Working at home: family-friendly?
By Sharon Jayson
Our lives were suppod to be more flexible and family-friendly thanks to the technology at our fingertips. But in this age of BlackBerrys and recession pressures and working from home after hours and on weekends, family time may not be working out the way we thought.
Busy parents who envisioned more time with the kids are finding that more work hours at home don’t necessarily translate into quality time with them.
Some studies suggest parents today do have more face time with their children than their counterparts decades ago, largely driven by incread time spent with fathers. An analysis relead last month by two California economists looked at a dozen nationally reprentative surveys from 1965 to 2008 and found the amount of time parents spend on child care is up dramatically since the 1990s , especially among the highly educated.
But a growing number of rearchers say that’s only part of the story. The technology that allows parents to spend more time at home –laptops and cellphones and mobile e-mail—is blurring the lines between work and personal life and disturbing them from the “family time” they crave.
Studies that show parents who spend more time than ever with their kids today don’t necessarily capture what’s happening between them, says sociologists Barbara Schneider of Michigan State University in East Lansing. “If you’re not connecting with Mom and Dad—just becau you’re in the hou with them—what difference does it make?”
The questions have become so much a part of life in a modern technological society that the tug of war between work and family time is among topics to be discusd when about 1800 demographers, sociologists, economists and others gather for the Population Association of America’s three-day annual meeting, which begins Thursday in Dallas.
卡拉哈里沙漠 Nearly half of American workers bring work home with them regularly, according to a stu
dy of 1,800 published in December in the American Sociological Review.
葡萄的功效 And even though an always-on BlackBerry mom may think she’s a master of multitasking, children know better.
Today’s parents might not even realize how their divided attention plays out with kids, says Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initative on Technology and Self7 at the Massachutts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
想多了
“That mother shows up in the surveys as being with the child, but is she actually, if she’s on the BlackBerry in the car?” Turkle says. “A mother putting laundry in while the child sits on the couch is not the same as a mother concentrating on this screen and going into this virtual space. Kids are totally attuned. They know…their parents are in la-la land.”
社区元宵节活动方案
宝宝肠绞痛 The 魂飞魄散的意思‘shared attention’ factor
Turkle has been interviewing kids ages 10 through college-age for a book due next year
and has found that, contrary to popular perceptions, all social class are caught up in technology. Not everyone has smart phones capable of accessing the Internet, but cellphones are ubiquitous and similarity alter attention.
“This is shared attention,” Turkle says .”And for children ,shared attention can feel like no attention at all.”
佝偻
One of the problems with rearch on family time is that much of it is bad on a popular method of data collection for social scientists—time-u diaries completed by parents and collected by various entities, including the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But some rearchers –-even tho who u them—say time-u rearch hasn’t kept pace with the new multitasking lifestyle that has become pervasive in the USA.
“Some of the time diaries are not as good at picking up joint activities—being available but doing something other than strictly child care,” says Julie Brines, associate director of the Center for Rearch on Families at the University of Washington in Seattle， co-author of rearch being prented at the population meeting. ”The problem comes with
our ability to analyze multitasking. It can get very complicated.”
苏联元帅Families know this firsthand.
In Alexandria, Va. , married mother of two Sylvie Venne worries about the attention she gives her daughters. “Honestly, I don’t think I spend enough time with them,” she says. “You try to make it up on weekends.”
After the economy collapd, Venne’s position in human resources got cut from full-time to part-time, so now she works in three different departments at the same company-human resources, accounting and as an administrative assistant—just to get the same hours she had before the recession.
