Children's Structured Time in Diverse Family Contexts.

Scholarship on patterns of parental time involvement with children in the U.S. has increased in recent years. However, few studies have as their chief aim an understanding of if parents time involvement with children differently across diverse family forms. The key contribution of this paper is to elaborate extant knowledge by examining the structured time that children spend in a diverse array of two-parent families. Structured time spent by children is used to index the level of institutionalization of parenting in a particular type of union. We limit our investigation to households with two coresidential "romantically" involved adults (e.g., first marriage, remarriage, and cohabitation) because a deepened understanding of the heterogeneity of two-parent households as environments for children is important empirically and conceptually. Through our emphasis on households with two parents, or at least one biological and one potential parental figure, this paper may lead to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between family structure and child well-being. A second contribution of this paper is that we investigate the extent to which the level of institutionalization of parental unions, rather than the qualities that parents bring to the unions, contribute to the variation in children's structured time. Attempting to capture differences in the structure of parenting practices that are attributable to parental unions themselves is quite challenging, and we will be appropriately cautious in our interpretation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]