Quality time is a patriarchal, capitalist myth.

Radical Mothering No. 27

I don’t know what it is about the idea of quality time that has always bothered me, long before I started to unpick it.

Perhaps it’s because as a stay at home mother to babies and toddlers, it was implied to me more than once that all the days and nights I spent with my child, all the night wakings, the nappy changes, the feeding and bathing and dressing, the meltdowns I sat through, didn’t “count” as quality time.

That was just boring, routine stuff. It could easily be delegated. That wasn’t how connection was built.

What *really* mattered was the “quality” time you spent with your child. The time you spent when you were fully available and present, where your regard and attention were fully on your child. When you actively played the game they wanted you to play, listened attentively, showered them with positive interactions. Those precious 10 or 20 minutes a day - that’s what really mattered.

As if the times I woke up at night and rocked my child back to sleep, or changed them because they spilled juice all over themselves, or patiently shepherded them through a transition - as if those times, and millions more like them, were just frills. Things our children could do with someone else, anyone else - boring things we had to just get through as humans but that added nothing to our relationship and lives.

I’m going to come out and just say it: I fear that quality time is a myth.

I fear that it’s just something we made up to justify not being around our children for hours every day. To feel less guilty or more okay about it.

I fear it’s something we invented to diminish the caretaking work that women, whether paid or unpaid, carry out day in day out. To downgrade that work even more than it already has been.

I fear it’s something we constructed to imply that connection can be built quickly and efficiently, that we can optimize our time with our children, that we don’t have to put in the actual hours as long we have quality time.

I fear it’s something society came up with to justify ushering new parents back into the workplace, to provide shorter (or non-existent) paid maternity or parental leave.

And look - I get it. I’ve worked away from my kids. They used to go to school. I fully understand that parents may need AND want to work away from home, that children need to go some place else while that happens. I am not in any way bashing that.

What I am saying, though, is that quality time is a way we justify spending only an a short while every day with our children. Or only 3 minutes a day (like some dads, according to a study I saw quoted). But make it 3 quality minutes, and you’re good!

Because here’s the thing about quality time: psychologists and parenting experts and all sorts of people can now teach you how to do it. Because you wanna be doing it right - or it’s not quality time, it’s just like, time wasted. Mismanaged, badly spent time.

Because “not all time spent is equal,” cautions another article I read when I googled “quality time.”

Here’s what I think. You build a society where families separate at least 5 days a week, and head to buildings where work of some sort happens, and many don’t see each other again until late afternoon, evening, or sometimes the next day. You create a society that can only function in this particular way, and then you create a way to theoretically redeem the time spent away from each other, by making it “quality.”

So not only have you taken away vast amounts of people’s time, not only have you removed the closeness and relationships that are built by spending hours and days together, with family and friends and community, but you’re also laying claim to how parents and children should be spending the little time they do have together. It needs to be quality time - because otherwise you’re failing.

Can we just say that quality time is a patriarchal, capitalist construct?

Because I truly think it is.

It’s not a coincidence that the phrase originated in the US in the 1970s, at a time when an increasing number of women were having to choose between time at work and time with their families - quality time seemed like a solution to the increasing lack of quantity time. Suddenly women were expected to do it all - work as hard and efficiently as men (harder, really), AND continue keeping house and raising children. Quality time seemed like a way to accomplish both by simply spending less, but more intensely scheduled and focused, time on chores and children.

At the time, or earlier, nobody mentioned quality time for fathers and their children.. because of course that was irrelevant. Men were never expected to do it all.

One definition of what quality time needs to look like is Gary Chapman’s (disclaimer: I have not read his books), and it goes like this: “Giving someone your undivided attention. I don’t mean sitting on the couch watching television. I mean sitting on the couch with the TV off, looking at each other and talking, and giving each other your undivided attention.”

Another definition, which is aimed specifically at parents, claims that the amount of time spent together is irrelevant; it’s what you do in that time that counts. So like, no scrolling on your phone or thinking about what to make for dinner.

I’m sorry, but that’s just not how people should live. Relationships, and trust, and connection are not built by efficiently managing your time and maximizing attention for short bursts of time, they’re built by sticking by someone, day in day out, through the meltdowns and dark moments, the boring bits and the glimmers of joy, the waiting and repeating and trying again. The messing up and making amends. Connection is built through being there, putting in the time. The actual time - hours and days. Getting to really know one another in all our many shades of being.

No amount of quality time will buy you a relationship with your child.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have time when we are present and pay attention - of course we should. It’s what humans who care about other humans DO. We don’t need to learn how to do it. If you see your child as a person, you will give them your attention just like you do with your partner or your friend.

What I am saying is that quality time will not make up for actual time. You can’t quality time your way to connecting with your child. It takes much more than that.

One 2015 study I came across (article linked below) found that actually, what mattered most in children’s outcomes was not quality time, nor large amounts of time. It was (surprise!) family income level and mother’s education. They dismissed both quality time, AND the idea you need to spend vast amounts of time. They found no correlation between amount of time spent, and better ‘outcomes.’ We know from other studies that children of stay at home mothers are not necessarily “better off” than ones of working mothers - so these findings make sense.

But also, the article below focuses, tunnel-vision-like, on ‘outcomes’ - because you’ve got to have evidence to justify wanting to spend longer time with your children!

Perhaps what we should be measuring is not time, but the ways be build connection and trust, the ways we heal as parents, the ways we partner with our children.

Because I’m in it not because I want to mould and shape my child into a better future adult, but because I want to be in relationship with them NOW.

And here’s another point: quality time assumes that we can schedule it in, much like another meeting or appointment. And this assumes that our child will, as if on cue, realize we’re spending quality time together and helpfully oblige. And again - relationships don’t work like that. There is no substitute for just being around, for extended periods of time, so that when my child is willing to be present for me, when they remember something they want to share, when they need a hug, when they have a joke to tell or a game they want to play - I’ll likely be there.

This doesn’t mean we all have to homeschool or stay at home with our children all the time - it is not our fault we live in a system that makes time such a scarce commodity. Being with our children all day is not necessarily the goal. Nor is it always beneficial!

But there’s something to be said about living our life alongside other people, outside of a grind culture mindset, like humans did for millennia and some continue to do - even if we’re doing separate things. There is something to be said about our children watching us work and do chores and follow our interests, and weaving in and out of each other’s lives. I’m not sure we have studies for that, but frankly we don’t need them.

The issues, as always, are not only individual and personal. They are much broader systemic issues - to do with our economy and the way work is set up, the lack of support for parents and the push for mothers to return to work, and the still very pervasive idea that it is a woman’s role to work for pay and do the bulk of the housework and childcare.

Perhaps if fathers had taken on their equal share of the childrearing work, back in the 1970s up to the present (which might have involved taking time off to be around, working shorter hours, and so on) women wouldn’t have had to rely on quality time as a way to compensate for not being around. Perhaps we could have had two working parents AND sustained, regular time with our children on the part of at least one parent at any given time.

But also, perhaps if we weren’t all so beholden to a system that wants us to be busy, productive and working for pay as much as possible, we wouldn’t have to wonder how much time to spend with our children, and what we should be doing in that time.

Relationships are built on more than scheduled, scripted windows of time. The idea that we can maximize our connection time and reduce it to intense, short chunks of time is the way capitalist society ropes us in and holds us captive. Don’t let it.

References:

Washington Post article about 2015 study (The title is misleading because the study didn’t measure “quality” time, just time spent doing pretty much anything.)