TBR: A Housekeeper is Cheaper Than A Divorce
In keeping with the housework theme for the week, today’s book is A Housekeeper Is Cheaper Than a Divorce: Why You Can Afford to Hire Help and How to Get It, by Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman. It’s a quick read, in an easy conversational style, and I’m quite sure it’s the only book ever written to receive blurbs from both John Gray and Rhona Mahony.
In spite of the provocative title, Sherman really doesn’t have much to say about the division of household labor. Her basic argument is that time spent doing housework is almost always time that could be spent on higher priority activities, whether working for pay, caring for children, volunteering, or just enjoying yourself. For most middle-class and above families, time is more valuable than money, so why not spend some money to buy yourself more time?
Lots of families do buy themselves time by hiring housecleaning services, eating out or getting takeout. Sherman suggests that you can get more help for the same amount of money by hiring less specialized workers — housekeepers — and providing them with extremely detailed instructions about what to do. She provides step-by-step guidance on how to figure out those instructions, as well as advice on recruiting, complying with tax requirements, etc.
I thought the book was interesting, but it didn’t make me want to rush out and hire a housekeeper. Maybe if the boys were older. But at this stage, a huge part of the work is just staying on top of the clutter, and I can’t imagine a housekeeper being able to make the judgements needed to know what to do with everything. And I’m not willing to limit ourselves to a weekly rotation of meals.
The latest from the housework tracking experiment: Monday, T spent 1.25 hours shopping (I think that includes driving to Costco and back), 3 hours cooking (he made a triple batch of curried chicken buns to freeze), and 2.25 hours cleaning. I spent about 20 minutes cleaning. Today T spent 15 minutes cooking, and an hour and 45 minutes cleaning. I spent 30 minutes cooking, and about 20 minutes cleaning.
For me, the most surprising part of this experiment is how much cleaner the house is getting. The act of writing down how much he’s doing has clearly motivated T to clean more. And he insists that it’s not because he wants to look good for all of you. In fact, he’s planning to keep tracking it for himself, but not tell me each day. He suggested that when he doesn’t track how much time he spends doing things, it can feel like he’s spending all the time cleaning, since it’s interspersed with hanging out with the boys. Writing it down also clearly helps him remember that once he’s put a load in the washer, it really need to move along to the dryer and eventually to get folded.
March 21st, 2006 at 10:45 pm
We have a housekeeper. She’s been with us for 5 years now. Shortly after we moved up here, we both agreed that we wanted to invest in someone to clean up. We were always arguing about who should do what and who was doing more. Clutter is our biggest problem too, but she’s actually helped us get better at that. She stacks stuff in one place. Then we can just go through it and purge as necessary. The stacking isn’t ideal in that things can sometimes get lost. That actually motivates us to not have much to stack. She’s even gotten used to my crazy laundry system and can tell when a load is clean or dirty and she’ll fold the clean clothes.
When we hired her, she told me how many people’s houses she cleaned. She was making more money than me!
March 22nd, 2006 at 6:55 am
My wife and I were in a group house together – before there was a romance (love grows doing dishes together) and we were less clean-oriented than one of our roommates. He got grumpy because he was doing far more than his share of cleaning, so we all agreed to share the cost of a once-a-week cleaning. Worked well, household tensions went down, and, yes, we did have more time for stuff we liked to do. And the cleaner, because she was not thinking where to file this or that paper, or getting distracted by life, did a far more efficient job than we would have.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:34 am
It seems she is assuming some particular values, which is fine, but… What strikes me (from your blurb — I haven’t read the book) is that she places no value whatsoever on the act of cleaning up after ourselves, on having our children see us clean up after ourselves and keep our homes at whatever level of cleanliness we feel adequate.
Also, it seems to mean that the kids then will not be doing cleaning, since there’s already a built-in servant to clean up after them. Yes it is a struggle and even a battle sometimes getting kids to pitch in and do their fair share. But I personally think it’s important. I do understand that others have different values and may not agree.
So while I understand her point, from my perspective this position really undervalues the importance of this kind of work.
Bottom line, I think it should be pointed out that her position is based on particular values and assumptions that are not necessarily universally held, even among the “middle class”.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:42 am
For years, I actively fought getting help. I mean, I have a tiny house – I *should* be able to do it all myself….
