Equal-Split Parenting

I my expereince the driver of women’s greater share of HH work is women’s lower tolerance of HH mess.

Most good men will gladly agree to split HH work 50/50, in principle. And they’ll really intend to do it.

But a man might have a dirt tolerance that says the bathroom needs to be cleaned every 10 days, while a woman might prefer every 5 days. This means that the man will gladly clean the bathroom, but it just won’t occur to him to do so until the 10 days are up.

Meanwhile, over those 10 days, the woman is uncomfortable in the bathroom for the latter 5. This leaves her with two options:

1) Clean the bathroom herself after, say, 6 days.
2) Nag her partner to clean it.

Nagging is unpleasant to do, of course, and can create broader relationship problems. So what often ends up happening is that, at least some of the time, the woman will just clean it herself, thereby basically taking the chore from the man. This leaves her doing more than an even share of the HH chores.

If you asked me why women have a different mess tolerance than men, I’d posit socialization – that women are tought from an early age to value domestic order. This suggests that inequal HH chore sharing sits deeper in our society than just ‘men are lazy’.

As far as practical advice, I guess there are two ways to deal with this:

1) Partner up with someone with a similar mess tolerance to you (e.g. my current girlfriend. We both have a pretty high mess-tolerance. Moreover, she has a higher need for a clean bathroom than I, I have a higher need for a clean rest-of-the-place, so we end up splitting chores fairly well.)
2) Assign chores in such a way that the mess-tolerance-differential will not be a problem – for instance, the man could be assigned to bill payment, car maintenance, child-picking-up, and cooking, the woman to cleaning and repair. Or whatever.

“exploiting nannies (and maids)”–the assumption seems to be that hiring a nanny and/or maid necessarily is exploiting them. Why, if they are paid decently & treated decently?

Absolutely right, adoherty, its not exploiting when they are paid and treated decently. The extremely high turnover in both occupations, and the data, suggest that’s rare.

Is it me, by the way, or is the bar being set pretty low by someone who thinks that making lasagna for dinner is incredibly different. It’s an unbelievably fire-and-forget dish to cook.

Part of the problem is that, even when chores are assigned to certain people, they may not get done: “Honey, how do I do this?” “Oops; sorry; I ruined your piece of clothing.” On one hand, this whole thing is/was so important to me that it was one of my major criteria–I had no desire to be the mommy for someone I hadn’t birthed or adopted (or, in the case of my current situation, stepparented)–and I realized early on that it was, indeed, major. Part of it is the mess tolerance that Andrew mentioned, but it’s also the case that many men had their mothers, former girlfriends, etc., clean up after them for a damned long time–such that they’re pretty clueless about what, exactly, is involved in even minimal housekeeping.

OTOH, a close friend was talking about divorcing his wife over this issue–and she was the one who didn’t pitch in, recognize dirt, etc.

“Absolutely right, adoherty, its not exploiting when they are paid and treated decently. The extremely high turnover in both occupations, and the data, suggest that’s rare.”

Why? There could be dozens of reasons for high turnover. .

If they are paid decently, they will probably still eventually want to stop caring for other people’s children and washing people’s bathtubs and perhaps gain a job with better hours and better pay. Sigh… The American Dream!

But that doesn’t mean they weren’t being decently paid for their hours of work and skill set. If you paid a live-in domestic servant minimum wage (where I come from that’s not horrendus) and didn’t deduct anything for her food or living expenses, she could save quite a bit of money. Such a woman would probably have a net year-end income higher than mine.

Though I do suspect that many domestic servants ARE being exploited, namely on the job hours front, if not also on the pay front.

Is it me, by the way, or is the bar being set pretty low by someone who thinks that making lasagna for dinner is incredibly different. It’s an unbelievably fire-and-forget dish to cook.

Which part of “go for the slackers” are you having trouble with?! As a(n unattached, incidentally, ladies!) slacker, the thought that anyone would snub a nice meal just because it was insufficiently complicated to prepare is completely baffling to me.

