‘The playdate is dying’: US parenting ‘lonelier’ than in previous generations, data suggests

Contrary to popular conceptions, American parents aren’t spending significantly more time with their children – but they’re feeling more isolated than their predecessors, a report concludes.

“Far from American parenting becoming more time-demanding, Americans are shedding many time-intensive ties (like friendship), reallocating time towards various kinds of experiential consumption (like pet ownership), and facing the demands of parenting more alone than ever before,” writes Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

Stone examined 20 years’ worth of data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which has tracked US childcare and time spent with children from 2003 to 2023.

His conclusions show a difference in how moms and dads manage childcare, a drastic decrease in time spent with friends, and other increasing demands on parents – such as pet care. 

He also blames online spaces for making parents less likely to seek outside support: “We became a society more divided by ‘parenting style’ than we used to be, and so we can’t ‘parent together.’ … Parenting is becoming lonelier than in the past.” 

Time with moms vs. dads 

In describing the challenges faced by today’s families, Stone draws a distinction between parents’ time “actively watching or interacting with their children” compared to time spent “with kids.” 

“Suppose a parent is making dinner while their child is playing with Legos on the floor,” he notes. “The parent is obviously present with the child; but in another important sense, the parent’s actual activity is ‘cooking.’ Or consider a parent who goes to the grocery store and brings along a child – is that childcare?” 

Confusion over such terminology can explain why the amount of time spent with children hasn’t substantially changed over the years, Stone concludes. 

“Modern time use surveys allow parents to report ‘secondary care activities,’ and even those don’t capture the full extent of child-watching activities.” 

Married and unmarried moms tend to spend at least 5 hours of waking time with their children, which remained relatively stable from 2003 to 2023. 

Meanwhile, married dads reported a slight increase from 4 hours to 4.5 hours a day. The largest increase in time spent with kids came from the “very select sample of unmarried coresidential dads,” from an estimated 2 hours in 2003 to approximately 4 hours in 2023. 

“Mothers are not spending more time with kids than in the past, but dads are, especially unmarried dads who live with children,” Stone explains. “This is overwhelmingly time spent not directly on childcare. … Increasingly, dads are just bringing their kids along for work, or chores, or errands, or social activities, much as many moms have always done.” 

Less time with friends 

Time spent with friends showed perhaps the most marked decline, which fell by 30-50% since the early 2000s. 

While the COVID-19 pandemic skewed the graph downward for all people, the “childless males” and “childless females” groups trended toward more social outings after 2020 compared to the groups of fathers and mothers. 

“For nonparents, time with friends in 2023 was arguably near where you might expect from a pre-COVID trendline,” Stone writes. “But for parents (and especially moms), social time seems not to have recovered as robustly after COVID.” 

Instead of about 1.2 hours a week with a friend alongside her children, the average mom spends less than half that today – about 30 minutes, according to the data. 

“This decline in time with friends may explain why parenting feels so exhausting to so many of us,” Stone notes. “What has happened in America is that the playdate is dying.” 

Since the mid-2010s with the rise of smartphones, social media and mom-influencers, “new cultural norms” may have inadvertently contributed to the demise of playdates. 

Some of these norms include parenting styles such as gentle parenting, free-range parenting, and helicopter parenting – all of which have shown massive growth as search terms in Google Trends. 

Online commentaries regarding these parenting styles allow “the most extreme voices to find and reinforce each other,” according to Stone. 

For example, Hannah Nwoko had been trying to practice gentle parenting until her son reached preschool age. 

“It became apparent that he would struggle in school – and the real world – if I didn’t change my approach to parenting,” she wrote for Business Insider. 

“His tantrums would go on for too long, he would be defiant with everyday tasks, and he would struggle to recognize authority. Even when I followed the gentle parenting scripts laid out by gurus, everything felt like an ongoing tug of war.” 

When she encountered challenges such as getting her son to brush his teeth, she turned online to find answers. 

“Instead of seeing rational responses, I was shocked to find some parents suggesting to avoid brushing teeth to keep children happy while defining it as ‘negotiable,’” she wrote. “This seemed unacceptable to me.” 

As families feel more subject to judgment over their parenting choices, they may choose just to avoid outside interactions altogether, Stone notes. “Even parents who try to stay out of the online battle are impacted, as the friends they would otherwise have coparented with are, now, worried about exposing their child to the wrong sort of parent.” 

Time on pet care doubles

Although time spent with kids hasn’t changed significantly in the past two decades, parents are spending more time in other areas. 

Stone focused on two care duties tracked by the survey – pet activities and care or help for household and non-household adults. 

“As our society ages, it would make sense to find a growing burden of adult care,” he writes. “But this is not what ATUS finds: there’s been no major change in time spent on the care of other adults since 2005 or so.” 

In contrast to adult care, the time spent on pet care has doubled from an average of about half an hour a week in 2003 to more than an hour a week by 2023, the survey found. 

“Americans spend more time caring for their pets than for elders,” Stone dryly concludes. 

All these findings contradict the widespread assumptions of more demanding care duties today than in previous generations: “Far from burdened by innumerable relationships, the rise in the care of pets is very much an exception in a general landscape of decreasing time spent on relationships of all sorts.” 

This is especially important for the American mom, who faces severe challenges in trying to balance parenting demands by herself without the benefit of supporting friends, Stone notes. 

“All Americans are seeing a dramatic diminishing of time spent with friends, with the result that parents are more relationally isolated in the past. … Increasingly, mothers are expected to leave their children behind if they want to have a social life.”