The stress of time
Does time pressure disproportionately affect women's health?
I have been thinking a lot about time.
Time that we balance. Time that we struggle to balance. Time that gets used up when we bounce between the two.
What does constant time pressure do to our bodies?
How much does the impact of the mapped stressors relate to time and time pressure? For example, the layer of time pressure in the context of mental load, child care issues, family caregiving, or workplace conflict. Maybe every stressor has a little bit of time pressure adding weight?
How much does time pressure make stress relief inaccessible? Many of the stress buffers and recommended individual stress management strategies require time. Social support, community, exercise, sleep, mindfulness and meditation. When stress is an inevitable component of life as a modern human, accessing stress relief becomes key, but we still need the time.
How much does time pressure limit our body’s natural ability to recover from acute stress? If rest and recovery is critical, what happens if we simply do not have the time for it and roll right into the next challenge?
How much of the added weight of parenting relates to time pressure and the over-investment of our own time for the sake of others?
How much does time pressure limit the benefits we could experience when we parent and care for others? The elements of joy and connection and meaning-making that comes from caring for our children, and caring for our family or friends can have real health benefits1. But what if we do not have the time to truly embrace the joy and connection or acknowledge the meaning of the work?
How much of the time pressure related to parenting and caregiving disproportionately affects the health of women and mothers?
“There’s never enough time!”
In the Surgeon General Advisory on parenting stress and parental mental health, an entire section (ok, one page) was dedicated to Time Demands. It even had a neat, social share graphic – featuring not one, but two purses and a “mom bag”, a missing sock, some sports equipment, two clocks and some other stuff – alongside a statistic about “high levels of stress” for parents.
As I have already pointed out, the entire SG Advisory manages to skip over one key element — mothers.
Ok, that’s not entirely fair. Moms do pop up in the Time Demands section in the following stats:
On average, mothers increased working hours 28% from 20.9 hours/week to 26.7 hours/week. (Dads too, from 39.8 hours/week to 41.2 hours/week)
For mothers, time spent weekly on child care increased 40%, from 8.4 to 11.8 hours/week (dads increased too from 2.6 hours to 6.6 hours/week)
In that section, the Advisory also made this general statement: “Evidence suggests that demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep, and parental leisure time”
So, as I am wont to do, I dug up the referenced citation that provides such “evidence” and guess what I found?
The mothers.
The reference for that statement was a 2011 review article. After reading the review, I ran a search for the word “leisure” to find exactly what inspired the claims.
Three instances of “leisure” popped up in the copy:
In the Abstract (for all the world to access2):
“Mothers continue to scale back paid work to meet childrearing demands. They also give up leisure time and report that they ‘are always rushed’ and are ‘multitasking most of the time.’”
In the section on What Do Parents Give Up to Devote Time to Work and Family?:
“Working mothers in particular give up leisure time and sleep (compared with mothers not in the labor force) to meet demands of children and jobs.”
In the subsection on Sleep, leisure, the family dinner, and a sense of well-being:
“Employed mothers engage in four fewer hours of social leisure than nonemployed mothers.”
In that same section, they did include the impact on dads. However, it was in the context of their working partners:
“There is a parallel difference among fathers, with those married to employed wives spending about four hours less per week in social pursuits than those married to a mother at home full time”
First, note that the data on mothers compare “working” mothers to “non-working” mothers. This means that the data secondarily cited in that subsection of the Surgeon General Advisory only included households with “working” vs. “non-working” mothers; they did not have a data set on non-working fathers for comparison. This makes the use of this dad data even more infuriating because it appears to come from the perspective of blaming working motherhood for dads not getting “necessary” social leisure time, when, clearly, that working mother is also not getting her social leisure time based on the related mom data point.
Second, to me, the dad data point reads as an observation of how the unpaid labor of women (those “non-working” mothers) opens up FOUR MORE HOURS of social leisure time for the “working” husbands and the father of their children.
If working fathers with non-working wives3 have four more hours of leisure time than working fathers with working wives, would you see the same “extra” four hours for working mothers with non-working husbands? If women’s time was valued the same, you should see a perfect gender flip, right?
