Is a mother’s quality time ever done?

Erin Striff sits on the couch with her lap divided between 5-year-old Megan and 22-month-old Ethan. A few feet away, Caitlin points a finger and protests.

“You want to be on my lap too?” Striff asks Caitlin, who is Ethan’s twin. “Come, there’s room; you can be on my lap.”

Sometimes Striff worries that her children fight over the chance to sit on her lap because she isn’t with them enough.

“Maybe I haven’t spent enough time with the little ones,” she says. “Maybe there’s not enough of me to go around ... to provide quality time for everyone.”

Research recently delivered some good news: Mothers today spend more so-called quality time with their children than mothers did 40 years ago. Fathers too spend more time with their children than they used to, but mothers still do more of the primary child care.

According to a University of Maryland study, mothers in 1965 spent 10.2 hours a week in focused time with their children -- feeding them, reading to them, playing games with them. That number declined in the ‘70s and ‘80s, rose in the 1990s, and now, at 14.1 hours per week, is higher than ever.

Even so, about half of mothers who work outside the home -- and 18% of those who don’t -- believe they aren’t spending enough time with their children.

Striff, who lives with her husband, Alex, in West Hartford and is an English professor at the University of Hartford, says she often finds herself thinking about what else she could do to better mother her children. Should she get Megan out of after-school care early today? Is there a class Megan should be taking?

“The cultural message is always about what could you be doing that’s more. It’s how what we’re doing can never be enough,” Striff says. “There’s always another class a child could take, another game they could play ... “

Melissa Milkie, one of the authors of the Maryland study and of the book “Changing Rhythms of American Family Life,” says mothers face “very strong cultural expectations that are impossible to achieve no matter how much you’re doing.”

That ideal of mothering has changed a great deal since the ‘50s and ‘60s, says Steven Mintz, a behavioral-sciences fellow at Stanford University. The notion used to be, he says, that “if you just let a child out to play, they would grow up and mature almost automatically, and you really didn’t need to do much intervention.... I would call it kind of natural upbringing.”

In fact, there was a feeling that intervention could lead to over-mothering, which could create psychological problems, says Mintz, who is also co-chairman of the Council on Contemporary Families.

“We have the opposite idea now,” he says. “It’s intensive cultivation. What this means is that from birth, even before birth, when the child is in the womb -- that at every stage we need to cultivate our child if they are going to be successful.

“That idea makes it much harder to be a mother, especially with the huge demands on someone’s time in the workplace as well as in the home.”

Why this shift? Mintz says it’s because we live in a more competitive society and that “there is a great worry that my kid will get left behind unless I do something special.... With housing costs rising out of hand, there is a real fear that kids won’t be able to repeat their parents’ class status. All of this has made parenting much more anxious.”

The anxiety causes mothers to second-guess and rethink, constantly trying to adjust their schedules to best accommodate their children.

It’s why Megan Perez of Cheshire, Conn., has worked full time, part time and stayed home at various times, trying to balance motherhood with the need to make money.

Sometimes the demands lead to collisions. In March, she felt guilty leaving her child with a baby-sitter on a snow day. So the next snow day, she rushed through an assignment so she could spend the afternoon building a snowman with her daughter.

The result was that she had fun with her daughter, but she made mistakes on the assignment.

“I felt terrible for having fouled it up,” Perez says. “I feel as though I’m not doing either job well, but I am not in a position not to work.”

Jennifer Rancourt of Enfield, Conn., worked full time when her youngest was small because she had to. “You know, I felt like I [cheated] the first kid. He was always in day care or with my mother.”

So when she had two more children -- and financial flexibility -- she went part time. Still, she feels guilty whenever she takes time for herself.

“I don’t ever leave my office to go to lunch or anything because I feel so guilty,” she says.

Once recently, she did take time for lunch with her husband.

“I felt so guilty enjoying leisure time,” she says, and she hated seeing “those rich mothers eating lunch, strolling their kids.”

Even mothers who stay home are not immune to guilt.

Jeannie Newman of Middletown, Conn., doesn’t worry about the number of hours she spends with her 3-year-old son, Gus. But she does fret about whether she is doing all she can for him.

She has friends who are also stay-at-home moms who fill their toddlers’ lives with music, dance and yoga classes.

“I feel pressure sometimes to fill up the day with activities.... I think if I’m home with him, then I really better make it count, like a one-person day care.”

Milkie says it may seem counterintuitive that mothers who are more likely to work outside the home today are spending more time with their children than mothers in the past.

She thinks several factors are involved. Birth control and less pressure to have children often make parenthood a real choice. In addition, the average parent is more highly educated, and such parents on average spend more time “reading, playing and investing” in their children, developing that more “intensive” parenting style.

Mothers try to maximize time with children by working less when they are small.

Mothers also may have more time for their kids because they have cut back on housework, which the study showed was down about 40% over 35 years. They also tend to multitask more, taking the children along in their free time and on business trips and spending less time alone with spouses.

The research involved studying thousands of parents’ detailed diaries, with time divided into three distinct categories: time spent focused on a child; time spent with a child while attending to another task, such as shopping; and time spent with a child nearby, in the same or the next room, but not interacting with the child.

Each of the categories shows increases in time spent with children, except in the case of single mothers. The number of hours spent with a child nearby has increased for married mothers from 47 hours in 1975 to 51 in 2000. For single mothers, it has declined from 50 hours a week to 44.

The research also showed that fathers’ quality, focused time with children more than doubled, from three hours a week in 1965 to seven hours a week in 2000.

Jill Bourque of Bristol, Conn., e-mails that she feels “racked with guilt” about not spending more time with her 9-year-old daughter.

“I’d like to be the one to get her off the bus and put her on the bus, but I can’t. I’m the primary provider,” she says. “I would like to be Betty Crocker, but I’d also like to have a career.”

Striff says she tries to manage any anxiety she may have about whether she is doing the best she can for her children by thinking about balance.

“I always come to the same conclusion,” she says. “There is only so much you can do ... there is the idea of ‘good enough’ parenting. You’ll never be the perfect parent, but you want to do more than make sure everyone has a pulse at the end of the day.”