David Brooks writes about a study that finds a leap in parental time with children.

First, parents are spending more time with their kids today than in
previous generations. Before 1995, mothers spent on average 12 hours a
week with their children. By 2007, that number had leapt to 21.2 for
college-educated moms and 15.9 hours for those with less education.
Paternal time leapt from 4.5 hours to 9.6 hours, among the
college-educated and from 3.7 to 6.8 among the less educated.

Tara Parker-Pope has more information on the latest findings.

So where is the extra time coming from? Women, in particular, are
spending less time cooking and cleaning their homes, while men are
putting in fewer hours at the office. A 2007 report in The Quarterly
Journal of Economics showed that leisure time among men and women
surged four to eight hours a week from 1965 to 2003.

Notably, the data in the Ramey study do not count the hours mothers
and fathers spend “around” their children — at the dinner table, for
example, or in solitary play. Instead, the survey tracks specific
activities in which the parent is directly involved in the child’s care.

“It’s taking them to school, helping with homework, bathing them,
playing catch with them in the back yard,” said a co-author of the
leisure-time paper, Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of
Chicago Booth School of Business. “Those are the activities that have
increased over the last 15 to 20 years.”

Brooks wonders about the correlation between parental attention and educational achievement.

I was fascinated by how parental time correlates to education. Is it
possible that college-educated parents are spending more time passing
down their advantages than other parents? Could it be that the rich
replicate themselves by dint of hard work and parental attention, on
top of all the other less worthy advantages?

Parents are spending more attention to their kids. Women are letting their homes go messy or outsourcing the labor in order to free up nearly 20 hours a week of quality time with their kids. Men still only spend ten hours a week of good time with the kids, but it's still an improvement. They are leaving work early in order to coach the soccer team. There's an improvement across economic classes, but more educated parents are still spending more time with their kids than less educated parents. 

While there will be a few that will scream "helicopter parents" when they read this study and bemoan the lost days of childhood independence, I can't see any downsides to this major sociological shift.