DIMITRI SOTIS: WTOP news time 7:17. No matter what else changes, we all find a challenge in properly balancing our work and family lives. The folks at the New America Foundation are having a symposium on that next week and we’ll be telling you more about that in a moment.

On the line now is David Gray, Director of the Workforce and Family Program at the New America Foundation.

SOTIS: David, should parents with small kids minimize the time they spend with their kids in child care?

DAVID GRAY: Well, our study finds something very interesting. About 2/3rds of parents feel they are not spending enough time with their kids. And yet when compared to a generation ago, parents are actually spending about as much time as they were in the past with their children. So we began to wonder why parents had this feeling of not spending enough time with their kids. It turns about the quality of time in many cases is falling.

SOTIS: What are parents doing then?

GRAY: Well, there are still only 24 hours in a day. And parents are working harder than a generation ago and yet are spending the same amount of time with their kids. So what gives? What they are cutting out is time as a couple, time on housework and time to oneself. Parents are spending 20% less time on housework than 1977, for example, and 40% less personal time to oneself than a generation ago.

SOTIS: So if I’m hearing you correctly, David, perhaps parents should be spending less time with their kids and having more time to themselves?

GRAY: Well, what we are finding is parents are spending more time working, the same amount of time with kids but they are now multi-tasking. Technology is making it possible for parents to be working while they are technically spending time with their children, but the quality of that time might be reduced. So when you ask the children about their time, surveys show that children report that 45% of the time their interaction with their mother is “rushed or distracted,” 37% of the time the same is true with their father. And when you ask children for their greatest concerns or wishes, they don’t now say “more time with my parents,” but “more uninterrupted time.”

SOTIS: So it seems like a pretty simply adjustment, and I say this not being a parent myself now, just turn off that cell phone, turn off that blackberry, and sit down on the floor and play with your kids.

GRAY: It’s harder than it seems, it’s the encroachment of work on family life that is the blessing and the curse of technology. Technology makes it easier for us to work remotely but it’s also harder to get away because we need the discipline to turn off our phones. And we find in our study that it actually has some negative effects on health.

SOTIS: As a single parent, when I was bringing up my daughter, I found I might be working on my computer in one room and she might be watching television in the other room and we counted that as time together.

GRAY: Exactly, so there is a change in the quality of time. Think about meal times, there has been a tripling in the percentage of time parents go out to eat each week from a generation ago. People are more distracted and rushed when eating out, particularly in eating fast food. And it’s no coincidence we think that this increase in people eating meals out coincides with the explosion of obesity among children.

SOTIS: David, I want to pick up on something you mentioned a moment ago in terms of health, in fact you touched on one effect in terms of obesity, but beyond obesity, what are some of the harmful effects?

GRAY: We find a large increase in parental stress and in the number of worker compensation claims for stress filed by workers. We find large increases in anxiety, and a doubling of substance abuse cases for workers suffering from work and family stress. There are mental and emotional challenges for such parents, who then bring home this stress to their children. The rise in overweight and obese children pushes down the overall well being of American kids by 30% since 1975. The work and family conflict further exacerbates the problem as parents take less time to take kids to the doctor or to breastfeed, things doctors say are important.

SOTIS: David Gray, Director of the Workforce and Family Program at the New America Foundation. Thank you David for your time. And you can attend a forum on this subject on Wednesday, September 19 at noon at the Foundation on Connecticut Avenue in northwest, D.C.

An MP3 audio recording of this interview is available below. For the full broadcast, please visit the WTOP Radio website.

For more information on the Sept. 19 forum where this study will be presented, please click here.