children playing

How do parents share child care?

Printer-friendly versionSend by emailPDF version
In 2022, on average, mothers spent 7.5 hours per day caring for their children, while fathers spent 4.9 hours.
Author: 
Statistics Canada
Format: 
Fact sheet
Publication Date: 
7 Oct 2024

Description

Using data from the 2022 Time Use Survey, this infographic explores how parents in different-gender couples share the unpaid work of caring for their own children. It examines how much time parents spend caring for children, how parents report sharing child care in their households, when equal sharing is more or less common, and how sharing child care is linked to time pressure.

Excerpt

About 55% of parents in different-gender couples reported sharing at least half of child care tasks equally. However, fathers (64%) were more likely than mothers (46%) to report sharing tasks equally.

Parents were most likely to report equally sharing children’s leisure activities.

Both fathers and mothers felt that child care tasks were shared more equally on weekends than on weekdays.

Parents who reported sharing tasks equally were less likely to feel time pressure than parents who did not.

Region: