This weekend I read a New York Times Magazine article about couples who attempt to achieve 'equally shared parenting.' Ok, fine, that's nice - but what really stood out was this statistic:
"the average wife does 31 hours of housework a week while the average husband does 14"
That's appalling from a gender-relations standpoint, it really is - but right now I'm not thinking about that. No, right now I'm thinking, "45 hours of housework PER WEEK?!" No matter how you divide it up that's just awful. That's more time than I spend at work. If I hired someone to do all that I'd be paying them overtime!
And so I embark on an experiment. For the next week or so I'm going to track how much housework I actually do and report back here. And it had better not be 31 hours - or anything approaching that.
4 comments:
That does seem high - children add a lot to the average numbers I'm sure. Meals alone would be about 10 hours a week I'd guess (including lunches at home). Dishes, garbage, grocery shopping, sweeping, mopping, laundry, gardening and lawn maintenace, general cleaning and upkeep - that's got to be at least another 15 hours for us (think macaroni smeared on the table, chairs and floor). I'll be interested in seeing your results.
What gets included?
Auto fillup, tire pressure/oil check, taking car in for routine maintenance?
Yard work?
Grocery shopping?
Checking the mail?
Paying the bills?
Making investment decisions? Figuring your taxes?
Fruit picking?
Packing for a trip out of town?
Buying and wrapping presents, and/or selecting cards and mailing them?
Keeping in touch with family and friends by email? By phone?
Brushing your teeth?
Going to the dentist?
I think "housework" is a very fuzzy set.
Or is "housework" just keeping the house clean, laundry done, and family fed?
Loyal Reader
Seriously. In a lot of ways my guy and I have it easy housework-wise: no kids, no pets, we both eat lunch at work and aren't really prone to huge complicated breakfasts. And we eat out a lot. And we have wood floors, which I find much much easier to care for than carpet.... This does explain why I'm such a fan of online grocery shopping, though, and have been so pleased that my guy has found grocery stores he actually enjoys shopping at.
Fuzzy set? Yes, but if you think of it as house/home maintenance, rather than life maintenance, it gets simpler.... I'm using "could I easily hire someone to do this" as a rough guideline.
I did hire someone to do this. So we have eliminated pure cleaning, which leaves only daily dishes (thirty minutes to load and unload, not counting running time) and picking up flotsam. I don't count walking the dog, but I guess one could. We also outsourced laundry, so there's just driving over to drop off and pick up.
But I think even with outsourcing and indifference (never underestimate indifference), and not counting pet walking but counting birdcage changing, we're probably still at a collective fifteen hours a week- probably ten for me and five for L. But that is due largely to my noticing things and caring more.
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