The rise of dual-earner couples together with the emergence of more time-demanding jobs (e.g., non-standard working hours) in recent decades are among the factors that have contributed to the time squeeze reported by individuals and by families. Nevertheless, existing studies have shown that in industrialised countries, parents are devoting more time to caring for their children today than they did several decades ago (Gauthier et al. 2004; García-Mainar et al. 2011; Faircloth 2014). The upward trend in the time spent on childcare has been accompanied by a cultural shift towards more time-intensive and child-centred parenting (Hays 1996; Craig et al. 2014). Busier parents have adapted to “the changing rhythms of family life” by becoming increasingly likely to engage in multitasking to ensure they are spending adequate amounts of time with their children (Bianchi et al. 2006). Prior research has suggested that multitasking is a source of gender inequality, as mothers are more likely than fathers to multitask by doing housework and childcare simultaneously. Thus, it appears that this trend has further widened the gender gap in time use patterns. Moreover, for mothers, multitasking at home is more likely to be associated with negative emotional experiences and work-family conflicts (Offer and Schneider 2011). The rise of the intensive parenting culture has contributed to mothers feeling increased pressure to spend time with their children, given their traditional role as the primary caregiver. The significant changes in the context and the meaning of parenting that have taken place in recent decades have led scholars to pay increasing attention to the well-being of parents. A number of studies have shown that parents have lower general levels of subjective well-being than childless people (e.g., Aassve et al. 2012). Nelson and colleagues (2014) have suggested that there is a highly complex relationship between parenthood and well-being. Specifically, they have argued that parents are more likely than non-parents to report negative experiences (e.g., financial problems, sleep disturbances, troubled marriages), but that parents also experience more positive emotions, such as happiness and the feeling that their life has greater meaning. Drawing on data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), Negraia and Augustine(2020) compared the well-being of parents and non-parents in a large set of time use activities, and found support for the claim that parental experiences are a “mixed bag”.¹ Fewer studies have analysed the relationship between spending time on childcare and well-being among parents. Connelly and Kimmel (2015) provided evidence that both American mothers and fathers enjoy the time they spend on childcare. Their findings also indicated that fathers enjoy their parenting time more than mothers, with the latter reporting higher levels of stress and tiredness. Similarly, Musick and colleagues (2016), using ATUS data, found that while parents consistently report greater subjective well-being when engaged in activities with their children than without, mothers report feeling less happiness and more stress and fatigue than fathers when spending time with their children. According to McDonnell and colleagues (2019), who used ATUS data to examine mothers’ and fathers’ momentary affect during childcare activities, such imbalances are partly explained by the gendered nature of parenting; i.e., by the considerable differences in the amounts of time as well as in the characteristics of the time mothers and fathers spend with their children.

To date, most studies on parents’ well-being when spending time on childcare have focused on the US (e.g., Offer 2014; Connelly and Kimmel 2015; Musick et al. 2016; Meier et al. 2018), while European research on this topic has been rarer, partly due to data availability.² This article investigates the subjective experience of time spent on childcare among Italian fathers and mothers. Our focus is on two aspects of parenting that have been shown to be considerably gendered: the type of childcare activity performed and the simultaneous performance of childcare and housework (i.e., multitasking). We also take into consideration other dimensions of the “care context” (McDonnell et al. 2019) by controlling our results for a number of relevant characteristics of childcare that have been found to differ considerably between mothers and fathers, such as the presence of other adults, the amount of time spent on childcare during the day, the duration of the activity and the time of day when the activity is performed. We aim to answer the following research questions: Do momentary assessments of well-being vary according to the type of childcare activity being performed by mothers and fathers? Does performing childcare and housework tasks simultaneously affect parents’ subjective experience of the time they spend with their children? Do men and women differ in their multitasking behaviours? Drawing on prior research that showed that performing multiple unpaid tasks at the same time is associated with a feeling of being under time pressure (Craig and Brown 2017), and that multitasking at home is related to negative emotions and psychological distress for mothers only (Offer and Schneider 2011), we expect to find that multitasking when performing childcare negatively affects the subjective well-being of mothers, but not of fathers. Furthermore, we assume that the negative effect of multitasking will be more evident when parents are engaged in physical care and supervising activities for two reasons. First, as such activities have been conceptualised as forms of routine unpaid care work given their repetitive nature and the relatively low degree of interaction involved (e.g., Craig 2006; Craig and Powell 2011), they are likely to be less enjoyable for parents than engaging in other activities with their children, such as recreational activities. Second, there is ample evidence of a gendered division of childcare tasks, with women taking on the largest share of the routine work burden (e.g., Fuligni and Brooks-Gunn 2004; Craig and Mullan 2011). Therefore, we assume that combining routine care work with other unpaid routine tasks is likely to result in a less enjoyable experience for mothers.

