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IT'S BEEN A CENTURY, AND WOMEN STILL DO TWICE AS MUCH CHILD CARE.
When men and women argue about the gender gap when it comes to time spent on household chores -- cooking, cleaning, yard work, and home repairs -- men often suggest that women should lower their standards. In other words, if you want the apartment to be neat and tidy, and he wants it to be a pig pen, you can compromise on it being disheveled and dusty. Right?
Whatever you think of that argument, it's a lot tougher to make the case that a "middle ground" can be reached on child care chores; cleaning, dressing, shopping for, and feeding kids. Researchers who study the division of child care between married couples don't count reading to kids or playing with them among these chores. As a result, they've found something startling, Lisa Belkin reports in a Times Magazine feature:
Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. As with housework, that ratio does not change as much as you would expect when you account for who brings home a paycheck. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom’s average drops to 11 and Dad’s goes up to 3. Lest you think this is at least a significant improvement over our parents and grandparents, not so fast. ...Back when women had to tend fires to cook and put clothes through the wringer and then onto the clothesline, they spent 50 hours a week on housework and men spent 20. (A ratio of 2.5 to 1.) And back in the 1950s, when no one was even bothering to measure how many hours men spent on child care because it was thought to be negligible, the average mother spent 12 to 15 hours caring for her children — the same as they spend today.
That's remarkable. Over the course of a century in which women's roles outside of the home expanded radically, mothers continued to spend the exact same number of hours on basic childcare chores as their great-great-grandmothers did. And the average working man with a working spouse still spends just three hours a week on basic child care.
Belkin's article focuses on a program called ThirdPath that promotes "Equally Shared Parenting" -- a systematic approach that "trains" parents to equalize the time they spend at work, on child care, and on domestic labor. The chart-making system may seem overly rigid to many people, and indeed, some couples tell Belkin ThirdPath didn't work out for them. It seems impossible for many husbands, for example, to internalize the mental "list making" that's essential to parenting: which kid needs to go to the doctor and when, which birthday parties are coming up and when to buy a gift, and so on. Women, on the other hand, often have trouble giving up control. It's all very discouraging. But it's also worth remembering that the travails of these middle-class and affluent hetero couples aren't representative; about a third of households with children under 18 are headed by a single parent.
In any case, the piece is worth a read, and is sure to be widely discussed.
--Dana Goldstein
COMMENTS (6)
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Posted by: votenic | June 13, 2008 12:16 PM
I'm a guy who actually changed all of my daughter's diapers the first few weeks after she was born and had to show my wife how to do it when I went back to work. I always loved children and baby sat as a teenager while my wife was quite willing to go without children.
Why do I mention this? Am I trying to brag?
Nope.
Because it didn't take long for my wife and I to fall into the same pattern mentioned in this study. We might be better than these percentages, but not by much.
My guess is we were an example of your best hope. Yep, it's hopeless. I don't know what it is, but it certainly seems natural. (As much as I hate to use that word in this context.)
Posted by: Mark | June 13, 2008 4:46 PM
Oh, please. You'd think raising children was some insanely challenging job. It's not that tough, and most women just do more so that they can either a) quit their job or b) feel put upon.
And in a better world, Lisa Belkin would be prevented from writing any more self-absorbed articles about mommyhood.
Posted by: Cal | June 13, 2008 10:22 PM
Cal:
Raising children may not seem challenging to a man who can't be bothered with them, but to be able to tolerate children's requests for attention, and provide it; to be able to feed a child that throws the food on the floor, and not get angry; to play patty cake with a child for the 15th time that afternoon; to take the child to the playground and push it on the swing endlessly; all these may not be "challenging" but they sure challenge a parent's patience, kindness and love. And this does not include the endless cleaning, hauling, shopping and home-work assisting. This would probably take a lot more than 15 hours a week, but this is an average which includes small children and adolescents, so it isn't a very good measure of any one parent's load at any particular time.
I have raised children and I have worked full-time outside the home, and working full-time is lot easier on your nerves. You get verbal praise at work, you get bonuses, you can even hope to get an office. With children, you get to see them finally gorw up, and that is all the reward you get.
And you, Cal, are one of the reasons women think men are jerks.
Posted by: Carol | June 13, 2008 11:24 PM
Thanks to all you Moms, from a childless single female deep in the California Child Development curriculum who was raised by a single mom in the 60's!
Posted by: Tina Miller | June 15, 2008 5:15 AM
"but to be able to tolerate children's requests for attention, and provide it; to be able to feed a child that throws the food on the floor, and not get angry; to play patty cake with a child for the 15th time that afternoon; to take the child to the playground and push it on the swing endlessly"
In fairness, of the above child-rearing tasks, only the food bit would be considered "childcare" for the purposes of the study.
To put it a little differently, on an average morning, our daughter wakes up around 6:00 these days. I get up with her, change her (5 minutes) and feed her (15 minutes) so her mother can sleep in, and then play with her until 7:45 or so. At that point, her mother gets up so I can shower for work. She usually changes her into her school clothes (10 minutes) during this time. When I'm out of the shower, I usually watch her so her mother can get ready. Then, we all leave for work/school/work around 8:15. I take the bus. Her mother drives her to pre-school (10 minutes).
So, despite the fact that I have primary childcare for about 2 or the 2.5 hours from the time our daughter wakes up until the time she goes to school, and her mother is asleep for nearly 2 hours of that time, we would get equal "childcare credit" according to the study.
Posted by: Joe | June 16, 2008 5:51 PM