Housework
Over on RebelDad’s blog (see September 15), G. wondered whether the American Time Use Survey would allow researchers to examine whether wives of stay-at-home dads got more sleep or did less housework than working moms in dual-earner families.
I’m not sure whether the ATUS will allow for that sort of detailed analysis, but my gut reaction is that researchers wouldn’t pick up a big difference (assuming that they were able to slice the data finely enough so that they only were comparing us to full-time working moms). Based on the not-especially random sample of moms on the MAWDAH (moms at work, dads at home) email list, most of us feel like we’re still doing a lot of the housework. Some even feel like they’d be doing less if their husbands’ worked — because then they could afford to pay someone else to do it. Our husbands do more housework than most men — but a lot less than the average stay-at-home mom.
If childrearing is only marginally valued in our society, housecleaning is definitely not valued. Because gender roles are up for negotiation in a MAWDAH family, there isn’t the fundamental assumption that housework is primariliy the at-home parent’s job.
Plus, most of us have pre-school age children, and the fact is, it’s awfully hard to get much cleaning done while caring for infants and toddlers. (The dads who have only school-age children do seem to do more housework, but there’s not a whole lot of them — if you think SAHDs get funny looks from strangers when they’re caring for preschoolers, wait until the kids are in school.) Most of our families have chosen to have an at-home parent because we value hands-on childrearing, and it’s hard to argue that the kids should be left to watch television so dad can mop the floors.
So how are things divided up in this household? Our motto is the song from Free to Be You And Me: “Your mommy hates housework, and your daddy hates housework, and someday, when you grow up, you can hate housework too.”
My husband does most of the grocery shopping, because I refuse to deal with the insanity of a supermarket on a weekend when he can do it mid week. I do a bit more than half the cooking — and tend to make more elaborate meals when I cook. (My husband doesn’t believe in side vegetables, as far as I can tell.) But I like cooking and miss it when I don’t do it. I do more than half of the laundry, which drives me crazy because it seems so much easier for him to do while he’s home during the day (we have a washer and dryer in the house). We do about equal amounts of vacuuming, sweeping, scrubbing, etc. — but neither of us does very much. He usually takes out the trash, because when it rains our back gate swells from the moisture and I can’t get it to open.
I think I’d do more housework than my husband does if I were the at-home parent — but I also think that’s part of why I wouldn’t be happy as an at-home parent. I’m afraid that I’d always be aware of the undone chores that were hanging over me, whereas he’s apparently quite capable of totally putting them out of mind.
I conclude with a quote from the New York Times Week in Review article on the ATUS study. They cite relationship researcher John Gottman:
“The more men participated in the care of children, housework and daily conversation, he found, the more the wife increased her level of satisfaction and sexual intimacy.”
