Scholars have been increasingly concerned about the rise in "intensive mothering" and its implications for the well-being of children and women and for inequality more broadly. These concerns, however, reflect a key assumption: that socioeconomic disparities in mothers' parenting time observed in earlier eras have continued to grow. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003-2005 and 2015-2017 (n = 13,755), we test this assumption by examining whether maternal education gaps in active time spent with children have persisted across the 2000s. We pay particular attention to the continued socioeconomic bifurcation in women's access to full-time stable work, assessing whether changes in the education-related time gap are due to changes in who works and how much. We find that the gap in active childcare time between mothers with a college degree and those without has closed dramatically. Although some of this narrowing was driven by declines in time among college-educated mothers, most was driven by increases among mothers with less education. These trends, however, are observed only among mothers who were not employed full-time. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses further reveal that although most of the increase in active care time among nonworking mothers with less education was attributable to behavioral change, 58% of the decline among nonworking, college-educated mothers was a result of sociodemographic compositional changes. These findings illuminate population-level trends in mothers' active parenting time, provide insights into the driving factors, and help update theories, qualitative findings, and policy considerations related to mothers' and children's well-being.

中文翻译：

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2003 年至 2017 年按教育和工作划分的母亲育儿时间趋势。

学者们越来越关注“密集母亲”的兴起及其对儿童和妇女福祉以及更广泛的不平等的影响。然而，这些担忧反映了一个关键假设：早期观察到的母亲育儿时间的社会经济差异继续扩大。使用 2003-2005 年和 2015-2017 年的美国时间使用调查 (ATUS) (n = 13,755)，我们通过检查在 2000 年代与孩子共度活动时间的母亲教育差距是否持续存在来检验这一假设。我们特别关注女性获得全职稳定工作的持续社会经济分化，评估与教育相关的时间差距的变化是否是由于工作人员和工作数量的变化。我们发现，拥有大学学历的母亲和没有大学学历的母亲之间在积极育儿时间上的差距已经大大缩小。尽管这种缩小的部分原因是受过大学教育的母亲的时间减少，但大多数是由于受教育程度较低的母亲的时间增加所致。然而，这些趋势仅在没有全职工作的母亲中观察到。Blinder-Oaxaca 分解分析进一步表明，尽管受教育程度较低的非工作母亲的积极护理时间增加大部分归因于行为变化，但受过大学教育的非工作母亲中 58% 的下降是社会人口构成变化的结果。这些发现阐明了母亲积极育儿时间的人口水平趋势，提供了对驱动因素的见解，并有助于更新理论，