As far as I can tell, the data do not exist on that yet4 and I am guessing when it does, it will not show a perfect gender flip. If that turns out to be true, it will be another indication that it is not a “working” vs. “non-working” issue. It is a gender issue.
So, no, it is not correct to say “Evidence suggests that demands from both work and child caregiving have come at the cost of quality time with one’s partner, sleep, and parental leisure time” unless you include the statement “...and this cost disproportionately affects mothers.”
Time is gendered.
As it relates to time use in the home, Kate Mangino, author of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home notes in her chapter dedicated to inequality with kids5:
“After the first baby, even couples who had previously achieved parity fell into traditional gender norms. After the baby came, the women were doing thirty-seven hours of work in the home, and the men were only doing twenty-four hours. (I don’t know about you, but I can think of a lot of things I could do with thirteen extra hours a week.)” –
Thirteen extra hours per week, relating back to traditional gender roles.
How has gender set us up for this trap? Eve Rodsky swoops in with a perfect analogy for gendered time:
“Society views women's time as infinite, like sand, and it views men's time as finite, like diamonds.” – Eve Rodsky
When we view men’s time like diamonds – finite, limited, precious – but view women’s time like sand – infinite, inconsequential, less valuable – we fall into the trap of expecting women to do it all without any support or acknowledgement6.
More importantly, we devalue the work that, on average, tends to fall on women, especially care work. Those four extra hours for leisure that open up for working dads with non-working partners likely reflect four extra hours dedicated to the disproportionate care+housework burden that falls on her. Why is her four additional hours spent for household tasks less valuable than his four extra hours with his buddies?7
This needs to be fixed. Everyone’s time, anyone’s time, is finite, precious, and valuable.
Disproportionate, gendered time demands are not always visible
In her 2014 book, Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Brigid Schulte explains the findings of time researcher, Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, and his studies using the Experience Sampling Method. With this sampling method, participants were pinged at random times of the day to check in on what they were doing, how they were feeling, and what they were thinking. The overall results?
“No matter where they were or what they were doing, the women in his studies were consumed with the exhaustive ‘mental labor’ of keeping in mind at all times all the moving parts of kids, house, work, errands, and family calendar. That, he wrote, only intensifies the feeling of breathless time pressure for women.” – Brigid Schulte in Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
With mental load comes emotional labor. Emotional labor is the most invisible of the invisible. I am starting to think that emotional labor is the more significant source of stress when it comes to mental load:
Can we start to think about our headspace as a precious time commodity as well?
Stress relief requires free time
The Gender Equity Policy Institute recently released a report on the Free Time Gender Gap. One key finding: women have 13% less free time, on average, than men. Women in the 35-44 range had the largest gap with 23% less free time than men in that same age group. On average, these men “had a full hour per day more free time” than women. Importantly, the report also highlights how the time gap is is not just about child care and housework – the youngest age group (18-24) had one of the largest gaps as well with women in this age range clocking 20% less free time than their male counterparts.
This comes right back to stress — the free time gender gap affects our ability to access key stress relieving tools.
Even the Surgeon General pointed out the importance of parents “caring for yourself” and fell right into the trap of recommending individual stress management tools that all require free time: “Remember, caring for yourself is a key part of how you care for your family. Some activities that can help reduce stress include exercise, sleep, a balanced diet, mindfulness, meditation, and recreational activities that bring joy.”
Take exercise, as an example. As Danielle Friedman recently reported on the exercise gender gap, for the New York Times:
“Experts say the greatest barrier to exercise for many women is free time — specifically, social norms informing how women should spend it, and the division of labor at home.” — Danielle Friedman
Again, “the greatest barrier” to exercise is time. The culprit behind that barrier? Social norms relating right back to gender.
Social support is another well-researched stress buffer. Social bonds, support from friends and community, reliable partnerships have all been demonstrated to reduce the impacts of stress. The power of community and social engagement comes up in the same section in the SG advisory: “Seek out or create relationships with parents of children across age groups.”
But anyone who has ever attempted to forge new adult friendships will recognize that creating community and fostering social relationships requires time.
Soaking in the benefits of parenthood and caring for others requires both physical and mental time.