Our study contributes to the literature in the field by evaluating how multitasking affects mothers’ and fathers’ experiences of the time they spent on childcare, while distinguishing between routine and recreational activities. To this end, the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical background of the paper, with a focus on the relationship between multitasking and well-being. Section 3 describes the data and methods used, while Section 4 presents the results. More specifically, Section 4.1 reports the descriptive findings for detailed childcare activities (i.e., routine care, recreational care, educational care and travel-related care) in order to provide an initial broad picture of the differences between mothers and fathers in the amounts and the nature of the time they spent with their children. Then, Section 4.2 presents the model results on the relationship between multitasking and the subjective well-being of mothers and fathers. Due to the small sample size of multitasking episodes recorded by parents while performing educational and travel-related childcare tasks, only the results for routine and recreational activities (in addition to the results related to the overall childcare episodes) are presented. Section 4.3 provides a brief discussion of the sensitive analyses we performed to check the robustness of the models’ results. Finally, Section 5 concludes.

In recent decades, the rhythm of family life in industrialised countries has changed, as women’s labour market participation has risen significantly, and double-earner households have become increasingly common (Bianchi et al. 2006). The observation that the new role of women in the labour market would inevitably reduce the amount of time they had available to devote to unpaid family work led to concerns being raised that these changes were occurring at the expense of children, with mothers taking time away from their childcare duties to meet their job responsibilities. However, scholars have since demystified the bad working mother myth by providing evidence that contemporary employed mothers are devoting at least as much time to their children as the “Golden Age” housewives (Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Liss et al. 2013). Moreover, even as mothers have continued to spend a significant portion of their time caring for their children, the amount of time fathers are spending with their children has been increasing since the 1960s in the US (Bianchi 2000; Wang and Bianchi 2009; Hofferth and Lee 2015) and in Europe (Goldscheider et al. 2014). In their comparative study of 16 industrialised countries, Gauthier and colleagues (2004) showed that the upward trend in the time parents are spending on childcare can be mostly explained by their increasing time investments in activities involving a high degree of interaction with their children, such as playing. Higher parental time investments have also been shown to have positive effects on the cognitive development of children (Del Boca et al. 2014), and, ultimately, on the production of human capital in many industrialised countries (Vargha and Donehower 2019). However, this upward trend in the amount of time parents are devoting to childcare is likely to result in increasing pressures on parents. The contemporary growth of dual-earner couples has contributed to increases in parents’ workloads, and, thus, to time squeezes for individuals and families (Buddelmeyer et al. 2018). Time-use studies conducted in different European countries have shown that dual-earner couples with young children are especially likely to be rushed (e.g., Zannella et al. 2019). While the amount of time men spend on childcare has been increasing, the gender gap in unpaid care work persists in many highly industrialised countries (Altintas and Sullivan 2016). These findings suggest that many women today work a second shift at home in addition to the paid job they perform in the formal sector (Hochschild 1989; Bianchi and Milkie 2010; Neilson and Stanfors 2014). As Mattingly and Sayer (2006: 1) noted: “persistent inequality in gendered time-use patterns is paralleled by gendered experiences of time pressure”. In other words, compared to men, women not only experience more time scarcity, they are also more likely to report feelings of time pressure and other forms of psychological distress (Nelson et al. 2014).

The study builds on data from the Italian Time Use Survey (ITUS) for the year 2013/4 to evaluate fathers’ and mothers’ subjective well-being during the time they spent caring for their children. ITUS includes three data files: the individual file, the daily diary and the weekly diary. The daily diary consisted of time data collected through the diary technique: the respondents recorded their time use during the previous 24 hours in their own words. The time diaries were randomly distributed across the days of the week to all household members aged three years and older. The respondents were asked to fill in the daily diary every 10 minutes by reporting the following information: a description of the main activity that was being carried out, the possible presence of a parallel secondary activity, the location where the activity was being performed, the level of enjoyment the respondent was experiencing, and whether the respondent was alone or with other people (e.g., partner, own children, other family members, friends). The individual file includes information about the socio-demographic characteristics of the individual respondent, the characteristics of the household, background information and information on the well-being of the respondent in different life domains. Our target population consisted of 6,582 individuals aged 25 to 54 years who were parents of dependent children aged up to 14 years.³ We relied on information from the episode enjoyment scores used by the respondents to evaluate the degree of (un)pleasantness associated with the different activities recorded in the daily diary to analyse the well-being of mothers and fathers when they were spending time on childcare. The scores ranged from -3 (very unpleasant) to 3 (very pleasant), and re'ected answers to the following question: How pleasant was the moment? As Kahneman and Krueger (2006, p. 18) have observed: “[…] one could legitimately question whether one should give a cardinal interpretation to the numeric values attached to individuals’ responses about their life satisfaction or emotional states […]”. For this reason, we decided to build a dichotomous indicator of momentary well-being (MW) based on the actual distribution of the enjoyment scores. For each childcare episode analysed, the MW indicator was assigned a value of one if its enjoyment score was in the lowest 25th percentile of the scores recorded by the respondents for the corresponding activity; and of zero otherwise.^4,5 The sample distribution of the enjoyment scores by the type of childcare activity performed is shown in Table A.1 in the appendix. The 25th percentile on which our indicator is based is equal to one (i.e., “somewhat pleasant”) for all the activities considered.⁶ Thus, our indicator distinguished between fully pleasant (i.e., very pleasant and pleasant) and more nuanced experiences, including childcare episodes rated as fairly pleasant, neutral or unpleasant.

