When polled about what they most want for Mother’s Day, women give a lot of different answers. But (aside from taking a well-deserved nap), two things rise to the top of the list: quality time with family, and time alone.
These two wishes aren’t as contradictory as they first seem. Moms whose children have already flown the nest enjoy the chance to reconnect, and even mothers with school-age children find the prospect of slowing down to spend quality time with their kids appealing.
But so is the prospect of having quality time to themselves—something many women are routinely deprived of, with American mothers clocking in a mere 36 minutes of child-free leisure time per day.
This lack of me-time means moms are also deprived of the benefits of solitude, which include opportunities to recharge, process their emotions, take time for self-care, and tap into their creativity or spirituality. These benefits are not luxuries; they’re essential for our mental health. Without them, we experience stress, resentment, and burnout, often taking our frustration out on those closest to us.
But if solitude is this great, why don’t mothers take more time for themselves?
The Gender Leisure Gap
Cue the “gender leisure gap.” Put simply: women get less free time than men. For moms, it’s even worse.
Findings from the American Time Use Survey show that mothers have less leisure time than any other group surveyed—three hours less per week than their spouses, and a whopping six hours less per week than women without children. (Men without children, not surprisingly, had the most free time). Mothers with children younger than five years of age had the least free time of all—as well as the widest gap in leisure time compared to their spouse.
But why is this so?
One reason is the unequal division of domestic labor. Mothers—both those who work outside the home and those who don’t—spend twice as much time on household tasks and childcare as fathers do. Now, there are plenty of dads out there who pull their weight at home, but they are a rarity, statistically speaking.
There’s another reason for mothers’ lack of leisure time, one that’s more subtle but arguably more powerful: the constant pressure for women to be emotionally available to others.
This finding emerged when researchers asked a novel question. Instead of inquiring about the amount of free time people had, they asked about the quality of that time. Specifically, they focused on leisure time that was used for recovering and relaxing, when people didn’t experience any time pressure and felt able to disconnect from work and family responsibilities.
Why the need for such a specific definition of leisure time? Because, the researchers argued, mothers’ leisure is more often than not tangled up with family time: “Mothers have less child-free leisure and are more likely than fathers to include children in their leisure activities, in essence ‘contaminating’ women’s leisure,” they wrote.
“Contaminated” Leisure Time
Even if they’re not actually interacting with their family during their down time, mothers are often multitasking—spending it on what researchers call the “invisible efforts” of emotional labor, such as keeping in touch with relatives or coordinating the endless stream of holidays, birthdays, playdates, and medical appointments. Thus, their leisure time is more demanding, more fragmented, and less relaxing than fathers’ time.
This contamination of women’s leisure is worse in countries with traditional gender norms. Mothers in countries with more egalitarian norms, such as Norway and Denmark, where women have more political power, generous maternity leave, and subsidized childcare, end up having more quality leisure time than mothers living in the U.S. In short, living in egalitarian countries helps women “feel entitled to use free time to relax and recover” – something that may feel foreign to mothers in America.
Instead, because women have been socialized to be emotionally available to others, they frequently adjust their leisure time to the needs and preferences of their partner or children, which ends up making their down time less enjoyable. To make matters worse, mothers have internalized these gender expectations so strongly that even when they finally do take leisure time away from their children, they report that they feel guilty for doing so.
So, What’s a Mother to Do?
First of all, she can validate for herself that time alone is important to her, and that taking care of her own needs is neither a rejection of her family nor a signal that she’s abandoning her relationships. Instead, it’s a vote for herself. It means she has recognized that to be a fully functioning person, she has to balance her attention to others with attention to herself.
Second, those of us who have mothers in our lives can step up and support them in prioritizing their own time. Likely this includes all of us, because I’m not talking just about our own mothers, but also friends or sisters who are mothers, adult daughters who are currently in the midst of parenting, and especially the single mothers in our orbit, a group frequently left out of the studies referenced above and who probably need the “me-time” most of all.
Maybe this is the year that instead of chocolates or jewelry (or, if you’re like me, the coffee mugs I used to give my mom year after year), we give them the gift of time. Uncontaminated time.
They deserve it.
