Study shows working parents are spending more time caring for their kids

Hey working parents-ready for some good news? A study detailed in today's New York Times bears the surprising news that contrary to popular belief, working parents are actually spending more time with their kids. A lot more.

After looking at a dozen surveys taken between 1965 and 2007 on how Americans say they use their time, the study concluded "that the amount of child care time spent by parents at all income levels...has risen "dramatically" since the mid-1990s."

Specifics include a huge rise in the hours a week moms spend attending to their children. Estimated at 12 hours a week before 1995, those hours have risen to 21.2 hours a week for college educated women, and 15.9 hours for women with less education.

Dads are spending more than twice the time they used to with their kids, going from an estimated 4.5 hours pre-1995 to 9.6 hours for college educated men and 6.3 hours for men with less education in 2007.

And where are we finding all this time with our crazier-than-ever schedules?

"Women, in particular, are spending less time cooking and cleaning their homes, while men are putting in fewer hours at the office. A 2007 report in The Quarterly Journal of Economics showed that leisure time among men and women surged four to eight hours a week from 1965 to 2003."

Wait a minute, did someone just tell me leisure time has DOUBLED in the last 40 or so years? Oh, wow. I guess in all of my romanticizing of how parents "used to be" I had never considered that they had much less time to relax. Did you?