Last year, I finally broke down and did it and it was one of the smartest decisions that we’ve ever made. The quality of life that we gain far exceeds the financial costs. And basically, we eat out a few less times a month to cover it (we eat a frozen pizza instead of the really good takeout kind).
I, too, was worried about the clutter factor – and I shouldn’t have. Miss Ella sets all the clutter off to the side in a strategically placed pile and tackles the hardcore cleaning. Funnily enough, we are actually starting to declutter and go through the piles. I never thought I’d see the day.
One thing that has not been mentioned, and that I have learned from Miss Ella is this: I don’t know how to clean. Which makes me feel quite ignorant… it’s something I should know how to do, right? But when I think about it, it would seem that I come from a long line of women who didn’t clean. My mother had help, her mother had live-in fulltime help, and so on. I probably could have learned from a book, but was never interested enough to research it. But it was so frustrating to me that I would “clean” and a few hours later you couldn’t tell. Miss Ella comes in and makes everything sparkle and smell great and it stays that way for days. I think she is magic….
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:18 am
Although we have a cleaning woman come every two weeks, I also share Chip’s concern about what message it’s sending to my kids. First off, any cleaning person is going to come from a lower socioeconomic strata. (Our housekeeper is Polish, but I am haunted by Audre Lord’s anecdote about her African-American kids being called “baby maids” at the grocery store.) And I can’t help but think of the time we visited my old boss’s house, and how his kid told mine that they didn’t need to pick up the toys they got out because the maid would do it. I try to fight this trend by having my girls clear the table after meals, pick up toys every night, and help fold and put away their own laundry.
But even though I’m asking them to do this work, I don’t want my kids to grow up fighting the demons I fight, that they’re not good people if they’re not spotless. That it’s appropriate to judge others based on how clean their houses, yards, and clothing are. That bleaching the bathroom is a better use of time than reading books with your children.
Final comment: hiring a housekeeper gets my husband completely off the hook, and does nothing to mitigate the ongoing problem of house cleanliness being a mom’s job.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:28 am
For what it’s worth, Sherman specifically addresses the issue of wanting kids to do chores. She argues that that there’s plenty left over from what a housekeeper does to have an appropriate list of chores for kids — the types of things Jen mentioned: putting their dirty clothes in the hamper, picking up their toys when they’re done, clearing the table and loading the dishwasher after dinner. She also suggests that you’re more likely to have the patience to let your kids “do it themselves” when you don’t have a huge list of tasks that need to get done.
Are people who say they have a housekeeper using that interchangably with housecleaner? Sherman specifically means someone who comes in daily (or close to it) and does light work like unloading the dishwasher and cooking (or at least meal prep) as well as heavy cleaning.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:45 am
I have found this very interesting (but no surprise — I find your whole blog very interesting!) and have been casually keeping track of how much time we spend tidying. I’m also doing a bit more, because frankly, it all doesn’t take as long as I thought. “Fifteen minutes to load the dishwasher? I was feeling weighed down by THAT?? I can wipe the counters and sweep while I’m at it.” But then, I’m a very competitive type of person, even with myself.
The thing I find most overwhelming is the coordination of it all and the divvying up of tasks — the project management aspect of housekeeping. This is distinct from housecleaning, which gets divided among my husband and myself, our eight-year-old, and the cleaner who comes in every two weeks. We let the two-year-old think he helps, but really, he gets to put away utensils as a ploy to keep him in my sight as I unload the dishwasher.
The project management part of housekeeping — keeping track of what all needs to be done and who is to do it, what supplies will be needed, timelines, appointments — that to me is the hard part and the part that can’t reliably be outsourced. This doesn’t seem to address that, because to me, the housekeeper sounds like just another person to manage.
