The Goal of Equal Parenting

Posted by Michelle Carchrae Jun 26, 2008

In your house, who cleans the toilet? Who repairs the car, remembers to buy birthday presents, cleans the cat box? Who cooks meals for the kids and makes sure they get dressed in the morning?

If your house is like most North American houses, chances are good that most of those tasks are done by the resident mom. The statistics show that the proportion of housework done by men and women in a household have pretty much stayed the same from the time when most tasks were done by hand to today's world of modern conveniences: women do twice as much housework and child care as men, on average.

Despite a long track record of gender-based roles, today we have the freedom to choose the balance of labor that works best for our families. This week I came across an interesting article in the New York Times about shared parenting. Families are coming to businesses like the ThirdPath Institute for help creating an equal and balanced family life, with child care, housework and income earning all shared equally between both partners.

This article really got me thinking about where our gender role assumptions come from, and how they are reinforced in our social circles and workplaces. At the end of the day, we've all got to choose the arrangement that works best for our own families, whether perfectly equal or not. However, examining those choices gives us a better idea of where those choices have come from and why they work for us.