Lesson 6: Is He Ever Going to Help With the Housework??
In this lesson you'll learn that men and women define "housework" much differently. And the differences between them can lead to conflict. Reading this part of the course will allow you to avoid this possible conflict, engage your partner in the home project of getting things done, and make yourselves feel more like partners than punching bags.
Housework? What Housework?
“Women usually measure what their husbands do against what these women do,” says researcher Jay Belsky. If you use this scale for “pass or fail,” most men fail miserably. But men tend to “measure their domestic contributions against what their fathers did”, adds Belsky, and sometimes even against what their male friends and coworkers are doing.” By this standard, many husbands feel pretty satisfied with themselves and their contributions around the house. But studies show that dads and moms have different standards for what equality in housework actually means. For many men, doing special tasks around the house such as fixing the sink or building shelves constitutes their definition of “contributing to household chores.”
Taking out the trash, cleaning the garage, and washing the car are helpful, but typically don’t impress wives with children as being in the housework category. Housework and childcare are the most misunderstood responsibilities among new and experienced couples with children and two areas that can lead to frustration and conflict.
Men usually take on smaller shares of both housework and child care than either partner predicted during the prenatal period. While this arrangement may be initially satisfactory, it generally declines during the first two years of parenthood. Concurrently, marital conflict increases. When you compare new fathers and mothers perceptions to the extent that housework is performed by men, fathers consistently see themselves as contributing more in this department than their spouses reported.
This may be attributable to the definitions men and women use for “housework” but more likely it is due to their different expectations regarding who should do household chores. This is another reason for couples to talk about their expectations early in a pregnancy. Chores such as cleaning, dusting and the other hundred things that need to be done weekly to maintain your home requires realistic planning and commitment. Who will be responsible for the child’s doctor appointments, daily childcare arrangements, and who will be able to stay home with a sick baby also needs to be talked about and agreed upon before the decisions reach crisis proportions and the discussion reaches triple decibels. Family roles have changed in the past three decades. Women are expected to relinquish some of their mothering tasks, in essence be less motherly than their own mothers, while fathers are expected to be more fathers than their own fathers were by taking on more parenting responsibilities. American women especially, are expected to take on career responsibilities outside the home while their children are young.
Fathers, likewise, are expected to participate more in family tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and parenting. Despite some recent indications that men are taking on more household chores, women continue to assume the majority of the household and child rearing responsibilities, even when both parents work. In fact, several studies have shown that gender roles become more traditional after the birth of the first child. It has been argued that the changing family and gender role attitudes indicate a weakening of traditional rules and values that used to offer well defined roles for husbands as the breadwinner and their wives as the homemaker.
