Rarely is motherhood out of the news. Media reporting of The Children's Society's ‘Good Childhood Inquiry’ raised, once again, the issue of working mothers and child development. Soul searching and outrage are dished out in equal servings as women and mothers both defend and critique their position as workers and carers. Lyn Craig's empirically based reflections on contemporary motherhood are, therefore, a welcome and sober addition to an emotive debate. Craig takes time-use data from the Australian Time-Use Survey and the Multinational Time Use Study to dig deep into the question of how parents spend their time. Although the title points to contemporary motherhood, the volume is equally valuable in its analysis of how fathers use their time, providing an insightful comparison of the two.

Craig presents the central unresolved issue in the opening. She points to ‘half a sex revolution’ (p.1) that has shifted women towards the labour market but failed to move men closer to home. This, in itself, is not uncontested, not least within her own empirical discipline. Time-use research has been at the forefront of claims that concepts such as ‘time-crunch’, the ‘dual-burden’ and the ‘second shift’ are spurious when applied to the real world of time allocation. Time-use studies have shown that men and women invest broadly equal amounts of time in productive activity (in the home and in employment). A mother's dual-burden is a perceived state not borne out by objective data.

Craig challenges this finding by exploring time depth. In chapter 4 she uses measures of secondary, or simultaneous, activity to examine the magnitude of time allocation. This approach is attractive in that it retains the advantages of quantitative measurement, whilst acknowledging the qualities or lived experience of time. Craig uses childcare as the key example of activity (whether active or passive) that can take place at the same time as other tasks (e.g. shopping, cleaning, family leisure). Indeed, she points to this characteristic as one of the reasons for the invisibility of care in the public sphere.

Her analysis is revealing. Explorations of primary and secondary activity show that ‘overall gender equivalence in work time is borne out only if solely primary activity is measured’ (p. 68) and that ‘mothers are more likely than fathers to be doing two things at once while with children’ (p. 69). When taken with the finding that married fathers are rarely alone with their children and therefore not substituting female care, the evidence presents a picture that supports the gendered time famine thesis. Craig refutes gender convergence in the home: time use is different between mothers and fathers and surface level rather than ‘deep’ analysis obscures this.

Chapter 5 addresses yet another thorny issue. It has long been a public and private anxiety that non-parental (especially non-maternal) childcare is an inferior form of care. The media use carefully picked extracts from recent research publications to speculate about the damaging effect of nursery or out-of-home childcare. Qualitative research highlights the private fears of parents about the effects of out-of-home care on the wellbeing of their children.

To address these issues, Craig first presents evidence to test the assumption that parents who send their children to out-of-home childcare are substituting care in the home and in particular maternal care. Her data confirm that parents use outside care in exchange for that which mothers would otherwise provide. In contrast, fathers' time spent at work does not predict any increase in non-parental childcare use: substitution, therefore, takes place to replace mothers' time rather than fathers'. There are two important adjuncts to this finding: first, mothers' time spent at work and children's time in out-of-home care is not directly substituted. Non-parental care goes up only half an hour for every hour a week a mother works (p. 82). Secondly, mothers who undertake paid labour and use non-parental care spend substantially similar amounts of time in childcare activities as non-employed mothers (p. 80).

This presents a considerable challenge to public discourse on the topic. Firstly, there is the question of the apparent absence of fathers from the equation of the provision of care in this context; secondly, it is possible mothers are using non-parental care for reasons other than the pursuit of employment; and, finally, maternal care appears to remain relatively undiminished even in the presence of employment responsibilities. Rarely are these issues raised in the false dichotomy of employment vs. motherhood in popular public discussion.

Craig addresses one of the more fascinating components of this story: just how do employed mothers who use non-parental child care in order to work maintain their parental child care time? Her analysis brings to the reader a familiar and uncomfortable image of the over-stretched, harried mum. Data from the time use studies indicate that mothers overlook housework and other domestic work to prioritise care (but catch up at the weekends). Employed mothers also sacrifice sleep, personal care and almost all of their personal leisure time to fulfil a caring role. She uncovers a stark but unsurprising finding that employed mothers with children under five years old have no child-free recreation at all. This contrasts uncomfortably with working fathers' leisure time: men in this category manage to achieve an average of over one hour a day in childfree recreation.

These findings are not startling in their discovery but in their implications, particularly against a backdrop of public debate that mostly highlights concern for children's welfare. As Craig quite rightly points out in her conclusion, the costs of these practices are largely borne by women. She suggests that the personal cost of motherhood is becoming prohibitive and that women have reached the ‘limit of their potential to accommodate the demands of parenthood individually’ (p.137). Personal wellbeing may well be a cost future generations of women may not be willing to pay. Craig suggests that declining maternal wellbeing is a significant enough social externality in itself to warrant attention from politicians and policy makers. It seems this would necessitate a shift in the central focus of this debate from the wellbeing of children to include the wellbeing of mothers. This volume by Craig is therefore a very useful addition to increasing the probability of this shift taking place, however distant that prospect may currently seem.