Who we're with. Every ATUS respondent (aged 15 and over) recalls one day, activity by activity, and for most activities says who was in the room or came along. This page pools the 145,248 diaries from 2010–2019 and 2021–2024 — 2020 is out because interviewing stopped from March to May, and the years before 2010 are out because nobody was asked who was there during work — and takes the average minutes per day with each kind of companion at each age, weighted by the ATUS final weight (TUFNWGTP). The groups follow Our World in Data: children are the respondent's own children, grandchildren, foster children and other related children under 18; family is parents, siblings and other relatives; friends include roommates; partner is a spouse or unmarried partner. ATUS records everyone 80–84 as 80 and everyone 85 and over as 85; those two points are drawn dashed. Lines are not smoothed. The results match OWID's published figures to within 0.001 hours at every age they publish (15 to 80–84).
Time with a child. For ages 0–17 the minutes come from parents' diaries: each pair of a parent and a child living in their household is one observation, and the minutes are the activities that list that particular child as present. From 18 on, most children have left home and ATUS cannot tell one grown child from other relatives, so the minutes come from the other side: adult respondents' time with a parent, whether the parent lives with them or not. The two views roughly agree where they overlap — at 15–17, a parent's minutes with that child, a teen's minutes with either parent, and a teen's minutes with one particular parent at home run (minutes a day) …. A grown child of 40 averages about 20 min a day with a parent. Your total is these minutes added up from your child's birth to the age you reach your life expectancy in the SSA table (men's, women's, or their average for “Either”); the share is how much of that total falls before your child's current age. The default birth age, 31, is the weighted median age of ATUS parents of a child under one. Every single-year age bin rests on at least 980 diaries (or, for fathers alone, 1,390 parent–child pairs); bins with fewer than 100 would be dropped.
What the count leaves out. Survey time is “present together,” not attention: a parent cooking while a child does homework counts, a video call doesn't, and sleep doesn't. ATUS doesn't ask whether a respondent's parents are alive, so the adult years average in people whose parents have died, which pulls them down; and they count time with either parent, which pushes them up for any one parent. These are national averages across families of every kind, not a forecast for yours. Tim Urban's 93% counted in-person days; counting minutes the survey finds more time in the adult years, so about four-fifths by 18 rather than nine-tenths. This page illustrates survey averages and arithmetic; it is not advice or a prediction about any family.
Data built by scripts/build_data.py.