March 22nd, 2006 at 9:52 am
I have the every-other-week houseCLEANER (v. housekeeper). She’s great, and it’s meant that I haven’t had to scrub a toilet or dust or mop a floor (other than the kitchen swiffer) or schedule in a regular vacuuming in a couple of years. But lordy, there is plenty of other work to do. In fact, my husband is downright militant about “cleaning to get ready for Doris” every other Tuesday, and the kids are part of that equation – picking up and shelving books, getting toys off the floor, etc. And Doris doesn’t mitigate AT ALL the daily life tasks of kitchen-work, laundry, quick wipe-downs of counters and sinks, picking up and straightening up, etc. It seems to me that the houseKEEPER does those daily things, too. I don’t think I’d want someone to do those things. But so long as I can afford it, I’ll have someone do the deep cleaning every couple of weeks, and I’d trade just about ANYTHING for that. Lattes, a new car, clothing, a vacation, you name it – about the only thing I wouldn’t trade in for a housecleaner is childcare.
Elizabeth, my husband and I were talking about how you and Tony are tracking time, and he was wondering whether there should be subcategorization (he’s an engineer, forgive him). For instance, is there a qualitative difference between the daily tasks and the “bigger” cleaning? Our biggest problem before we hired Doris was that all of our time was consumed with the dailies, so we never had the time or energy to do the full bathroom scrubdown or purge the bookshelves. He also was wondering whether cooking should “count”, which I thought was intriguing. My mom always used to say that there are cookers and there are cleaners – very rarely do you find someone who likes to both cook and clean. I’m a cooker, not a cleaner. I will always find time to cook a meal, because I like to do that, but I won’t find time to clean the living room, because I hate to do that.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:08 am
I am ferociously anti-clutter, and it makes our house relatively easy to clean up. It’s not that it doesn’t get messy – oh it gets messy – but it isn’t very hard to clean up because we don’t have institutionalized clutter (no stacks of magazines on the floor, no stacks of stuff anywhere in fact). As for my kids – their rooms are their own – and one of the things that makes the house easy to clean is that if they leave stuff out, I just heave it into their rooms and shut the door behind me.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:22 am
I’d be interested to see the numbers on employment of housekeepers (aka Alice from the Brady Bunch) vs. housecleaners. In our very upper middle class neighborhood, we are one of the only (if not the only) families not to hire a housecleaner — and yet the division of working vs. SAH mothers is about 50/50. In other words, we illustrate quite well the trend for upper middle class families to hire housecleaners even when a parent (typically the mother) is at home. And yet, I know no one here or anywhere who has a houseKEEPER. How many women are available for that kind of commitment? Especially if Laura is correct and cleaning many houses in a week is more renumerative?
Most of our friends say the housecleaner keeps them honest re: the clutter. As Maggie puts it, they all clean up for their housecleaners, catching up on the daily tasks so the bigger cleaning (floors into the corners, dusting, cabinet wipedowns, etc) can get done. And I can add that quite a few of my small-town Minnesota neighbors hire housecleaners, and it’s an interesting change to observe, because the housecleaners are not nearly as different (in terms of race, class, social commitments) from their employers as happens in the exurbs. The housecleaners come in to do the “weekly” jobs that no one ever finds time to do themselves.
And yet, surrounded by cleaner homes, knowing models where the class division isn’t as icky, I just can’t bring myself to hire a housecleaner. We SHOULD have done it when the babies were infants, and it would certainly make me happier now to have a cleaner house without having to make the effort, but … I balk. It just makes me uncomfortable. And I still remember my college roommates, and how the ones with housecleaners at home didn’t even KNOW to do certain tasks. It wasn’t that they were more reluctant than those of us brought up on mopping and dusting (although they were, and also — whispering now — less competent): it simply didn’t occur to them that such tasks even needed to be done. And yet, if we’d suggested that they’d made their housecleaners’ labor invisible, they would have been full of indignation. Of COURSE they knew how much she (always she) did for their families (mothers) at home.
I share jen’s concern, by the way, with the ways in which housecleaners make housecleaning a form of explicitly female labor. And while I do accept the idea that conceding this point may be better than divorce on a couple-by-couple basis, it’s still one more place where women lose the feminist argument at home, subtly undermining their ability to win the feminist argument in the workplace.
