Divvying Up The Duties
Share Chores and Fun with Children
June 11, 2007
By Mary Medland
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As women have flooded into the workforce over the past several decades, it figures that they were spending less and less time with their children.
Not so, says a group of University of Maryland sociologists in a buzz-generating new book that spawned a front-page story in The New York Times.
The gist: Mothers spend more time with their children today than they did 40 years ago, whether they work outside the home or not. And fathers are not the stereotypical couch-potato do-nothings of the Dagwood days. In fact, men and women are doing a pretty good job of divvying up the childcare and housework.
In 1965, married mothers spent an average of 10.6 hours a week with their children, while in 2000 they spent an average of 12.9 hours, the academics report in Changing Rhythms of American Family Life. Single mothers also spend more time with their children now: 11.8 hours a week compared to 7.5 hours in 1965.
Yes, stay-at home mothers do spend a lot more time with their children than their office-bound counterparts: 17 hours a week for stay-at-home moms compared to 11 hours for mothers working outside the house in 2000. But the trend is toward more time with the kids.
The report — published by the Russell Sage Foundation and the American Sociological Association — was written by Suzanne M. Bianchi, chairwoman of the department of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, John P. Robinson and Melissa A. Milkie. “Our research suggests that when mothers go into the labor force, something has to give,” says Professor Bianchi, who with her colleagues pored over the results of time-use surveys. She explains that mothers devise a range of strategies to spend more time with their children.
“For example, mothers often do not go whole hog into the labor force when their children are most needy,” she says. “Working mothers don’t spend as much time keeping their home pristine, and they do sacrifice their leisure time to be with their children.”
The study also found that married fathers spend more time with their kids than they did in the past. In 1965, married fathers spent an average of 2.6 hours a week on childcare; by 2000 the time had risen to 6.5 hours. They also did more housework: an average of 9.7 hours a week in 2000, more than double the 1965 number.
Bianchi stresses that it is indeed mothers who spend the most time with children when they are small — but that things change as the kids grow up.
“In my household when my children were very young, there were some times I only worked four days a week, rather than full-time, and all of my husband’s and my nonwork time was devoted to our children,” Bianchi says. “Usually when one’s children are really young, it is the mothers who spend more time doing childcare, but that changes as the kids get older. Now, for example, our 16-year-old spends more time with his father than with me.”
The study did support one conventional wisdom: Wives in two-parent households do twice as much housework and childcare as their husbands. But, the study showed, when hours of paid and unpaid work are compared, the total hours of labor are pretty much equal.
That said, the study did find that women in the workforce do double duty — a 71-hour average workweek compared to 52 hours for stay-at-home moms. “These disparities suggest why working mothers often feel hurried and harried,” The New York Times article commented.
Jenny Dansicker, an Owings Mills mother of three children under age 4 who works part time from home as an editor, thinks her family fits the study’s overall profile of increasing equality between married men and women.
“I think it would be hard to find too many other couples who are as equitable as Andy and I,” Jenny Dansicker says. “When we chose to have three children, we talked about the sacrifices we were going to have to make. For example, my husband is an attorney who used to come home at 7 p.m. Now he makes it home at 5:30 p.m. so we can sit down to have dinner as a family.”
Andy Dansicker gets the three children up, dressed and fed in the morning before his wife arises at 7. While the children are sitting on the couch reading, he unloads and loads the dishwasher. “It’s a pleasant way to start the day,” Jenny Dansicker says. “I don’t wake up to a mess.” And, she adds, her husband makes dinner at least three nights a week.
According to Professor Bianchi, a big shift occurred 20 years ago. “After 1985 we found a lot of married dads spending more time with their children,” she says. “My guess is that they wanted to do more childcare, but [that] it also was expected by their wives, especially those working outside the home.”
These post-1985 men grew up during the feminist revolution and understood that they, too, must pick up a vacuum, sort the laundry and take their children to the dentist.
For the Dansickers, the weekend is family time. Saturdays begin at 7:30 a.m. when the family goes out for breakfast. That is followed by a trip to the zoo or a nature center and then home for naps by 1 p.m. “When the kids are napping, Andy and I can connect as partners,” Jenny Dansicker says. “Even our oldest child who really doesn’t need a nap has to stay in his room and have some quiet time.”
Many men and women have made a conscious effort to figure out how to divide up the work at home. “My husband and I split household and child-care responsibilities 50-50,” says Towson resident Vicki Aversa, president of Aversa Communications and the mother of a teenage son. “We try to set priorities weekly and sometimes even daily when we are really busy.”
She and her husband also know their strengths and weaknesses. “We acknowledge that each of us is better at something than the other, so we split duties by talent as well as time,” she says. For example, Aversa’s husband tends to be the one who gets dinner on the table, while she handles chores like paying the bills.
If Aversa estimates that she and her husband split things down the middle, stay-at-home Hampstead mother Sarah O. (who did not want her last name used) estimates that she shoulders about 60 percent of the childcare and housework, while her husband takes on the rest.
“I’m home all day, so obviously I do more on both counts — and it makes sense that I do,” says Sarah, who has two children under the age of 8. “When my husband gets home at night, things get split fairly evenly. He cleans up after dinner and puts one kid to bed while I take care of the other one.”
While she is not quite sure that her husband knows how to plug in the vacuum, let alone use it, she acknowledges that he does handle household chores such as cleaning leaves off the roof and replacing broken toilets — tasks she would not take on herself.
But even the best-organized couples can find themselves overwhelmed from time to time. “When that happens we ask for help from our parents,” Aversa says. “They can pick up my son from high school or wait for a repairman at our home. We manage as best we can by being creative — and relying on carry-out.”
