Moms bring home the bacon, fry it up, and still clean the pan

Tagged with: food, kindergarten, mom

Betsy Shaw

posted in Mom Stories

We’ve seen statistics like this before, but reading the U.S. Department of Labor’s 2011 American Time Use Survey sure casts a bright light on how we spend our time.

According to the survey, women spend an average of 1.1 hours physically caring for children under six, while men spend an average of 26 minutes on childcare tasks.

If that sounds like an impossibly small amount of time, note that there is something called “secondary childcare,” which might explain where the rest of the time we know we are spending in the presence of our children goes:

Adults living in households with at least one child under age 6 spent
an average of 5.5 hours per day providing secondary childcare–that is,
they had at least one child in their care while doing activities other
than primary childcare. Secondary childcare provided by adults living
in households with children under age 6 was most commonly provided while
doing leisure activities (2.2 hours) or household activities (1.3
hours).

I’m envisioning every family member practicing parallel play, rather than face-to-face play, each with his or her own hand-held device. But I know there is more to family life than that. Right?

Another interesting statistic highlights time spent doing household activities. Women, it seems, despite bringing home the bacon, are still the ones cooking that bacon, then cleaning the pan after dinner:

-On an average day, 83 percent of women and 65 percent of men spent some
time doing household activities such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or
financial and other household management. On the days that they did household activities, women spent an average of 2.6 hours on such activities, while men spent 2.1 hours.

More numbers here include the fact that 19 percent of men engaged in housework chores, such as cleaning and doing laundry on an average day, compared with 48 percent of women. When it came to food preparation and cleanup, 40 percent of men did it vs. 66 percent of women.

To be fair, men, on average, are still spending more hours at work:

–On the days that they worked, employed men worked 47 minutes more
than employed women. This difference partly reflects women’s greater
likelihood of working part time. However, even among full-time workers
(those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer
than women–8.3 hours compared with 7.8 hours.

But….if we want to play the game of who-works-harder pingpong, men seem to be devoting more time to leisure activities than women:

Of those who engaged in leisure activities, socializing, watching TV, men spent more time in these activities (5.8 hours) than did women (5.2 hours). Men were a little more likely than women to participate in sports, exercise, or recreation on any given day–20 percent compared with 17 percent. On the days that they participated, men also spent more time in these activities than did women–1.9 hours compared with 1.3 hours.

Now that I have my husband back, I would have to say these statistics, other than the one about time spent working, don’t represent our family at all. The man outdoes me on all fronts when it comes to housework (inside and out), physical childcare, face-to-face time with children– while I was sleeping last Sunday morning, he had helped Isla write a perfectly written thank you note to her former Kindergarten teacher, and practiced soccer with Esther, WTF?– I outdo him, meaning I spend more time at socializing and doing recreational sports, while he admittedly spends more time, I spend virtually none, watching TV.

Do these statistics reflect your family?

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