Oh, I can also say that hiring and supervising and communicating with housecleaners is a form of labor in itself, one I found myself uniquely unsuited for during the two months in spring 2001 when we attempted the experiment. Also, our cohort’s happy tendency to pay cash to women who spoke only Spanish (all coordinated via one woman who did speak English, but who was herself a fairly recent immigrant) COMPLETELY creeped me out.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:25 am
Small-town Minnesota RELATIVES. It should read relatives, not neighbors. The wives are all school teachers, the men are all cobbling together a combination of jobs (some farming, some city services, some teaching — everyone in small-town America seems to have some job with the government somehow, if only seasonally), and the housecleaners are often doing the same thing, with housecleaning in their mix. There are definitely class differences (small towns are fantastic places for class differences) but they’re far more subtle than in the suburbs and exurbs, not least because everyone just lives that much closer to everyone else.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:37 am
The project management and supervision parts of hiring a housekeeper are definitely no small obstacle. Sherman says that many people hire cleaners rather than housekeepers precisely because they’re intimidated by the prospect of figuring out and communicating exactly what needs to be done (and of course, she says that she’ll teach you how to do it).
We had a housecleaning service for a while, when N was a baby. It’s definitely harder to combine cleaning with caring for an infant than with a 2 year old.
Does cooking count? Well, it’s certainly more easily outsourced these days. (Thank you Trader Joes.) Like Maggie, I’ll always choose to cook over cleaning. And T doesn’t mind cleaning as much, so for a long time pre-kids I did most of the cooking and he did most of the dishes. But while I enjoy cooking, when I only have about 2 hours with the boys between when I get home and when they go to bed, I don’t want to spend most of that time in the kitchen.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:56 am
I agree on the “cookers vs. cleaners” split in life. Happily my husband is the cooker and I’m the cleaner and we both can absorb these daily tasks. (That is, once I convinced him to give up his wok.)
March 22nd, 2006 at 12:20 pm
For what it’s worth on the feminism issue – my mother has a couple who cleans her house. (Admittedly, it’s because the husband had time on his hands after he retired, and decided to horn in on his wife’s business.) It’s not necessarily a total given that you can only hire a woman to clean your house.
Actually, she says the best housecleaner she ever had, about 15 years ago, was a man. He was originally working through an agency, and then went independent. She was a little freaked out the first time he showed up to clean the house (especially since she assumed that the cleaner would be female and answered the door in a bath towel), but he was efficient, thorough, and professional.
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
I find myself feeling some conflicting emotions over this one. First, jealousy because there’s no way we can afford a housecleaner, let alone a housekeeper. And I don’t have a latte habit to give up. We’re desperately trying to chip away at our debt and getting nowhere, despite the constant purging of luxuries like Netflix. And we need a new car and a bigger house BADLY but neither are in our future.
But then I think, wait! I would never hire a housecleaner/keeper! Because I agree with all of the above observations about the class/race/gender issues involving housework. And also because I used to be a housecleaner and I hated it. I also used to clean rooms in a motel for $4.50/hour. I swore I’d never pay anyone else to scrub my toilet for me. And yet, now I fantasize about being relieved of that duty forever.
Upon further consideration, it also occurred to me that if by some freak incident I were to hire a housecleaner, I would be mortified if my maid turned out to be my neighbor. And in my neighborhood, that’s a very real possibility.
I guess it’s good that I don’t have to agonize over that decision, because it’s just not an option. I’m not in the class of people for whom “time is more valuable than money,” but I sure as hell wish I was.
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:22 pm
I understood jen to be saying that the allocation of household labor goes: wife – housecleaner/nanny – husband. And then you hear that language about “we have a nanny so my wife can work.” Uh, no: you have a nanny so you BOTH can work. Ditto the housecleaner: you have that person so neither one of you has to do those jobs.
I understood the title of this book to be saying: rather than battle your husband into his fair share of the household labor, save your emotional capital, spend your monetary capital, and hire a housekeeper. Which does solve the emotional battleground on one level, but leaves the philosophical question entirely unaddressed. ESPECIALLY if the woman continues to do all the negotiating/supervising/management/oversight of the housekeeper.