Our main aim is to assess the subjective well-being of the parents when they were spending time on childcare. We are particularly interested in understanding whether and, if so, to what extent mothers’ and fathers’ enjoyment of childcare time varied depending on the type of childcare activity they were performing, and on whether they were doing housework as a parallel activity (i.e., multitasking). For this purpose, we use logistic regression to analyse the parents’ probability of experiencing a childcare episode that was not (fully) pleasant (MW indicator=1). We run separate models for the subsamples of men and women for each of the following activities considered: performing overall childcare, providing routine care and providing recreational care (resulting in six models in total). Our main explicative variable is multitasking. As we explained in Section 2, our definition of multitasking includes all possible combinations of childcare tasks with housework, regardless of whether childcare was recorded by the respondent as a primary or as a secondary activity. The control variables include the following: individual characteristics (age, education, employment status, life satisfaction, single parent/living in a couple), household characteristics (number of children, age of the youngest child, the number of daily hours spent on childcare), characteristics of the episode (i.e., the episode’s starting hour, the presence of at least one other adult, the duration of the episode) as well as characteristics of the diary entry (day of the week, survey quarter). In order to check the robustness of our results, we replicated the analysis by using the episode enjoyment scores as a dependent variable in a linear regression model (Section 3).

In this article, we used data from the latest time use survey available for Italy (year 2013/4) to study Italian mothers’ and fathers’ enjoyment of the time they spent on childcare. To do so, we took advantage of novel information included in the latest version of ITUS: the enjoyment scores used by the respondents to evaluate the degree of (un)pleasantness associated with episodes of the different activities recorded in a daily diary. Unlike the ATUS and other time use surveys, in which respondents were asked to report on five emotions (i.e., meaning, happiness, sadness, tiredness, stress and pain) for a number of sampled activities, the ITUS respondents were asked to rate their general level of enjoyment for each time use episode experienced during the day. This approach has both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, it does not permit to distinguish between the different emotions that determine the respondents’ levels of momentary well-being. For instance, existing studies have shown that although mothers and fathers report similarly high levels of happiness and meaning when caring for their children, mothers report higher levels of tiredness and stress when engaged in almost every childcare activity (e.g., Musick et al. 2016). On the other hand, this approach allows for a more in-depth analysis of the link between well-being and the use of time for detailed activities.

Our main goal was to assess the relationship between multitasking and parental well-being. To this end, we created a marker of multitasking to indicate whether childcare was performed as a single task or in combination with other unpaid work activities. Thus, we tested the association between multitasking and parents’ momentary assessments of well-being across different types of childcare activities, with a gender perspective. Our results provide further support for the findings of prior research showing that both mothers and fathers positively assess the time they spend on childcare, but that mothers are more likely than fathers to report having less pleasant moments (e.g., Connelly and Kimmel 2015). In line with previous studies (e.g., Sayer 2007b; Offer and Schneider 2011), we found that mothers were more likely than fathers to report that they were performing childcare and housework simultaneously. Thus, by engaging in multitasking, women were doing more work than men, and the gender gap in unpaid work increased (Craig 2007). Our model results demonstrated that there was a negative relationship between multitasking and momentary well-being for both mothers and fathers, regardless of the kind of activity they were performing (whether it was routine or recreational childcare). This finding adds insights to prior research on parental well-being by providing new evidence that multitasking is an important contextual characteristic of care that affects the subjective well-being of fathers, as well as of mothers. Indeed contemporary parents who are time squeezed are likely to feel compelled to spend as much time as possible with their children, even if this means “compressing” time by performing multiple tasks simultaneously (Craig and Brown 2016). Parenthood entails greater unpaid work requirements, not only in terms of the time needed for childcare, but for domestic work as well (Craig and Bittman 2008). From this perspective, multitasking at home may been seen as one of the strategies parents adopt to cope with this time pressure.