The previous two chapters each addressed questions concerning children's activities, or, to put it in other words, what children do. This chapter marks a departure from these chapters by bringing contextual features of children's daily lives into view. Context here refers to information about the location where activities occur and information about who else is present during the activity. The focus in this chapter is on the context of daily life linked to family, in particular concentrating on the time children spend at home and with parents. The chapter uses data collected from both children and parents to create comparable measures of co-location and time in shared family activities covering a period of four decades between 1975 and 2015, thereby enabling analysis of long-term trends in children's time use connected to family. The analysis in this chapter is restricted, however, to measures of time when children are co-located with their parents at home because of data restrictions in the earliest survey detailed in the next section. Chapter 5 will take up the study of change in children's total time with parents across all locations, and other dimensions of the social context of daily life, using available comparable data in recent years.

This chapter is organised in three major parts looking at separate, though connected, elements of the family context of children's daily lives. The first part sets out an analysis of long-term trends between 1975 and 2015 in the time children are at home, distinguishing between time when parents are also at home and time when they are not at home. In addition to considering total time with parents, the analysis differentiates, in two-parent families, between time when children are with their mothers only, with their fathers only, or with both parents, enabling the analysis of patterns in the gender division of parents’ time with school-age children at home. The second part brings together the analysis of trends in major activities covered in previous chapters with the analysis of trends in time at home with and without parents in this chapter.