Census says kids getting more time with parents

Alma Ayala-Ramos is a 26-year-old mother who makes a point of having dinner with her family each night. She follows up that routine by reading to her three children, all under 7.

But that wasn't always the case.

"I wasn't spending time with my oldest daughter like I do now," she said. "I was a young mother. I didn't know how to parent."

After years of reporting that parents were spending less and less time with their children, the U.S. Census Bureau now says more parents, like Ayala-Ramos, appear to be turning around that trend.

"I see the difference in my kids. They talk better and learn more quickly," Ayala-Ramos said.

The 2004 data, released Wednesday, found that more parents also are praising their children. And they're limiting television time, reading more to them and eating more meals with them than they did a decade ago, according to the national survey of 73,000 children.

The census report, titled "A Child's Day," found that 71 percent of families with 6-to 11-year-olds had restrictions on television, compared with 60 percent 10 years earlier.

The report also found that 73 percent of parents had dinner with their children ages 6 to 11 every day during a typical week, a measure that wasn't collected in a previous report.

The findings are significant because child experts almost universally agree that spending quality time with children, especially during the first three years, is critical to developing fundamental skills, such as reading.

"Early literacy is the foundation to a child's basic needs: emotional, social, cognitive and physical," said Yesenia Gonzalez, a program manager at Avance-San Antonio. "Interacting with children, getting quality time in, helps build children's self-esteem. Doing this now will enrich their lives in the future."