DailyViews: Editorial

Mom’s work is never done

On a day when Americans celebrate motherhood, it’s a good time to look at some of the numbers that go with wedding vows and having children.

For instance, when a woman marries, she might feel that, in addition to a husband, she’s picked up quite a bit of extra work. And when the couple have children, she might feel like that extra workload is even heavier.

According to University of Michigan researchers, her suspicions would be correct.

The university’s Institute for Social Research found that in 2005, U.S. wives picked up an extra seven hours of housework after they said “I do.”

Meanwhile, becoming a husband meant a bonus hour for men who had been devoting those particular 60 minutes a week to doing household chores.

The University of Michigan has been studying this issue since 1968, and the numbers in the study it released last month were based on 2005 time-diary data collected by the federally funded Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Chores such as cooking, cleaning and other basic housework were counted, while tasks such as washing the car, making home repairs and gardening were excluded.

“It’s a well known pattern,” said ISR economist Frank Stafford, who directed the study. “There’s still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage — men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor. Certainly there are all kinds of individual differences here, but, in general, this is what happens after marriage. And the situation gets worse for women when they have children.”

The study found that women who have more than three children log in about 28 hours of a housework a week, compared to 10 hours for men with more than three children.

But if these numbers have you longing for the good ol’ days, you might want to rethink that. While the women in the study averaged 17 hours a week in housework, that was far below the 26 hours a week they averaged 30 years ago. And men have begun picking up a fairer share of the workload in that period, going from an average of six hours of housework a week in 1976 to 13 hours a week in 2005.

The study noted some other interesting findings, including:

• Single women in their 20s and 30s did the least housework, about 12 hours a week.
• Married women in their 60s and 70s did the most housework per week, averaging 21 hours.
• Older men do more housework than younger men.
• Single men do more housework than married men regardless of age.
• For the 10-year period of 1995-2006, both men and women who got married over that period did more housework than their counterparts who stayed single.

“Marriage is no longer a man’s path to less housework,” Stafford said.

So, maybe in addition to flowers and cards, husbands and children might want to consider a gift of chipping in a little more on the household chores. It appears moms all over the country sure could use the break.

The Albany Herald Editorial Board

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