We All Spend More Time With Our Kids Except in France

Here’s an interesting chart presented recently by the Economist:

There are two overall trends here: (1) over the past few decades, mothers are spending more and more time with their children, and (2) in most countries, mothers now spend about two hours a day with their kids.

But if this data is accurate, there are two huge outliers, one in each direction. In France, childcare time has been declining and is now down to about an hour per day. In Denmark it’s skyrocketed, now averaging about four hours per day. And that’s not all: it’s skyrocketed from a 1965 base of about ten minutes per day. This seems rather unlikely, doesn’t it?

There are several countries with large divergences between college-educated and non-college-educated mothers, but the largest divergence appears to be in the United States. College-educated mothers spend about 120 minutes per day with their kids while non-college-educated mothers spend about 90 minutes.

What this shows, generally speaking, is that as mothers have spent less time on other housework thanks to both modern technology and work outside the home, they’ve filled up that extra time with childcare. That’s probably a good tradeoff. I still have a hard time figuring out how Danish mothers can manage to cram in four hours a day, though.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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