Welfare states contribute to people's well-being in many different ways. Bringing all these contributions under a common metric is tricky. Here we propose doing so through the notion of temporal autonomy: the freedom to spend one's time as one pleases, outside the necessities of everyday life....

We argue that previous research on time devoted to child care has devoted insufficient attention to the definition and conceptualization of care time. Three separate problems are evident. First, the conventional focus on explicit activities with children distracts attention from the larger...