(“No, we’re having Venezualan bat-tongue vol-au-vents with caramelised camel-snot. Tastes horribly, but it’s unbelievably fiddly to make! You did pick up the kids on your way home, didn’t you?”)

And yes, I think that household tasks and child-related tasks raise different issues, and find inequality in the former much harder to evaluate. Some people enter the union with particular domestic expertise which make a particular division of labour more efficient. And for some people some domestic work is leisure. Of course, that sounds sexist when it’s women doing it all, but here are two examples: I love vaccuuming which helps me think when I’m stuck with a problem, and love making the kid’s breakfast. The vaccuming is not a household task by my lights, and I’d feel deprived if I couldn’t do the kids’ breakfasts. Do they count as part of my 50% or should we discount them?

Harry, I feel the same way about breakfasts; I love making pancakes and waffles and omelets, and would be annoyed if I thought it necesary to “share” that task with my wife. Melissa feels the same way about bread-making and (to a lesser degree) laundry; it’s theraputic and important to her, and she wouldn’t stand for me intruding on her “responsibilities” there (unless of course she was down with a sickness).

I think Daniel is overestimating the amount of time parents have at their disposal even if they stay at home all day. There is no such thing as a free hour (or a free 15 minutes for that matter) when a two year old is wandering the house. As I quickly type this comment I am running the risk that my two year old daughter has grown bored of reading a book to her doll and is now disassembling the entire bookcase, which is a fine activity insofar as it doesn’t involve ripping the pages out of daddy’s books.

On these threads I always point out that childraising is tremendously costly in time and money and not an economically rational activity. The kid is a free individual at 18 and goes away and all you have is the memory of raising the kid. Some kids are nice, some not, but economically individuals A and B have given a lot to individual C with no hope of return.

Which is just to say that childraising is communitarian and not individualistic. Since I think that economic rationality is a noxious way of making personal lifestyle choices, I’m cool with childraising, which I’ve done.

The nanny problem is just the same old economic-class problem. Has the nanny had to renounce having children? Does she have children she’s neglecting? Does she have a sub-nanny back in Mexico or across town? — often the answer is yes to that one. Only if the mother’s work is valued significantly more highly than the nanny’s does hiring one make sense.

Not to go all sociobiological on you, but more women than men seem to have a nesting-instinct-type trait. But many gay men do seem to have it. Possibly another solution for career women there.

2 years ago friend of mine observing a role-reversed couple concluded that a couple needs to have one husband and one wife, and that in this case the man was functioning as wife — looking to the woman when serious questions were asked, etc.

On the other hand, are role-reversed men sexy? to the extent that the old-fashioned desire for an intense, larger-than-life Zorba / Heathcliff man is a factor, the slacker out isn’t going to work.

Renouncing respectability and normality really helps a lot, but you do find that it costs you. Some seemingly-rational people really do have serious problems with people who drive old, ugly, imperfect cars and wear out-of-style, slightly-worn clothing. In the US, anyway.

Why be satisfied with lasagna? Go for the guy whop will make you chocolate cake…

Medievalist – Arlie Russell Hochschild talks about how “gender codes” affect how men and women treat housework. A couple can split household labor evenly but often they give different meanings to the housework done by the opposite partner. For example, when men do housework they often treat it as a gift to their wives. They do the laundry so they expect some sort of special acknowledgment for their willingness to help. Women rarely expect nor receive special acknowledgment for household labor because it is not perceived as a “gift” but as a duty.

These set of meanings are not applicable to every household. If a couple has a genuine egalitarian relationship, they give in other ways. But I think it’s fair to say that in a majority of U.S. households, men’s household labor is still interpreted as a kind of “gift” to the wife.

Harumph. After a week together, I found out that my then girlfriend and present wife had a far lower threshold than I when it came to the quality and diversity of meals. It took most of a year before I realised that she had a much higher threshold for messes too.

