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Thursday, June 19, 2008
Can caring for kids/home really be 50/50?
In studies, lesbian couples come closer to truly sharing family duties than most heterosexual couples. How well do you share the duties?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The New York Times Magazine posted a fantastic story examining the concept of “equally shared parenting” — where couples try to share 50/50 all housework and care of the children.
There is not a master and apprentice (as in moms is great at fixing hair and matching outfits, and Dad needs to follow her directions). In theory, Dad knows just as much about what is going on in the house as Mom and can change a diaper and clean out the refrigerator as efficiently. (The story is long but stick with it — loads of interesting material.)
The author gives great examples of how families are actually trying to make this lifestyle a reality, but also offers amazing statistics on how work is shared in most households. For example:
“Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women. Any way you measure it, they say, women do about twice as much around the house as men.”
“The most recent figures from the University of Wisconsin’s National Survey of Families and Households show that the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14 — a ratio of slightly more than two to one. If you break out couples in which wives stay home and husbands are the sole earners, the number of hours goes up for women, to 38 hours of housework a week, and down a bit for men, to 12, a ratio of more than three to one. That makes sense, because the couple have defined home as one partner’s work.”
“But then break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.” “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. ‘The most striking part,’ Blair says, ‘is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago.’ ”
The author goes on to explain that lesbian couples share things much more equally. In fact, 75 percent of those in one study considered themselves to be co-parents as opposed to 25 percent who said the birth-mother was primary parent.
” ‘Heterosexual couples can learn from gay couples about sharing housework and child care.’ says Esther D. Rothblum, a professor in the women’s studies department of San Diego State University whose comparative study of the relationships of 342 couples — lesbian, gay, heterosexual — was published in the journal Developmental Psychology in January. ‘They are good role models.’ ”
“It is not clear, however, why lesbian couples split parenting more equally. ‘Is it because you take gender out of the equation or because women are better at sharing or because parents of the same gender see things more similarly?’ asks Dr. Nanette Gartrell, a psychiatrist with the University of California at San Francisco who has been studying lesbian families for 22 years. ‘We don’t know,’ and won’t know, she says, until there is equivalent data on gay men who become parents.
What do you make of these studies? What do you think of the shared-parenting strategy? What did you think of the couples examined in the story? Would you be willing to ask for a three or four day work schedule to share more equally? Would you be willing to forgo that income?
Do you think couples need to work that hard to track who is doing what (the color-coordinated charts)? Do you think the parenting does become more equal as the children get older?
What do make of the lesbians sharing more equally than heterosexual couples? Is it something inherent to being women?
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