Understanding the Time Pressure of Working Parents: How Parents’ Childcare Time Impacts the Diurnal Organization of Activities and the Sense of Feeling Rushed

Time pressure of parents has become an important policy agenda in many contemporary societies. This study aims to examine the association between parental childcare time and subjective time pressure (feeling rushed) by taking into account different types of diurnal activity patterns. From the background of time fragmentation as a structural source of time pressure we introduce two specific types of diurnal time use activities, namely activity resumption and activity switching. As activity resumption denotes that the same kind of activity is repeatedly shown over the day, activity switching indicates the diurnal substantive variety of activities. Our research question is aimed a examining if these activity patterns covariate with parental childcare time use and to what extent they add are connected with subjective time pressure. Analyzing the original timeline raw data of 6,812 diary entries from the 2014 Korean Time Use Study (KTUS) we focused on working parents with children aged 18 or younger. Overall, we found that activity resumption is positively related to subjective time pressure, while activity switching negatively correlates with subjective time pressure. While we did not find a significant effect of time spent for childcare on feeling rushed, we found that time use for childcare is negatively correlated with activity resumption, but positively with activity switching intensity. Having young children compared to having teenagers in the family significantly goes with more feeling rushed, while having young children means less activity switching and less activity resumption. Finally, our results point to a significant parents’ gender differentiation of the covariation of subjective time pressure, diurnal activity change pattern and child care time use.