Beyond mothers’ time in childcare: Worlds of care and connection in the early life course
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Family scholars examining time spent on children's care focus heavily on mothers’ allocations to a specific sphere of active caregiving activities . But children's needs for care and supervision involve connection to others; and many others beyond mothers can and do provide care, especially as children grow. Using a “linked lives” approach that centers relationality, we show how time diaries can illuminate children's time spent in “socially connected” care. Using recent (2014–2019) time diary data from the American and the United Kingdom Time Use Surveys, we examine mothers', children's, and teenagers' days to assess two forms of connected care time. First, results show that in addition to childcare time as traditionally measured by time use studies, mothers spend considerable further time providing connected care through social and community time in which children are included, religious activities with their children present, and mealtime with children. Second, looking from the child's perspective also underscores time in the larger “village” of carers within which children and youth are embedded. Fully two-thirds of 8–14-year-olds' and three-quarters of 15–17-year-olds’ waking time is not with mothers—it is spent alone or in social connection to fathers, extended family, teachers, neighbors, and friends. A “linked lives” approach shifts attention to assessing care time in diverse activities with others and to measuring mothers’ and children's time in social connections within the larger world. This analytic frame also moves away from maternal determinism to highlight the contours of children's care and social time occurring within the community at large, as well as the roles and responsibilities of those outside of the mother–child dyad across the child's early life course.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".