Creating Versus Negating Togetherness: Perceptual and Emotional Differences in Parent-Teenager Reported Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Time together is central to family life, and the question of how much time parents spend with children is vital to scholars. Although parents’ reports of time with children are taken as standard and reliable, assessing different family actors’ perspectives on time together may challenge this notion. Using the American Time Use Survey (2003-2018), we provide a unique window into parent-adolescent time, via a novel examination of precise questions about co-presence and emotions during daily activities. Comparing parents’ and teenagers’ reports of the amount and emotional valence of time spent together, we reveal considerable perceptual gaps – reflecting “ambiguous” rather than “objective” togetherness. Mothers report 24 hours per week of co-presence (“in the room with”) compared to adolescents’ 15 hours – a gap greater than an entire school day; father-teenager discrepancies are comparable. Discrepancies vary by parents’ employment status, with larger discrepancies between stay-at-home parent and adolescent reports. Though the perceptual gap is sizeable, the emotional one is not: both generations experience reported time together as more meaningful, happier and less stressful than time apart, partly due to the nature of activities and presence of other people. Employed parents and the more educated receive more of a well-being boost from adolescent co-presence compared to their counterparts. Ultimately, generational position and social statuses shape perceptions of co-presence, in the form of “creating” versus “negating” classifications of togetherness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".