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:58 pm
wow. this is very interesting, i realize that I’ve floated here into a totally different class world. Growing up no one in our neighborhood, relatives or anyone we knew hired housecleaners or any kind of domestic help. And now none of our friends, and none of our neighbors hire help either. I guess I’m living in a very different universe…
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:20 pm
Chip, no one in my family or neighborhood growing up had a maid/cleaner/whatever. Heck, my Oma *was* a cleaning lady for a time when she was first widowed during World War II. But you know, I can’t think of one single mom on our street who worked. Around the corner, Mrs. S taught piano. Oh, and Mrs. J. drove a school bus mornings and afternoons. But that was it. My husband’s family had a maid when he was a kid, but his father had his own business and was working all hours, sometimes my MIL was as well, and there were a dozen kids in the family. So, you need a few more hands to deal with a ten-bedroom house and all that laundry.
Elizabeth, it’s very kind of Sherman for volunteering to teach me project management, but that’s not the issue. It’s the least favorite part of my job, and not just using Microsoft *&@#%!! Project. If we were paying someone to come in daily, I couldn’t justify winging it, and I have already moaned that I don’t want to be the family project manager. Sadly, the other adult in the household is less suited to it, and the eight-year-old, while she would love to be in charge, has completely unreasonable priorities and timelines.
March 22nd, 2006 at 8:45 pm
My sister in law married a man who had a live in housekeeper and a gardener as a child. As an adult, he doesn’t understand why his coat doesn’t hang itself up when he drops it on the floor. To get around this for her children, she has the housecleaner do everything but the children’s rooms, kids’ bathrooms, and playroom. The youngest one (6) does the dusting and wipes down the sink. The two older ones (8 &10) do the toilets and tub.
We have a housecleaner that comes in every two weeks but we still make our 2 year old pick up her toys at the end of the day, we clean up the kitchen, straighten up the living room, and generally “reset” every thing for the next day. I wipe down the sinks and toilets pretty often between cleanings so I don’t really feel like my daughter will grow up thinking that any aspect of housecleaning is beneath us or her.
March 22nd, 2006 at 10:29 pm
I’m fascinated by how defensive I could feel myself getting as I read Chip’s last comment. I do think class plays a big role in this — I think there’s probably a lot of people who could afford to hire help but don’t think of themselves as the “type of people” who have housecleaners.
March 23rd, 2006 at 12:21 am
Would I do it again? Yes, if I could afford to do it properly. I hope the book covers finding wage slaves who get health insurance worth having, or what “reasonable pay” means beyond “market rate”.
Yes, I think it’s important to know how to wipe your own ass and mop your own floor. I also think the zen/virtue business about doing it continuously is a lot of baloney. Frequently there are more interesting and/or important things to do with time.
Also, I agree with Jody re oversight chores.
March 23rd, 2006 at 1:50 am
We have a house cleaner who comes in every two weeks (every week when ALL of my clients are working). I love her, love her, love her and I need her. As a working mother with a working husband I do not want to spend my nights or weekends cleaning toilets, vacuuming, or wiping down windows. I want to be at the farm picking berries and walking on the beach with the kids.
We clean up after ourselves, do our laundry, and keep the house as tidy (eh hem) as possible between Gloria’s visits. The boys 2 & 4 have to clean up their room every night before bed, take their clothes to the hamper, and clear the table after dinner. They also LOVE to “help” Gloria when she is here.
She keeps our lives running smoothly and cleanly. I have not a shred of guilt having Gloria in our lives. The boys will eventually have greater responsiblities, but until then, I am satisfied they understand that we ALL contribute to keeping the house running and clean.
March 23rd, 2006 at 2:56 am
Elizabeth: today is my housework day and rather than counting the amt of housework I do, I counted the amt of time spent *not* doing housework. I included childcare in the housework because I was too lazy to separate it out. It’s on my blog.
I have really mixed feelings on this one. I tend to agree with Chip — kids need to see you do ordinary stuff like cleaning. And they need to participate. Cleaning/cooking is a great way to teach little kids. (Mine are 4 and 2.) It’s like one giant science experiment. Wash dishes and learn that water is the universal solvent!
But I don’t work full-time. If I worked full-time I think I’d hire a housecleaner & take the kids for a bike ride.
March 23rd, 2006 at 10:22 am
This is really fascinating. Particularly because in my marriage, I’m the housekeeping slacker and my husband is the stickler – which I’ve come to realize is one of the true gender role reversals. Almost universally, among my hetero coupled friends, the women care more than the men about a clean house. I’ve had to learn to (and how to) clean up along with my kids, with much pushing, pulling, and gnashing of teeth by my husband.
