The effects of the family work day on family time

Laurent Lesnard (1, 2)

1 OSC - Observatoire sociologique du changement (Sciences Po, CNRS)
2 CREST - Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique

The rise of dual-earner couples reshapes the relations families used to have with work. The consequences for family time of this dual participation to the labor market have not received a lot of attention yet. The family time is derived from the `with whom' variable of the last two French time-use surveys (1985-86 and 1998-99): the three kinds of family time taken into account (conjugal time, father and mother time, and couple-children time) have considerably increased during the period studied. A classification of the family workdays is built using Matching Analysis. The shape of the family workday is highly correlated with the social position of spouses: the higher the social position of the spouses, the higher their synchronicity. Desynchronized work schedules are most of the time not chosen by couples but arise from the temporal requirements of their employers. In other words, desynchronization is a negative temporal externality affecting unequally dual-earner couples. The lack of synchronicity affects differently the different categories of family time: the more synchronous couples are, the more symmetrical family time is but the less are father and mother times. Consequently, desynchronization can lead to an instantaneous more egalitarian way of parenting.

Mots clés: dual-earner couples; synchronicity; synchronization; family time; parental time; conjugal time; time together; family work day; work schedules; optimal matching; sequence; typology

Domaines: Sociologie

Laurent Lesnard. The effects of the family work day on family time. 2005. ⟨halshs-00008086⟩