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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Honestly, all of this is made easier if mom stays home with the children and dad makes more money to compensate. I know it’s an unpopular sentiment, but most women would feel much less resentment if they dropped work to focus their efforts (when the children are young) on raising them and let their DH work harder to cover the bills.[/quote]

The problem with this is once upon a time when women stayed home, they viewed their role as "homemaker" and that job description included everything: Care for children, keep the house clean and orderly, fix the meals.

Today's young women define this role as "SAHM" with the emphasis on the "M." They think their duty is only to look after the children during the hours that their husband is working or commuting but that he should immediately step in for 50% on all of the other tasks. They bristle at the "homemaker" label -- basically they are invested in intensive mothering; so, basically, they want to be a nanny or governess to their own children. The rest of the duties that used to be embedded in the role are beneath them and either need to be outsourced or shared equally.[/quote]

Uh, women did all the childcare and housework 24/7 (including physically caring for their husbands like they were children -- cooking for them, cleaning them, washing their clothes, running their errands, even bathing and grooming them sometimes) because they were oppressed, had no economic power and no political rights, and were viewed as the property of their fathers and husbands. Not because the really "embraced the role" of homemaker. But because if they failed to perform the role, their husbands might abandon them and they were not allowed to do most jobs or own property or have bank accounts, plus rape wasn't even illegal except as a violation of another man's property rights so they'd be very vulnerable.

The good old days. When women would cook and clean and tend to children all day, and then the second their husbands came home, tend to him while continuing to cook and clean until bedtime, while their husbands with "real jobs" replaced after a hard day of work.

Yeah, it's so weird that women today are not eager to return to that set up, I wonder why.[/quote]

But ... they want a "shell" of that that set-up. They only want the intensive mothering bit. Which is insanely easy. Easiest job ever. So, really, they're just lazy. The ones who continue to do this when their children are in elementary school are the laziest of them all.  It would be different if they embraced the actual job description of a homemaker.[/quote]

But men want the whole set up. They want to go to work and then come home and do nothing. Men expect this whether their wives work outside the home or not. Whether the kids are toddlers or teens.  They do not believe that the work of childcare outside their working hours should be evenly divided. EVEN if both people worked all day (whether that work was for pay or unpaid wiping of butts and preparing snacks and all that).

Women who have husbands with this attitude (which is most husbands) are stuck. If they work, they will still be expected to do the majority of childcare/housework outside of work hours. Sometimes this is justified by "I make more money" or "my job is harder" or "I work longer hours." But usually not.

On the other hand, if they SAHM, they may have more time to do all the tasks they will be expected to do anyway. But they are expected to work 24/7, because men like you think being a SAHM is easy. You don't understand what is so hard about childcare that she can't also keep the house perfectly tidy and do all the administrative stuff too. What's she doing all day? No really, you have no idea, having never cared for kids full time. What IS she doing all day? So even if she spends the entire day working, you still expect her to do the vast majority of the after-work childcare/household responsibilities because, after all, she doesn't have a "real job" like you (nevermind if your job actually involves a lot of sitting, downtime, and socializing with colleagues and clients, things that could easily be called easy when compared to the hardest parts of what even a SAHM of school age kids does).

Which is why the only "solution" anyone has ever found to this is outsourcing a lot of the childcare and housework so that the couple can divide what is left. But most families can't afford that.

Is there ANY situation in which you actually believe that a man should do 50% (or more!) of the childcare/housework/household admin? I bet no. That's women's work.[/quote]

Um, not most men. My father wasn't like this. My husband isn't like this. I know plenty of men who aren't like this.

I also know men who do more than 50% at home because their wives' careers are more intense or they have other issues going on. [/quote]

It's comments like the ones you're responding to that make these complaints hard to take seriously. We have data; we know what "most men" do. They don't come home and do "nothing" they come home and do less, but they also work more. The issue, if there is one, is about distribution, not that either party is doing "nothing." Overall, we're all doing about the same amount.[/quote]

[b]No, we have data showing that men increase women’s domestic labor. [/b]Also it’s well known that men hide at work to avoid coming home to take care of kids. [/quote]

1) We most certainly do have data showing that between paid work, household work, and caregiving men and women do similar amounts of work in a week. You might not like it, but you can just say "no."
2) We do have data that women in married households do more household work than women in other types of households. Some other data showed men doing less, but there's also data that shows that married men do more household work than single men. The 2022 ATUS data showed men doing a bit over 30 minutes more of household activity per day if they were married and living with their spouse than if they were single (or married but living apart from their spouse). Would you call that "data that women increase men's domestic labor"?
3) I know nothing about men hiding at work to avoid coming home to kids. I don't do it, I don't know a man who does it (all the dads at my office check out early to take do school pick up, actually, but it's a small office). I do think it's funny, though, that time use data about women's housework and childcare is reliable, but the same data about men doing paid labor isn't. Convenient. [/quote]

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/husbands-create-extra-seven-hours-of-housework-a-week-a6885951.html

[b]Dude we ALL know men aren’t making it up by actually working more at the office.[/b] Maybe “working” but not actually working. [/quote]

I'm telling you what the data shows, which you seem to admit since you need to create a story of men pretending to work to explain it away. Meanwhile your link shows that women and men both do more housework when they're married, exactly like I said.

I've got nothing personally invested in this particular issue. I'm lucky enough to be a man who doesn't have a job that takes a ton of time, so I do way more than 50% of the housework/childcare without complaint. Organizing stuff for my kids is incredibly rewarding and not very difficult. The real "dad privilege" I have is that I get to make my family dinner, pick camps, drive my kids to music lessons, and help out with their scout troops. I just think we have to be honest about the data, which is not what's happening in this conversation.[/quote]

DP[b] but the data shows that married men with kids spend the most time on both paid work, unpaid work, and leisure.[/b] Which seems impossible-- do these men have more hours in the day? How can they be doing more of both?

One explanation is that some of their extra level sure time is coming AT work, that they are lingering at the office to socialize or engaging in leisure activities on the way home, in ways women do not. The studies don't say this is what is happening, but they also don't clearly say it's not happening.[/quote]

It doesn't show that. It shows that men spend more time on leisure and paid work than women and married men spend more time on unpaid work than unmarried men, not that they spend more time on unpaid work than women. Women do more unpaid work and men more paid work.

If we're comparing married men to married women:
Men do more paid work
Women do more housework and childcare
These two numbers combined add up to around the same number of hours in a week
Men spend more time on leisure
Women spend more time on "personal care" (sleeping is a lot of this in terms of gender difference, but so is dressing and grooming oneself, rather than caring for other family members)

Everyone gets the same number of hours, men aren't double counting hours spent at the office as leisure time. The data can't show how actively anyone is working, but it also can't show how actively anyone is doing childcare either. [/quote]

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