All of this brings me to a discussion I had with author,
. Elissa’s book When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others threw me off when I first read it. Elissa has an entire chapter dedicated to countering the assumption that caregiving = stress.Up to that point, I had only been considering the physical and mental demands of parenting and caregiving as a source of stress. I have cited the research demonstrating the health effects of caregiving stress, especially as it relates to family caregiving and parents caring for children with chronic illness. After all, caregiving is used as a human model for chronic stress, a method to study the negative health consequences of stress on the human body.
But Elissa pointed out a key aspect of this research – when researchers use caregiving as a model for chronic stress, they are starting from the point of chronic stress and then examining the negative health outcomes that result. They are not studying what has led up to that point, they are not considering why caregiving is a stressor. They are not looking for potential benefits of providing care. The directionality isn’t the fault of the researchers – this model system is a good way to closely examine the physiological consequences of chronic stress in humans. Rather, the blame is on the rest of us, for looking at only this research and cementing the narrative that caregiving only equals chronic stress.
As Elissa argues, it is not that caregiving = chronic stress but rather caregiving in our modern, unsupportive societal structure = chronic stress. It is everything surrounding how we navigate caregiving and parenting, not necessarily the act of providing the care. This is an important distinction because there are real benefits to caring for another human being. These benefits may even be stress buffers, in and of themselves8.
But all of this comes back to time and time pressure.
The lack of support structure in the society that doesn’t value care work, requires us to carve out our own time. Other societal stressors that add weight to the stress of caregiving and parenting – financial stability, identity, workplace conflict – often relate back to time pressure.
The positive, potential stress buffering effects of providing care, requires time. I am starting to consider how time pressure limits our ability to access these benefits, especially when the burden disproportionately affects the physical time and mental space for women and mothers.
Solutions
Ok, I don’t have any solid insight here. I’m (clearly) still wrapping my head around how much we can attribute the disproportionate stress load to gendered time.
Overall, though, considering time as an added factor in the way we experience the challenges of parenting and caregiving amplifies the importance of policy that relieves the time pressure – e.g. paid family leave, universal child care and elder care, etc. See:
The impact of gendered time pressure also highlights why we need a significant culture shift. We need to value a woman’s time in the home, in the workplace, and in her own head.
We need to see women’s time as diamonds.
And we need to see free time and leisure time as something mothers deserve and need for their own health, regardless of “working” status.
How does time pressure show up in your life? Do you feel like it differs between you and your partner? Do you feel like time, in whatever capacity, is adding weight to your stress load?
How are you reclaiming your time?
Talking with Elissa Strauss about this one soon! Stay tuned!
The full version of the review is paywalled for those without journal access. But that’s a whole other issue for another time. Let me know if you want a copy ;)
The data cited in the review only included married, opposite sex couples.
The data referenced comes from a study that specifically looked at houses with working mothers vs non-working mothers. It had ZERO data with non-working fathers so the comparison could not even be made. This is not a fault of the researcher (Suzanne Bianchi) but rather the use of this resource as the one example of impacts on leisure time for parents. Also a good reminder that we still have a lot of research to do.
If I did miss some research that shows a gender flip, please send it my way! I have not been able to find it yet.
Yes, I have already used this quote but I love it and it fits well here.
For more on this topic, check out all things
, especially her excellent book Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.If you're tempted to go in the direction of "work is stressful, he deserves his leisure time" and “men are experiencing a loneliness epidemic, give them a break!” please revisit the above note about not seeing this in a gender flip scenario where mom is working and dad is not.
I only have anecdotal stories to back up my hypothesis but I have yet to see a working mom with a non-working spouse take extra time for leisure or friends because "work is stressful". In fact, I have more examples of dad taking more leisure time because "he needs the break" from taking care of home and kids.
Four hours can easily be shared between two people and still allow time to combat a male loneliness epidemic. Just saying.
Elissa and I will discuss this more in an upcoming post and I have already started adapting this revelation into other conversations about caregiving and stress, like this one:
How many mothers weren't able to complete these surveys because it was just one more thing added to their plate?
This is SO good and so validating Molly!! Time poverty is REAL!