How Employed Mothers in Australia Find Time for Both Market Work and Childcare

Abstract

Time use studies find that employed mothers reduce their parental childcare time by much less than an hour for every hour they spend in market work. This chapter uses data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Time Use Survey 1997 (4059 randomly selected households) to investigate how employed mothers manage to avoid a one-for-one trade-off between work and childcare. It compares the time allocation of employed fathers, employed mothers and non-employed mothers and finds that parents use non-parental childcare to reschedule as well as to replace their own childcare, that employed mothers reschedule activities from weekdays to weekends or to earlier or later in the day, and spend less time..