And I echo the defensiveness, and fascination with same, expressed by Elizabeth at Chip’s comment – especially because my working-class urban mom did everything herself when I was growing up, and I still didn’t learn the cleaning thing.
Much like the false stay-at-home/work-out-of-the-home dichotomy, I think making assumptions about the “type of people” who hire nannies v. use daycare centers v. stay home, clean the house themselves v. hire help, etc can be dangerous, and can mask a thoughtful examination of the deeper issues. Class absolutely plays a role, but what assumptions are being made about “class”? My husband and I live in a rundown 1950’s split-level and drive a 1991 Jeep Cherokee. According to the census, though, we make a (relative) ton of money. As was mentioned on this blog and others, I think in response to the NYT series on class in America, those of us who can afford to live in major urban centers in the USA may be statistically “rich”, but many of us don’t FEEL “rich” or think we live as if we’re “rich.” That being said, we *can* afford to hire housecleaners (and pay taxes for it), as well as pay for quality daycare. In short, I think the class gradations are more subtle and cross-cutting than “I’ve wandered into a totally different class world” implies. As Elizabeth noted, there are plenty of people who might be able to afford to hire help who don’t consider themselves the “kind of people” who hire help – but what assumptions are being made about what “kinds” of people *are* hiring help? And is making those assumptions an unhelpful barrier to thinking more constructively about the issue of how house-work (and care-work) affect the status of women and families in the public sphere?
March 23rd, 2006 at 10:44 am
You know, I’ve never understood, at a fundamental level that there are tasks that you shouldn’t outsource for some moral reason. We’re talking about household work, but I feel the same way about childcare, cooking, and any other activity. I think the key is that you treat people who work for you with respect, and you teach your children that. Treating them with respect includes valuing the work that they do. I have a weekly housecleaner, and my mom & dad (who also help with the children) help with daily tasks, like loading the dishwasher. I’ve been considering whether we can figure out a way to hire a housekeeper, but have been stymied by the project management aspect of the whole thing (So, Elizabeth, thanks for the book cite).
I know reading this, that it might sound like I’m a bit of a princess. But, I’m not; I am, however, an imigrant, and it’s not at all unusual for people to have help in other countries, even live in help. In fact, there’s probably a strain of belief that doing the work yourself when someone else needs the opportunity to do it, in order to gainfully employ themselves, is wrong. (Anyone else remember the Robert Frost poem about a “priveleged” person chopping wood for fun, when someone else wanted to get paid to do the work).
Now, in the US, the problem is that most people can’t really afford help, so they can only pay for it in exploitative situations (like the individual is an illegal immigrant). But, it doesn’t have to be like that.
In thinking about how this affects one’s children, my concerns are two fold. First, that they treat people with respect, always, and that includes understanding what the boundaries of work are. Second, kids have to learn that though their family of origin might be able to afford household help, they may not have that choice when they are adults. I do struggle with the second, which is teaching children that everyone has to live within their means. One learns that automatically if one is better off as an adult than as a child. But, what happens with children for whom that is an unreasonable expectation.
bj
PS: I have to complain again about the Wash Post column on work/family balance. It is really really really really bad. Elizabeth’s blog is 5 billion times better. If anyone has suggestions about how we make them stop with that blog and actually give a reasonable forum for discussing these concerns, I’d love hearing about it. Right now, I don’t comment; I’m hoping that if enough people do that it will go away.
March 23rd, 2006 at 9:53 pm
sorry Elizabeth, I didn’t mean to make anyone defense, it was just a reaction to comments here that seem to indicate everyone else who reads this blog either uses help or most of their friends do, and how different that is from our context — and we’re talking about families where both parents work. Thinking about it I do actually know one couple that hires someone once a week or so, but they are the exception.
I’ve blogged before that I don’t really personally see doing laundry or sweeping as a huge burden, it doesn’t really take that much time, and yes I do usually do those things, as well as cook dinner, and I get a certain satisfaction from doing it. Last year I did pretty much all of that household work, this year, my wife’s job is a bit less stressful and so she’s doing some of it too.
