How children spend time, and whether this may have changed, is routinely the subject of public debates around children's health and well-being. This book has sought to inform these debates by presenting a detailed analysis of change in various aspects of children's time use over four decades between 1975 and 2015, using high quality time use data collected from children directly. Children's daily lives are widely thought to have changed dramatically over the past several decades. Knowledge about change in children's time use is based on extremely limited data, however, with debates struggling to move beyond pointing out in general terms that children are spending either more or less time in whatever activity is of interest. This book set out to deepen understanding of change in children's daily time use, looking at change across a comprehensive range of activities, including time using devices such as smartphones and tablets in recent years. As well as examining children's daily activities, the book foregrounded elements of the social and family context of children's daily activities and studied the influence of parents’ time use on children's time use.

The focus of the book is on children's everyday lives. Childhood scholars have drawn attention to this level of analysis as a way to learn more about how children responsively engage with and construct their social worlds as they learn and grow, with the focus very much on understanding children's lives in the present. Children's time use is clearly a step removed from processes of social construction, but it has the potential to offer insights on changes in the action basis of these processes. A second area of research on children's lives in the present revolves around efforts to measure and track child well-being. The measurement of child well-being partially incorporates children's time use, and this study aims to support these efforts further in drawing out more fully than previously a complete picture of change in a child's day in connection with major domains of child well-being. The analysis uses nationally representative time use data and therefore provides both a snapshot of children as a permanent group in our society and a unique perspective on how children's lives are influenced by social change.