While not quibbling with the math, I think there are two things that mitigate this meaningfully.
1) quality of the time spent (I have more meaningful conversations in a couple of hours now, than months as a child + much of that time was spent administratively / logistically)
2) voice / video / text communication is not meaningless (I’ve lived >1,500 miles from my parents for the past ~12 years, but on average probably talk to them one a week? Those conversations matter, and shouldn’t be discarded for in-person time)
Childhood is much more than logistics and administration. Your parents are there during your formative years, teaching you, often through example. Also, your emphasis on conversation seems strange. As much as I like a good conversation, this is not what defines the parent-child relationship. It is not what makes this relationship valuable above all else. Who would you rather have? A parent who sacrifices immensely for your good, or a good conversationalist who can't be bothered?
Everything you said is true, and is not mutually exclusive with my point that all hours spent together should carry the same weight.
I use the word conversation as a short hand for being present with someone.
Just look around a restaurant and see families eating a meal together where some or all of them are lost in their phones/devices, in some respects those people are having dinner on their own.
Put another way, I’ve seen plenty parents that are physically present, and emotionally absent, and other parents that may have have less physical hours spent with a child, but are more are more present and involved in their lives.
> It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
Around that time, I attended an offsite of a larger private equity firm and there was a organizational psychologist who gave a talk on work life balance. He said something I'll never forget. He said that you have about ten to twelve years to connect with your kids and then they turn into teenagers, tune you out, then turn into adults and build their own lives. I thought about my kids who were five, three, and a baby and realized that time was short and I needed to be present in their lives in every way that I could.
It demonstrated that many of us have already spent between 95-99% of the time we will see our parents.
Eg:
* presume your parents have you at ~30
* Live at home 18years x 365 days per year = 6570 days
* You see them a week per year for the remainder of their life = 50 years * 7 days per year = 350 days
therefore at 19yrs old you have 350/(6570+350) days remaining ~= 5%