Parents are told to treasure every moment: “It goes by in the blink of an eye!” Yet for many, the early months of parenthood do not feel fast so much as relentless: a blur of feedings, worries and appointments in which time seems to belong to everyone but the parents themselves.
How do we find balance when every minute is already spoken for? This is the question at the heart of my research. Over years of fieldwork in Toronto’s wealthiest and most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, I interviewed more than 200 people and surveyed over 1,000, among them first-time parents. I develop these findings in Timeless, my forthcoming book.
Parenthood eats everyone’s hours, but it takes different bites depending on the size of your bank account. What both rich and poor make clear is that time balance is not a matter of accumulating free hours. After all, no one can hoard more than 24 hours in one day.
Everyone has what I call a “temporal goldilocks zone”, where free time and obligated time is “just right”. New parents, thrown out of the goldilocks zone seemingly overnight, have a great deal to teach us about finding the way back in.
Five lessons are worth passing on:
1. Sync, don’t impose, schedules
New parents quickly discovered that a newborn cannot be scheduled into submission. The ones who fared best stop trying to impose a rigid schedule. As Agnes* put it, her baby “is more in tune with his body than we are”, so she learned to “go with the flow” rather than enforce a predetermined regime.
Agnes is on to something. My research suggests that wellbeing depends less on how many free hours we have than on how well our rhythms align with the people we share our lives with. Control is the professional reflex, but with a newborn, coordination wins. Ask not “how can I get more time?” but “whose rhythms am I out of step with, and how do we realign?”
2. Maintaining your sense of self requires time
Parents across class lines described old identities dissolving into feedings and laundry. The ones who adjusted best deliberately merged their pre-baby selves with parenthood – holding on to friendships with non-parents, nourishing hobbies, keeping a cherished ritual.
As Jonah, a new father, succinctly put it: “If a person or a thing matters to you, you’ll make time.” If time signals appreciation, then your schedule is a ledger of love. A small, regular investment in the person you were before becoming a parent is not selfish. It is what allows you to return to your loved ones with patience and presence.
3. An hour bought is not an hour saved
Thanks to economists, we know time can be bought: through takeaways, nannies and cleaners, for example. Yet even with paid help, many privileged parents in my study remained time poor: outsourced hours were refilled with email and the labour of keeping up appearances. Unless the purchased hours are defended, money spent on help merely subsidises other people’s time.
Less privileged participants, meanwhile, could not afford to buy time to the same extent. Instead, they paid with time for everything, and their health absorbed the overdraft.
Both groups underscore the same imperative: treat time with care. If you manage to “free up” an hour, use it deliberately. Guard your sleep and meals the way you guard your baby’s. Health sacrificed now is a loan taken out against your future time, repaid with interest.
4. Share time to make time
Time, as astute social scientists argue, is a “network good”: its value depends on being able to share it with others. Parenthood tests this.
Deema, home alone with her daughter, said everyone would adore her baby, “but no one is here to help me”. This feeling of isolation despite having visitors can have a profound effect on new parents. You can, however, create time for yourself from shared time: ask trusted visitors to hold the baby while you shower, to bring something needed. People who care about you want to help; sometimes they just need to be told how.
Building community can go hand-in-hand with finding more time. One place where this is evident is in what I call shared “temporal sanctuaries” – parks, community centres, libraries – spaces where the tyranny of clock time recedes. Communal repose is itself a form of repair, restoring the wellbeing that time poverty erodes.
5. Feeling requires time
Emotional life is time consuming. To fully experience the joys, surprises and worries of parenthood, you must identify feelings, let them crest and settle, and weave them into your story. Many people are simply too busy to feel. When every minute is spoken for, emotions are deferred. Time poverty, in this sense, produces a poverty of feeling: a dulling of sorrow and joy alike.
Protect small pockets of unclaimed time – not for productivity, but for feeling – and trust that this will repay you in hours.
This is why, in the end, time is not money but love. Love is both what time is for and where time comes from. The idle hours you share with others and the quiet moments you keep for yourself are not lost time. They are the very substance of it.
*All names have been changed
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