Sure it’s “50/50” split. She makes 70% of the money and cleans the bathroom. I do all the shopping, all the cooking, all the dishes, everything to do with the kitchen (she hasn’t yet mastered putting garbage in the garbage can instead of the counter, much less taking the garbage out) and nearly all of the laundry. Plus, I have to deal with everything that involves public services or dealing with non-English speaking clerks since she can’t speak French or Dutch.

Perversely, I get a kick out the role reversal.

What makes an even split impossible is the impossibility of doing the necesary accounting or living up to each other’s standards. There are households where the men do the housework and there are households where the women do the housework. There are no households where all the chores get split 50/50.

Here’s a question though: Is it acceptable if the man doesn’t do 50% of the chores, if he works three times the hours (and makes eight times the money, though that is neither here nor there) as his wife?

And yes, I’m a lawyer and my wife’s an academic.

Good point. Maybe I mentioned the money because (1) I believe that it IS relevant to the contribution each spouse makes to the family, but (2) I understand that my wife finds this opinion to be unacceptable, and that financial contribution should be completely discounted when apportioning household responsibilities due to the fact that many people cannot control the monetary value assigned to their labors.

As for kids, there are none as of yet. She does have a half-dozen or so times every year when she is working long days getting out an article or chapter, but during those times I either clear my schedule to take care of the household, or explain that if we’re both working 18 hours a day, only those chores that will result in physical harm to us or our dog need to be done.

The problem with treating family organization as a glorious adventure in customized, creative relationship engineering is that most people draw their ideas about appropriate family structure from the culture around them. And in today’s culture, which is the larger-scale, more pressing problem?

1) “Non-slacker” fathers who have been socialized to believe that contributing to the housework isn’t important; or

2) “Slacker” fathers who have been socialized to believe that materially supporting their sexual partners and children isn’t important?

(A more elaborate version of this rant can be found here)

My husband and I are both wage slaves (he’s a bookkeeper, I’m a secretary at one job and a singer at the other). We definitely have a very even split for childcare, but we are both horrible slackers when it comes to housework, choosing to do things like read or put together a puzzle or play a game or check out some blogs, or even watch some TV. We do the minimum we need to do to keep our house from being disgusting or subject to health inspection. I really like a neat house, I love to see miles of clear counters and I would love to sit down to dinner without having to move some books or papers off the table first, but frankly, between working 50+ hours a week and having children who are involved in some activities, I don’t have the time or inclination to keep the house as neat as I would like.

MQ: I agree that these phenomena are different, but I don’t believe they can be treated completely separately. Both influence, and are influenced by, societal norms, assumptions and expectations. And they thus may be more connected than you suggest.

For example, as it becomes more acceptable for men to give up their breadwinning responsibilities, the arguments for doing so can be (mis)used by irresponsible, immature men, and are harder for the less strong-willed among their partners to refute. The arguments don’t have to be justified in any particular case–their widespread implicit acceptance alone may be enough.

Dan: you seem to have a certain amount of paranoia or insecurity about the male gender role here — that if it changes or is redefined in any way then it will collapse entirely and men will turn into feckless boys. In particular, men are so weak that unless they are in an authoritarian breadwinner role in the family norms supporting male responsibility will collapse altogether. But taking the primary role in caring for the children and the household is easily recognizable as a form of responsibility. The key seems to me to be responsibility vs. irresponsibility. Both men and women would still be able to valorize responsibility as sexy in a world where some men stayed home with the kids. I mean, there is always the possibility that you are right about men, but I like to think of my sex as a little broader than you are depicting.

To others: looking at the posts above I see we have some lousy cooks represented among the comments. To make good lasagana, you should make your own tomato sauce and also pre-cook the vegetables and meat. Plus add other spices or sauce for some recipes. Only then do you get to “stick it in the oven”. Good lasagna is just as hard to make as any other baked dish. My conclusion is that none of you deserve to marry a hot, sexy career woman.

