Deconstructing Family Time: From Ideology to Lived Experience

“Family time” is often uncritically accepted as a uniform, coherent concept and a universally desirable goal. In order to fully understand the meaning of family time in experience, interviews were conducted with parents in 17 dual‐earner and 11 single‐parent families, and 8 observation episodes were done with 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children in childcare. What emerged was a dramatic discordance between the expectations and experiences of family time. Although families have held on to an expectation of a positive experience of togetherness, they are typically left with a feeling that there is never enough, that it is in the service of children, and that they are duty‐bound by it. There is a structural contradiction between the ideals and experience of family time that is typically expressed through disillusionment and guilt.