Science has confirmed what a lot of us always suspected.
Picture this: A day at the park and Daddy is pushing the kids on the swings and racing them to the slide. What fun!
Cut to mum in the corner; feeding the baby, doing head-counts on repeat, preparing the picnic, re-hatting children and shouting ‘careful, careful!’
Parenting is very rewarding, but ultimately quite stressful too. And fun-loving dads don’t always know what all the fuss is about – because just about everything is great craic. That’s not to take anything away from dads – it is just a different approach.
But as mums we have science on our side – a study carried out at the Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, and Minnesota Population Centre has found that parenting is more stress and fatigue for mums.
Researchers discovered that mums spend more time dedicated to childcare chores, more solo parenting, face more disturbed sleep and less time on their own activities. This can lead to increased stress.
Dads, on the other hand, spend more time playing and getting involved with the lower stress activities with their children. And when it came to newborns, mums felt even more under pressure.
According to the American Sociological Review, a group of 12,000 parents in America were surveyed over three years. They found mums were more stressed out because the balance of kid chores to enjoyable kid interactions was way off when compared to dads. Kelly Musick is the co-author of the study, she says parenting methods are simply woven into mums and dads differently;
“Mothers are doing different things with their children than fathers are, things that we know aren’t as enjoyable. Playing with their kids is a particularly enjoyable experience for parents. And dads are doing more play as a share of the total amount of time they spend with their kids.”
This isn’t to diss any dads – the majority of those we know jump right into the chaos alongside their partners. However, recommendations of the study include a focus on support systems for mums in order to de-stress. Hear, hear!
