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Not long ago, a 40-year-old office worker surnamed Lee had an awkward situation at a company sporting event he attended with his family. His second child, who was 10 months old at the time, wouldn’t stop crying at the sight of his face.
“I stay late at the office three or four days a week and don’t come home until after 10 at night. I think my child gets to see me so rarely that I look like a stranger,” Lee said. “It must be two months since I’ve had a chance to read a book to my oldest child, who is six years old.”
Children in South Korea spend an average of six minutes a day with their father, the least of any country in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), a recent study shows. When asked if there was a friend or relative they could turn to when they were having a hard time, the number of South Koreans who said no was the highest in the OECD. Experts say that these trends should be seen as resulting from the long working hours that are customary in the country.
How’s Life 2015, a report that was recently published by the OECD, found that South Korean children only spend 48 minutes with their parents each day. Not only was this much lower than the average of 151 minutes in the 20 OECD member countries, but it was also the lowest of any of the countries surveyed.
The OECD report noted that Australian children spend more than four hours with their parents, while South Korean children spend less than an hour with them. According to the report, the time that children spend with their parents, and especially the way they spend that time, are key factors in their physical and emotional development.
South Korean fathers spend only three minutes reading books to their children, helping them with their homework, and playing with them, and three minutes taking care of their physical needs.
This is very different from the OECD average of 47 minutes. The time that fathers spend with their children is 72 minutes in Australia, 76 minutes in the US, and 19 minutes in Japan.
South Korea was also the lowest of the total 34 countries in the OECD in the category of perceived support from their social network. This was what analysts found when they combined responses to the question “when you are in trouble, do you have a friend or relative that you can count on?” which the polling organization Gallup asked about a thousand people in each country.
In South Korea, only 72.37% responded that they had someone like that in their life, far below the OECD average of 88.02%. The 72.37% figure, which was from a 2014 survey, was 7 percentage points lower than when the same question was asked in 2009.
Among people in their 50s and above, only 60.91% said that they had a friend or relative that they could rely on. The only countries that fell in the 60 percentage range for this age group were South Korea and Turkey (67.58%). In other countries, this percentage tended to range between 80 and 90%.
“Since people are so busy with their lives, they don’t take care of the people around them, which leads them to assume that other people won’t take care of them either. This also appears to reflect the unique conditions in South Korean society, which has longer working hours than other countries,” said Chung Hae-sik, assistant researcher for the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.
South Koreans spend an average of 2,071 hours at work each year (as of 2013), more than 400 hours above the OECD average of 1,671.
In addition to this, South Koreans ranked their life satisfaction at 5.8 points out of 10 possible, below the OECD average of 6.58 points. South Korea ranked 27th out of 34 countries on this measure. Life satisfaction was lower in older age groups.
By Hwangbo Yon, staff reporter
Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

This cartoon depicts a young girl saying to her dad