Beyond Clock Time: Social Class, Gender, and Everyday Unpredictability

Renske Keizer , Erasmus University Rotterdam
Shelby Sissing, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Petra Olsthoorn, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Maaike Hornstra, Erasmus University Rotterdam

How much unpredictability do parents face in daily life, and does this vary by social class and gender? While families are central to intergenerational inequality, research lacks consensus on the mechanisms linking class, parenting, and child outcomes. Time has increasingly been investigated as such a mechanism but is typically reduced to “clock time” (minutes or hours spent with children). This overlooks differences in how parents use, control, and negotiate time. We argue that focusing on exposure to everyday unpredictability as a form of temporal inequality provides new insight into how social class shapes parenting and child development. Our study examines how often parents encounter daily disruptions—such as illness, sudden work demands, or caregiving needs—and how these disruptions are perceived across and within families. We hypothesize that higher-class parents, with greater autonomy and work flexibility, experience fewer unexpected events and report them as less stressful and more manageable than lower-class parents. Building on pandemic-era evidence that men and women perceive and cope with unpredictability differently, we also explore gendered patterns. We draw on 100-day daily-diary multi-actor data from 128 Dutch families (256 mothers and fathers), collected between March and June 2025. 22819 daily diaries were filled in. Parents reported on unexpected events, time pressure, coping strategies, emotions, and family interactions. Embedded in a longitudinal survey and complemented with interview data, this design provides rich contextual information while capturing the temporal dynamics of inequality. Our findings highlight how social class and gender shape the lived experience of unpredictability in everyday life.

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 Presented in Session 57. Flash Session Assortive Mating, Education and Social Class