“for real lasagna, you also have to make your own bechamel”

What, not tomato sauce?

Daniel, did you have to start this lasagne thread?

bq. Elizabeth Anderson makes this point explaining why, for example, firefighters ought to get paid for the socially-valuable work they do, and compensated for the extra danger nad health hazards, even if it is true that they are adrenaline junkies and love their work. We’re not paying them for their pleasure, but for the work.

I know Anderson’s argument, and see its force, from the outside as it were. But I find it harder to feel the force from the inside. ‘Oh yes, I know I enjoy vaccuming and you hate putting out the trash, but they’re both work, so its ok that I am doing better than you’ What if we both hate putting out the trash, and she hates vaccuming? I’m not really arguing the point, just musing.

djw — I didn’t mean to accuse you of accusing me of fetishizing the nuclear family — it was more a consideration of a self-accusation.

The points abut different thresholds that people have made are absolutely right — my own mess and dirt threshold is much higher than my spouse’s and I don’t see that as a character flaw. But sometimes we stay in homes where women do *all* the domestic work (that is, all the necessary domestic work — the men might have DIY as their dangerous hobby, but that’s different). Mary Wollstonecraft has a lovely passage about the indignity of having other people do one’s own self-reproductive labor for one, and I am moved by that. Let alone the millions of men who, apparently, *don’t know how* to do self-reproductive tasks. Its only a less extreme version of Prince Charles needing someone else’s help to pee. So, sympathetic as I am to people whose paid-work splits are very uneven wanting to compensate with an uneven unpaid work split there does seem to be something undignified (to me anyway) about having someone else do all of one’s washing cooking and cleaning. In our 12 years of marriage there have been 3 when I was paid-working more hours, and about 7 (so far, and presumably the rest from now till retirement) when she is paid-working more hours. I’ve done more than half the HH work during most of those 7, and I was very uncomfortable in the 3 with her doing more of it. I think this is why lots of people are very uncomfortable with outsourcing house cleaning. (And, yes, as Laura suggests, I think the income is completely irrelevant to the indignity of having someone else clean up after one — we both regard how many hours we work and what jobs we have and what courses we take etc as collective decisions. And the higher earner, longer hour worker, is enhancing his own future earning power and depending for the conditions on his life on someone whose earning power is not being enhanced).

Russell — thanks for linking to this. I have to confess that the daily breakfast is usually porridge (waffles etc are for special occasions), but it is porridge which my daughters declare that only I can make properly, and (for Daniel’s interest) is an absolute bugger to make (and for the interest of the Irish contingent is Irish — I’m trying to keep all the CTers happy).

Lasagna is certainly not difficult, but it is time consuming – when I come home at 5:30pm, I need to have dinner on the table within an hour or my younger child won’t make it to bed on time. And I’ve never made tomato sauce – my sister makes huge batches of it and gives me some in exchange for babysitting services.

My mother boiled everything, so I had to learn how to cook at least a little if I wanted to avoid eating things that tasted like hot water. When I say everything, I mean everything. We frequently had boiled chicken for dinner.

I am bewildered by the idea that there’s something inherently morally wrong with having other people do a portion of one’s housework and/or childcare–even if they are paid well & treated well. Why? People (like Caitlin Flanagan) seem to be accepting that idea & saying gee, I wish I could be as holy as Barbara Ehrenreich who “doesn’t want that kind of relationship with another person.” What kind of relationship–employer to employee? What’s the difference between hiring someone to clean the kitchen floor & hiring someone to type (or to draft a will, for that matter)? Is there a philosopher out there who can explain this–I’m genuinely confused. If it doesn’t degrade me to clean a toilet (and I don’t think it does), then I fail to see how it degrades someone else (provided they are paid properly, etc.)

I don’t know what depresses me more; the idea that someone is out there not only putting vegetables into lasagna but boasting about it, or the (probably true) fact that most of our readers would need a recipe to make tomato sauce.