Aging Well: Time Use Patterns of Older Canadians

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Engagement or disengagement

As older adults move through later life they modify their patterns of time use. They may begin to disengage from some activities, engage more intensely in others, or try new activities. In this section time use patterns of older adults across the later life course are presented to explore three questions. How engaged were Canadians across later life age cohorts? What types of activities did older Canadians engage in and disengage from across the life course? Have these patterns of engagement changed over the past decade? Younger age cohorts are presented in some of the charts as a comparison to the engagement levels of older cohorts.

Hours of paid work decline after age 55

As Canadians move into retirement, the demands on their days change (see charts 1 and 2). The majority of men and women begin to disengage from paid work in their early fifties. Men's hours of paid work decreased after age 55 from an average of 4.4 hours for those aged 55 to 64 to 1.0 hour for those aged 65 to 74.¹ Paid work diminished from a daily average of 2.3 hours for women between 55 and 64 years of age to 0.4 hours for women aged 65 to 74.

Family and household responsibilities consumed a large number of hours each day. On average, men aged 55 to 64 years reported 3.1 hours a day doing unpaid work² and women from the same age group reported 4.8 hours. As time spent on paid work declined for men aged 65 to 74 the amount of time spent on unpaid work increased to 3.9 hours per day while the amount of time women spent on these tasks remained the same. For respondents aged 75 years and older the amount of time spent on unpaid work decreased. The findings on paid and unpaid work indicate that disengagement in some tasks is associated with increased engagement in other activities. Older Canadians disengaged from those activities, like paid work, which society has institutionalized their exit but engaged in other activities, like unpaid work, at the same or more intense levels. This result supports earlier work that found that men and women reallocate some of their time previously spent in paid work into other productive activities (Dosman, Fast, Chapman and Keating 2006).

Notes:

1. These averages of time spent are calculated for the entire population and are averaged over a 7 day week.
   
2. Unpaid work includes household tasks, volunteer work and care and assistance to others.