New statistics reveal the pressure work puts on family life
Penny Marshall writes in The Daily Mail: nly one Christmas present given to me as a child has survived into my adult years. It is a handwritten book full of family recipes. All the shop-bought baubles, bangles and Barbies I clamoured for have long gone. But the Marshall Family Recipe Book, compiled by my mother, remains intact all these years later.
It must have taken her hours to write out each recipe in her delicate longhand. My favourite, in the cakes and biscuits section, is a recipe for Grandma Marshall’s shortcrust pastry. No one could make a mince pie like Grandma, though every Christmas my mother and I tried.
The book cost my mother nothing to compile, except time, which is why it has always meant so much to me. The time she invested in it was proof of how much she loved me.
But as I approach Christmas, with work deadlines to meet, shopping to do and school carol concerts to get to, time for my three teenage daughters is a commodity of which I’m desperately short. And I’m not the only parent struggling.
For though we clearly love our children just as much as ever, we are choosing to spend less and less time with them.
‘It’s as if parents will do anything for their children except be with them,’ one headteacher told me. ‘Children are often starved of parental time but materially pampered. It’s a form of neglect.’
According to the Office of National Statistics, a typical working mother spends as little as 19 minutes a day with her children; working fathers even less.
Only one Christmas present given to me as a child has survived into my adult years. It is a handwritten book full of family recipes. All the shop-bought baubles, bangles and Barbies I clamoured for have long gone. But the Marshall Family Recipe Book, compiled by my mother, remains intact all these years later.
It must have taken her hours to write out each recipe in her delicate longhand. My favourite, in the cakes and biscuits section, is a recipe for Grandma Marshall’s shortcrust pastry. No one could make a mince pie like Grandma, though every Christmas my mother and I tried.
The book cost my mother nothing to compile, except time, which is why it has always meant so much to me. The time she invested in it was proof of how much she loved me.
But as I approach Christmas, with work deadlines to meet, shopping to do and school carol concerts to get to, time for my three teenage daughters is a commodity of which I’m desperately short. And I’m not the only parent struggling.
For though we clearly love our children just as much as ever, we are choosing to spend less and less time with them.
‘It’s as if parents will do anything for their children except be with them,’ one headteacher told me. ‘Children are often starved of parental time but materially pampered. It’s a form of neglect.’
According to the Office of National Statistics, a typical working mother spends as little as 19 minutes a day with her children; working fathers even less.Time-neglect is what child psychologists call it, and they are studying its effect in middle-class families with increasing concern.
‘We are seeing some of the most privileged and yet in some ways the most neglected children in history,’ says child psychologist Dr Richard House, from the University of Roehampton.
We have some of the longest working hours in Europe and the recession is piling pressure on parents to be the last to leave the office. The guilt parents feel about this has consequences for when they are with their children.
‘Parents are reluctant to say “No” when they need to. They try to compensate by lavishing gifts on them. Neither is good for children’s well-being and healthy development,’ says Dr House.