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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][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]

You think the data shows that men do their fair share? It absolutely does not. [/quote]

I'm not offering an opinion on what is or isn't a fair share, just stating what the data shows in terms of work done. I'm defining that based on the American Time Use Study's categories, counting paid work, household activities (cooking, cleaning, feeding pets, etc.) and caring for other household members (primarily childcare but there's some time spent caring for adult members, too). This doesn't count leisure time, nor does it count personal care and sleep, which vary by gender, but my original comment in this thread was in response to descriptions of men as "lazy."

Looking at that data, and focusing on households with children where both people work, because this is a parenting site and the thread is about dads.

[b]Households with children under six[/b]
[i]Household Activities[/i]
Men: 1.36 hours
Women: 1.95 hours
[i]Caring for other household members[/i]
Men: 1.48 hours
Women: 2.40 hours
[i]Paid Work[/i]
Men: 5.95 hours
Women: 4.82 hours
[i]Total[/i]
Men: 8.79 hours
Women: 9.17 hours

[b]Households with children between six and 17[/b]
[i]Household Activities[/i]
Men: 1.30 hours
Women: 1.82 hours
[i]Caring for other household members[/i]
Men: .57 hours
Women: .97 hours
[i]Paid Work[/i]
Men: 6.48 hours
Women: 4.96 hours
[i]Total[/i]
Men: 8.35 hours
Women: 7.75 hours

As I said, that data absolutely shows that men spend less time on housework and childcare than women, but it also shows they spend more time on paid work. I think it shows overall, that both sexes do about the same amount of work (considering both paid and unpaid work) in households with kids. Women do a little more when kids are younger, men do a little more when kids are older, but neither difference is huge. That's why I think that, if there is an issue, its one of distribution. No one is being lazy; everyone is working.
[/quote]

There are some limits to aggregate data here. It smooths out variation within a group. There are absolutely lazy men. There are also lazy women. This data doesn't really tell us much about how actual families work, nor what happens in a family when one partner or the other is lazy. As a group, men and women are both working. But this obviously might not ring true for individuals because individuals are not statistics.

This is why you are getting push back. Yes, it's worthwhile to "look at the data." But you are looking exclusively at aggregated data that only tells us what "the average" family is doing. That family does not actually exist. If you did a qualitative study and looked at individual family units, would you find that in families where fathers work less (both paid and unpaid work), mothers work more (both paid and unpaid work)? I guarantee you would. And likely the reverse is true as well -- in families where mothers report doing less paid and unpaid work, men likely report more. Now what percent of families have women doing more than men, and what percent have men doing more than women? And how big is the gap? Those are interesting questions but we cannot answer them based on this data.

As this thread has shown, there is quite a bit of variation in terms of how equal the allocation of childcare and household is in a given family. Some people on the thread report that their allocation is completely equal, others report a very unequal division of labor. Factors such as whether both parents work and their financial ability to outsource work play a huge role as well. [b]There is no "average family." Which means it's actually perfectly possible for there to be a problem with equality in families and not be able to identify it using a time use study like the one you are referencing.[/b][/quote]

The bolded is awfully convenient, because a dozen pages ago people were crowing about how time use studies proved all of this was true (without any citation to actual data). When the data shows something different, it becomes insufficient. The aggregate data absolutely shows what's true at a societal level; if the types of families that people are complaining about here were common it would show up in the aggregate data. Obviously there will be individual variation, but if we're going to talk about groups we're not talking about individual variation. [/quote]

PP here and I wasn't one of them. These time use studies are most useful in terms of showing us aggregate trends in populations over time. So comparing time use of men and women in the 1990s versus 2020s might tell us some things about social shifts. And even there they are limited. Social trends can vary based on socioeconomics, geographies, professions, etc. An aggregated study will not show any of this.

I think some segments of the populations have made great strides in gender equality in marriages, and others less so. [/quote]

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