Sammendrag
The purpose of this article is to investigate how children experience their fathers and mothers in full-time working life. The analysis is qualitative and deals with how parents’ participation in a flexible and standardized working time culture has different consequences for the children, consequences in the form of absence and availability. The results show that children’s stories from everyday life can reveal different perspectives on modern childhood. Flexible time cultures can be experienced as limitless and unpredictable, and extensive travelling in these cultures can result in absent fathers missed by the children. Standardized time cultures instil more predictable time practices in the children, i.e. in delimiting clear lines between the work and leisure time of their parents. The children’s stories from their everyday life make visible how poorly the time organisation in schools is adapted to the standardized time cultures in working life. The time organisation in schools seems best fit for children with parents in flexible work time arrangements. A common thread in the children’s stories, however, is that being home alone after school, with parents still at work, gives the child a feeling of freedom in a childhood more and more organised and controlled by adults.