I would like to talk to young wives and mothers about what I call “side time,” meaning the times in their day when they can pay attention to things other than their mandated work schedule. I would like to talk about how crucial this is to human relations, to raising children, to creativity, to health. About how allowing for it in their lives is not laziness or shirking but a human necessity, and about how much is being lost for lack of it.

But then, I expect they already know what I want to say because they think about it themselves.

It’s frustrating when I read a book that I know my adult daughters would love and maybe need, and they don’t have time to read it. It isn’t just that I want to share it with them. It’s that they can’t have the experience of reading it, or anything like it. They’re preoccupied with the necessities that surround their full-time, hard and demanding outside jobs or careers. Their evenings and weekends are spent on the laundry, the grocery shopping, the maintenance of house, car, everyone’s health, the errands and appointments. They have little or no energy left for reading, thinking, conversation, or family life, let alone for projects of their own. Week after week, month after month, year after year.

This is not a life that suits them. It’s survival mode. They need more.

I , being old, of course can remember when it was one person’s job in a family to take care of the family’s home life. That person wasn’t expected to earn money too. In addition to the chores mentioned above, she had time to listen, help with problems, make family occasions special and family crises manageable, join with schools and the community to enrich life for everybody’s children, and even to have creative projects of her own. In short, she made a home.

Many of us felt constrained by that arrangement, maybe even demeaned. Long before today’s generation of young women came of age, women advanced into the working world with careers of their own, and there were corresponding changes in the family dynamic. Then technology revolutionized work, the economy, and social norms in unforeseen ways. Nothing and nobody ever took the place of that stay-at-home mother.

Of all the many factors that have changed our way of life so much in the space of a couple of generations, it seems to me that the cruelest effect has been robbing women, and families, of free time. So much more expectation is piled on every able adult in the job world that leisure isn’t even in the equation any more.

I don’t see any lack in my loved ones; they are doing magnificently. I just see the lack in their lives of a dimension families used to be entitled to, that everybody needs and that I think they would love to have. I just hope they will always accept every possible opportunity for a measure of freedom and leisure, as a priority and without apology.

I wish them, and everyone, more side time in their lives.