Where Does Your Day Go? The Hidden Time Cost of Motherhood

School pickup. Doctor’s appointments. After-school activities. Waiting for everyone else. You’ve been busy all day—so why does it feel like you haven’t had a moment for yourself?
In this episode of MissPerceived, Professor Leah Ruppanner explores the overlooked time spent waiting, driving, and organizing—and why mothers so often absorb it at the expense of paid work, rest, and their own priorities. Drawing on her experience navigating cancer care, Leah asks a bigger question: Whose time do we treat as valuable, and whose time do we expect to be endlessly available?
Leah shares findings from an ongoing research project with Jen Hook using the American Time Use Survey. As families grow, their analysis finds that mothers’ time in paid employment gets squeezed while housework and the logistics of family life expand. Fathers’ daily patterns, by comparison, remain much more similar across families with one, two, or three children.
From medical waiting rooms to the school pickup line, this episode makes visible the hours that keep a family running—and asks what those hours cost the person giving them.
In this episode
• Why waiting isn’t necessarily downtime.
• How transporting, scheduling, and attending children’s activities can crowd out mothers’ paid work.
• Why more children don’t simply mean more time playing or reading together.
• How money and access to resources shape who can avoid waiting.
• What caregiving for children, aging parents, or yourself reveals about whose time gets valued.
Follow Leah: @prof.leahruppanner
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