 |
March
2006
|
 |
Women’s work, men’s work? |
|
Sharing household chores leads to harmony
|
|
James
Pankratz
Special to Parenting |
|
Here’s a short quiz on child raising:
1. What household chores should be assigned to girls?
2. What household chores should be assigned to boys?
How you answer the quiz will reveal what you believe about important questions of family life, such as autonomy vs. dependence, gender biases, and etiquette.
Etiquette?
As I was researching last month’s article on manners, I came across a recent book by Peter Post, a descendant of Emily Post, called “Essential Manners for Men.” His book really has nothing to do with questions of where to place the salad fork, how to fold linen napkins, or when a man should wear a top hat and tails. By the way, have you ever seen a man (who was not in a movie) actually wearing a top hat and tails?
Post’s approach is more practical. He began by gathering information through a survey in which he asked questions about how people view men’s behavior. It should be no surprise that 86 percent of the respondents were women, and that 73 percent of them were living with a male partner, either married or unmarried.
In summary, the female respondents wanted more help in key areas of running the household.
Post has a chapter titled “Two Rooms That Can Make or Break Your Home Life.” Can you guess which rooms they are?
Here’s a hint: What two rooms are constantly being messed up by the human beings who use them? You got it: the kitchen and the bathroom.
The bathroom may be the smallest room in your house, but it is the site of the greatest traffic jams in the morning and evening. Post zeros in on the bathroom sink and offers two practical tips: clean the sink of shaving residue and wipe up the water on the counter to leave it dry for the next user. He calls it the “considerate thing to do.”
Post highlights three rules for the kitchen: pitch in to clean up the general mess, clean up your own mess, and avoid the “half-load philosophy.” This philosophy can also be summed up by the male default mode, in which the goal is to sneak out of the kitchen with the clean up half done in the hope that your female partner will finish the job and not complain about it. If you cannot identify with that strategy, then you are probably not a male.
Years ago I tuned in a TV talk show in which Larry Hagman, the corrupt, yet charming J.R. Ewing on “Dallas,” was making a guest appearance before an audience made up mostly of women. When not before the cameras, Hagman was an excellent cook, and he was demonstrating his culinary ability for the audience in a studio kitchen.
At a certain point in the program the women applauded and cheered enthusiastically, but it had nothing to do with his cooking expertise or his megastar status. It was when the host pointed out that Hagman cleaned up the kitchen as he went along.
So what’s the big deal? In almost three decades of being a family therapist, I would say that women’s second biggest complaint about men (the first is insufficient emotional intimacy) is that they don’t contribute more to what Post calls “sharing the load.” This includes “laundry, baby watching, cooking, making the beds, vacuuming, taking out the garbage, doing the grocery shopping, paying the bills, and planning an evening out.”
Most of that is pretty tedious, never-ending stuff. But that’s the point: why should one spouse get stuck with most of it solely on the basis of gender? When women get home from their jobs, they would like a break just as much as men. The man who understands that, and pitches in, is well on his way to winning his partner’s applause.
Post says the real point of etiquette is not stuffy rules, but applying “a code of treating people with — and making choices based on — consideration, respect, and honesty.”
The short answer to the above quiz is that chores should be divided up based on ability, and not gender. Secondly, adults should do the majority of the chores, with children gradually taking part.
When girls and boys are raised seeing their moms and dads work together to simply get the pile of work done, and when they are given an age-appropriate share in that work, they are likely to grow up with the internalized belief that the investments in and the rewards of life are to be shared equally between male and female.
(Pankratz is a marriage and family therapist at Catholic Charities Milwaukee regional office.) |
|
