too much time at work - and too little at home.

Parents who work full-time spend just 19 minutes every day "caring for [their] own children", according to ONS's "Time Use Survey", published yesterday.

A further 16 minutes is spent looking after their children as a "secondary activity", but this means that they are doing something else - such as the weekly supermarket shop - at the same time.

According to Maire Fahey, editor of Prima, said: "In the 1980s, we thought we could have it all and aspired to high-flying careers and happy families.

"But the cracks are starting to show. Family life is suffering and something has got to give."


Recent research indicates that parental work stress has implications for the quality of family interaction and, in turn, children's and adolescents' adjustment. Studies in two distinct genres are reviewed: investigations relying on global reports of work demands, family dynamics, and child and adolescent adjustment and studies focusing on within-person comparisons of family interaction on days characterized by high and low work stress.

The effects of parental work stress on children's and adolescents' adjustment appear to be indirect. Work stress is linked to parents' feelings of overload and strain, which in turn predict lower parent-child acceptance and higher conflict, processes that in turn are related to less positive adjustment of children and adolescents. In the face of high work stress, withdrawing from family involvement may be adaptive in the short run but ultimately problematic. The strength of these associations depends on parents' personality qualities, parents' coping styles, and work and family circumstances.