Worried that you don’t spend enough time teaching your child and boosting their school and life success? Here’s a new look at quality time
Last fall, Patrick Ishizuka, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, published a report exploring what 21st Century parents consider important in rearing their children. It was based on an extensive study of 3600 parents representing a cross-section of socio-economic and cultural groups in the United States. The results were clear: parents in all groups value “intensive mothering and fathering,” defined as spending time directly teaching and helping their children learn. This represents a cultural shift from the mid-20th century that is reflected in the increasing amount of time parents spend specifically engaged with their children. It points to “high contemporary standards for parental investments in children,” as Ishizuka states in his report.
Despite the common values across social groups, a fair amount of other recent research shows an expanding achievement gap between children in lower and higher income families. This gap seems to correlate with differences in how cognitively enriched the children’s home environments are, including the amount of time spent directly teaching children. Some typical parent-provided enrichment activities are daily reading, storytelling, visiting museums, and teaching academic skills such as numbers, letters, words, or simple math. In addition to parent time, there are also differences among SES groups in the ability to provide goods and services, such as tutoring or coding camps, that bolster children’s achievement and confidence. These too contribute to the achievement gap.
One report that includes a careful review of multiple studies (Kalil et al., 2016) points to differences in the amounts of time parents in different SES groups typically spend directly teaching or “intensively parenting.”
So how much time do parents actually spend directly teaching their children? Not as much as you think: college educated parents spend an average of about 14 minutes per day directly teaching their pre-school child. Parents with a high school degree or less spend about 5 minutes. Some spend zero minutes. Educated parents of school age children may spend up to 30 minutes supporting their children’s learning, but that seems to be the maximum. Dr. Ariel Kalil, lead author of the review study, is quoted in the New York Times saying, “Whatever the myth of hyperparenting is, there is basically no parent who spends two hours a day reading or doing puzzles.”
Directly teaching or deliberately providing enrichment activities clearly provides a leg-up for children, a fact that now seems broadly accepted and valued, even among families that are less able or less skilled at providing it. But hyperparenting, in the sense of directly and deliberately enriching, is not the full picture. Parenting is not something slotted into the round of daily activities — cooking time, laundry time, parenting time.
Parenting is a relationship. One that is embedded into the fabric of family life and is a part of many activities of daily living. Children gain knowledge, skill, confidence and a sense of self not just from being taught, but from rich interactions in which conversational turns go back and forth between parent and child while other activities are happening: talking together while in the car, eating, getting ready for bed, cooking and everything else.
This dialogic engagement between parent and child cuts across SES boundaries. In fact, an important interdisciplinary study (Romero, et al. 2018) finds that children who have more of these turn-taking interactions excel in multiple measures of early academic achievement and also have denser brain development in specific areas of the cortex (language areas) compared with those children who have fewer of these kinds of conversational interactions. The finding cuts across SES groups. Regardless of other factors, including the number of books in the home or family income or other variables that have been linked to the achievement gap, children from all SES groups who have conversations with their parents in daily life outperform those who do not. The key is dialogic interaction – talking back and forth in turns. It is not being talked at, which quickly disengages children. It is also not ignoring one another while expediently getting tasks done, or being glued to a screen.
Drawing together a lot of this kind of research, I find myself thinking of the old fashioned term, “quality time.” Providing some direct enrichment activities by teaching children and supporting their school-based learning is certainly quality time. I did it and I still smile, and maybe laugh at myself, when I open boxes, now lovingly stored in the garage, of magnetic alphabet letters and little beads meant to teach my children about numbers and letters. We did do those things sometimes – probably for 15 minutes at a time and not nearly as often as I’d imagined. But quality time is also just paying attention to and interacting with your child as part of your shared round of daily living. It’s playing together, connecting and talking throughout the day. Interestingly, it is one of the things my now older children especially remember about our home when they were tiny: we talked a lot together. In fact, my older daughter began her college essay describing our dinner table conversations and all our daily chattering, commenting that it opened so many ideas and built so many connections.
So how much time are you spending with your child bolstering and supporting development? Maybe it depends on how you count time. If you’re finding 15 minutes a day for direct “teaching” you’re probably doing it right. But how about the times you spend with your child every day just engaging in back-and-forth interactions?
References
Ishizuka, P. (2019). Social Class, Gender, and Contemporary Parenting Standards in the United States: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment. Social Forces, 98, (1), 31–58.
Kalil, A., Ziol-Guest, M., Ryan, R. & Markowitz, A. (2016). Changes in Income-Based Gaps in Parent Activities With Young Children From 1988 to 2012. AERA Open, 2,(3), 1 -17.
Klass, P. (2019). Intensive Care: What makes a good parent? The New York Times, October 2, 2019.
Romeo, R., Leonard, J., Robinson, S. and four others, (2018). Beyond the 30-million-word gap: children’s conversational exposure is associated with language-related brain function. Psychological Science , 29 (5) , 700-710.
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