Running a home and a family is busy work, I think most of us will agree.
And unfortunately, in the vast majority of families, women still carry the absolute brunt of work involving children and keeping the home clean and in order. This despite that in most families, mothers with young children now also work outside the home during the day.
A little infuriating? Wait till you hear this: According to a new study, which was published recently in the journal Sex Roles, while mums are taking care of their children or doing chores around the house, their partners are usually relaxing.
Yup, relaxing.
It was researchers at Ohio State University that looked at more than 50 highly educated, dual-earner couples to try to determine what dads and mums each get up to on their days off. And what they found (sigh) was that men, on average, are spending 101 minutes in leisure on their day off—about twice as much as the 46 to 49 minutes per day women have to themselves.
What this means, mamas, is that when dads are in charge of either housework or childcare, us mamas aren’t fully taking advantage of the time to relax, because we’re often still caring for their kids or doing chores. In other words, men are having fun 46 percent of the time their partners are busy with childcare, while women are only relaxing 16 percent of the time men have daddy duties.
Sounds familiar?
This pattern was repeated when it came to household chores too, with men taking 35 percent of their time off when women were in charge, but women only took 19 percent of their time off when men were in charge.
This discrepancy, the researchers theorise, might boil down to decreased pressure to get things done on the weekends. This is what assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Jill Yavorsky, had to say about the study:
“On non-workdays, parents are more evenly splitting housework and childcare,” Yavorsky explains. “It’s very much ‘all hands on deck,’ but when there is more time available on the weekend and parents are not so pressed to get everything done, then we see the emergence of gendered patterns and inequality where women do a lot more housework and childcare while he leisures.”
What do YOU think, parents? Does this reflect life in YOUR house? And are dads solely to blame, or do us mums need to learn to step back and stop micro-managing so much? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
