Social Issues : U.S. Dads Lag in Child-Care Duties, Global Study Finds : But American moms are with kids more than other mothers.

American women are retreating from the care of their children, leaving them with nannies or child-care centers, while men are showing a new commitment to family by sharing more child-care duties with mothers. That’s the conventional wisdom in a society where the ranks of working women are growing and men are more attuned than ever to being fathers.

Except it’s not true, according to a new study on the care of 4-year-olds during the workweek in the United States and elsewhere.

American women, in fact, average 10.7 hours each weekday caring for preschoolers. That is more than women in any of 10 countries surveyed in a recent study.

When it comes to the daily round of feeding, playing with and keeping an eye on those 4-year-olds, fathers here and elsewhere take charge without the mothers’ help less than an hour a day on average. In the United States, the daily average is about 45 minutes.

“We found fathers internationally felt they were doing much better than they are,” said David P. Weikart, coordinator of the study and president of the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Mich.

The study also included Belgium, China, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Portugal, Spain and Thailand. Men around the world spent more time sharing supervision with mothers than they spent caring for children alone, the study found. But American fathers lagged behind men in several other countries in sharing child-watching duties, averaging an hour a day, compared with three hours in Belgium and Thailand and two hours in Spain.

The study, the first of its kind, was based on surveys of parents of 4-year-olds, including 428 families in the United States. It is part of a project by the International Assn. for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement to determine how children’s development is affected by their preschool experiences.

The study found that about half the American mothers of preschoolers work outside the home, about the same level recorded in a 1987 study. A relatively high proportion of those working mothers have part-time employment or manage to care for their children while working, said Patricia P. Olmsted, one of the study’s authors.

Although in developing countries, such as Thailand and Nigeria, only about a third of children regularly spend some time being cared for by someone other than a parent, in the United States, 60% of 4-year-olds spend some time each week in preschools or other day-care facilities.

In the United States, six out of 10 of the 4-year-olds in the study spent nearly all day with their mothers and just a few hours a week elsewhere. The rest of the U.S. children were evenly divided into two groups: those who spend the whole day in centers or preschools and those who spend half the day in the care of their mothers and half with someone else.

Overall, the American children in the study averaged 28 hours a week in preschools or day care, compared with more than 30 hours in most of the other countries studied.

A related study on how children spend time when away from their parents found some intriguing differences between the United States and other countries in attitudes about how to care for children.

Although in the United States it is generally illegal to leave young children without adult supervision, the practice is commonly accepted in China. Chinese 4-year-olds average three hours a day unsupervised, mostly in rural areas where it is considered safe to leave them in their homes while parents farm.

Supervision in Chinese preschools is also quite different from that in the United States, where visitors to preschools can expect to see children in various states of distraction.

In China, researchers found children in preschools were highly focused. A videotape of one class shows all eyes on the instructor as 4-year-olds march, wave and stretch in perfect, synchronized lines in their daily exercise routine.

The study underscores a worldwide need for high-quality child care and preschools because of the time children spend there, Weikart said. Even so, more than 90% of parents surveyed in each locale said they were somewhat or very satisfied with the care their children received.

Based on that satisfaction and the high rate of mothers working in all the countries, Weikart said he believes that the number of preschoolers cared for away from home “is not going to reverse.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Who’s Watching the Kids?

When it comes to the daily round of caring for a toddler, dads around the world average less than an hour a day. Average daily waking hours that 4-year-olds spend in parent care:

Mother Father Both parents Other care Belgium 5.2 0.5 3.2 7.1 China 6.8 0.9 -- 8.3 Finland 7.7 0.8 2.1 5.4 Germany 10.0 0.6 1.9 3.5 Hong Kong 7.5 0.1 0.8 7.6 Nigeria 10.0 0.7 1.0 4.3 Portugal 8.2 0.4 1.6 5.8 Spain 7.6 0.3 2.3 5.8 Thailand 8.0 0.2 3.3 4.5 U.S. 10.7 0.7 0.9 3.7

Source: international Assn. for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement