The Time Parents and Children Spend Together [microform] / Mark E. Ziegler

Questions about how parents' childrearing time becomes associated with different developmental outcomes and about the relative importance of the quantity and quality of shared parent/child time remain largely unanswered. A study explored such associations in a sample of 48 white middle class third and fourth graders (24 boys and 24 girls) and their mothers and fathers. Each child received a battery of five cognitive and achievement tasks. Teachers were asked to rate the children on their classroom behaviors, including learning effectiveness, memory, attentiveness, and cooperativeness. Both parents were interviewed, asked to keep diaries of time spent with their child, and requested to record their child's activities. Parents specifically indicated indirect, direct, or available time with their children. Results indicated large interfamily variability but no differences in the time parents and children spent together with respect to the sex of the child. In addition, it was found that mothers' available time for contact with the child exceeded the available time of fathers. Finally, while a positive relationship was found to exist between the amount of time fathers spent supervising their children and teacher ratings of the children's cognitive abilities, the inverse was true for mothers' time. These and other results suggested the relationship between parents' time and children's development was not straightforward, nor was it the same for mothers and fathers in this sample. (Author/BJD)