Single mums are the most time poor: study

Single mums have on average up to 27 hours a week less free time than a person in a dual income household without children according to new research from The Australian National University. The study, led by Professor Bob Goodin from the University's Research School of Social Sciences, measured how much time people strictly need to spend on various activities of daily life, distinguishing between acts of choice and necessity. With his colleagues James Rice, Antti Parpo and Lina Eriksson, Professor Goodin has developed the concept of 'discretionary time'. The concept specifies how much time people strictly need to spend in each of those sorts of activities. What's left over is called 'discretionary time'. ?When the calculations are performed according to this time measurement, single mothers in Australia had around 60 hours of 'discretionary time' per week, in contrast to 87 hours for women with a duel income and no kids,? said Professor Goodin. 'In other words, single mothers are 27 hours a week worse off, in terms of control over their time, than people with two incomes and no children.' Professor Goodin added that the different findings from previous studies highlighted problems in the way that information about people's spare time was assessed.