Who does more, mommies or daddies?
The answer is both, according to Changing Rhythms of American Family Life by Suzanne M. Bianchi, John P. Robinson and Melissa A. Milkie, a trio of sociologists at the University of Maryland.
According to the authors, while women work outside the home, they still devote about twice as much time to housework and child-rearing as men. The flip side is that men today are doing close to three times as much child-rearing as their fathers did.
"I didn't need a study to tell me that," says Ruben Navarrette Jr. "When I get off work, my wife -- who has been home all day with our 2-year-old daughter -- naturally expects some relief. And that's what I provide."
According to Bianchi,
In the literature, there has been an overemphasis on what men aren't doing and maybe a failure to pay attention to what they increasingly are doing.
In 2000, dads spent an average of 6.5 hours a week on child care activities. That's up from the 2.6 hours a week that dads devoted to child care in 1965, back in the days when taking care of the kids was often lumped together with other kinds of ``women's work.'' For married mothers, the time spent on child care activities increased to an average of 12.9 hours a week in 2000, from 10.6 hours in 1965.
Now think about that figure a minute. Far more women work outside the home now than did in 1965, yet women spend more time on child care activities today than they did 40 years ago. What that tells me is that we spend much more time with our kids today than our parents spent with us. That's not to be disrespectful of our parents, but I think there are far greater expectations today that parents will spend every waking minute with their kids and doing things with their kids than our parents thought to do.
My husband and I were discussing this very thing yesterday just before the annual parent-teacher conferences. Our son, who is very bright but not very mature, has had problems with organization and staying on task completing his work. I've spent this fall focusing on helping him adjust to his new responsibilities and assignments. It seems to have worked and he is now much more capable of remembering his homework, which books he needs, looking ahead to future assignments, and so on.
But the amount of time and patience needed to get him to this point, 12 weeks into the semester, was far greater than I remember my parents spending on my siblings or me. In short, parenting has become a much more hands-on endeavor than in previous generations. This could explain, at least in part, why women seem to be doing so much more child care-related activities even though they are doing so much more outside the home as well.
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