Work-in-progress presentations: how do parents manage time?

Last month, two work-in-progress presentations were given by team members of the Sarphati Ethnography project. The researchers gave an insight into their ongoing projects and discussed the first results with colleagues. The team members received a lot of useful and good feedback that they can continue working on.

Temporal practices

On Thursday April 10th, Christian Bröer gave a presentation at the Anthropology department. Christian gave us an insight into the research on temporal practices in Amsterdam families that he is doing in collaboration with Zana Chadud Cosac. The research is mainly focused on the question: how do you do time?

At the moment Christian and Zana are still busy analyzing interviews that were conducted over several years with four different families in the Sarphati Ethnography project. They are curious about how parents deal with time in their everyday lives with young children. Specifically, they look at the daily practices of parents and/or caregivers that deal with, or are focused on, time itself. We call these temporal practices; they are the social practices with which we organize our daily lives to get a grip on time and with which we can navigate through life.

Why is it important to look at time in relation to the health of young children?

Christian discussed two families and showed that in both families there are different daily practices that have to do with time. In one family, time was much more strictly allocated, and parents were busy controlling how time was spent and experienced. In the other family, people were more adaptable to unexpected events and time division was much more often abandoned.

The temporal practices that are present are influenced by how time is felt and experienced on the one hand, and to what extent parents think that time is something that needs to be arranged. The comparison of how these two families deal with time also shows that temporal practices are influenced by factors such as work, education, and the presence of a social safety net such as friends and family. In some cases, this has an effect on how time pressure and stress is experienced in families with young children.