Our house would not meet the squeaky clean standards of the 1950s stereotypical house, but as someone has already mentioned, part of the problem is having unrealistic expectations. Our house is at times cluttered, and I definitely don’t dust every week (I’ll dust when I notice the dust getting a little bit too deep). But our kids wouldn’t be taken away by protective services…
Finally let me second BJ’s comment about WaPo blog vs. this one.
March 23rd, 2006 at 9:59 pm
No harm, Chip. It’s not that I was really upset, just that I thought it was interesting that my first reaction was defensiveness.
And thanks for the compliments about this blog. If you have any thoughts about how to get more people to pay attention to the real dialogues going on out here and less to the folks who just like to poke the fire to see what happens, I’d love to hear them.
March 24th, 2006 at 8:48 am
re: the WaPo blog, it truly is unbelievable how clueless and backward it is. I hope they’re embarrassed by their own performance! And I hope the marketplace will show them they’ve made a misstep in underestimating their audience.
March 26th, 2006 at 4:11 am
I’ve always thought about cleaning that if I can afford it, then the person who is doing the cleaning probably needs the money more than I do. Put like that, it sounds a bit noblesse oblige, but I don’t really understand the view that cleaning is something you should do for yourself. Nobody ever says that about mowing lawns, after all, or painting the walls.
My kids are too young for us to be setting a bad example (they have to tidy up, after themselves, and most cleaning, whether or not we had a cleaner, would take place when they are at childcare or school) but that part of it does make me stop and think. I certainly don’t want my boys to grow up thinking that someone else will always clean up after them.
On the WaPo blog, I only read it when RebelDad sends me over there with another unbelieveable comment – it seems like something that should have been written 15 years ago.
March 26th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Hmm, I’m with Maggie (above in comments) in that I’m married to someone who cares about all of this far more than I do: he’s cleaner, AND he believes strongly in a do-it-yourself ethic. (Including, as a matter of fact, Jennifer, painting the walls and mowing the lawns, all of which he does, and does better than most people we could pay for it. We’ve outsourced child care more than any other household task, interestingly…) I think my cohort is split between those who do and those who don’t pay for housecleaning (no housekeepers here either) about 50-50; for some it’s a money thing, for others an ethical thing. Our house isn’t very clean but our kids do have to participate in what cleaning we do.
Like some of the other commenters I come from a long line of women who had help of various sorts, including (when we lived overseas) live-in help, so I understand (I think) the arguments on all sides. And what it comes down to for me right now is that, actually, I wouldn’t sacrifice a vacation or my DSL line, say, for a cleaner house. If it weren’t a question of sacrifice then my husband’s ethics and my laziness might come into conflict.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:41 am
One of the Alexander McCall novels set in Botswana (No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency et al.) made the intriguing argument that, if you have enough money, it’s selfish NOT to hire household help. Spending your money to pay wages is a social good because it increases local employment and helps someone make a living.
March 31st, 2006 at 1:39 pm
What is it about toilet-scrubbing and other cleaning tasks that makes them more important for children to see than other tasks that we do outsource?
A couple hundred years ago, would it have been a moral failing not to teach sons to chop wood, or daughters to tend chickens? It actually is entirely possible to go through life today never scrubbing your own toilet, just like it’s possible to go through life never gutting a fish or driving a horse or even relighting a pilot light. (From home with a housecleaner to a college dorm to a downtown condo with maid service, or a house with a housecleaner of your own, for example.)
Even with live-in help, you can teach kids to be considerate of others, which would normally include picking up stuff when it’s easy for you to do it at the time, instead of leaving it for a housekeeper for later.
I just read this book last night (having gotten it from the library after reading the review here, as I often do), and I was thinking about why it feels like a moral failing to outsource some tasks for women. No conclusions, but I’m wondering whether the “life skills” argument is just a way of reinforcing our own prejudices about what life skills everyone ought to have.
June 15th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I would love to interview you on this topic for a story I’m writing, would that be possible? Please let me know how to reach you – thank you!
Kimberly Palmer
Senior Editor, Money & Business
U.S. News & World Report
http://www.usnews.com/alpha