If I were paying someone to watch my kid while I worked they wouldn’t do any household chores, cook, or running errands. That work is valued by society as being good enough on its own–even if I am paying one person to watch my one child and it isn’t a group situation.
That said, how many hours a day do y’all think a stay at home parent should do housework/cleaning/cooking? As many hours as the work out of the home parent? More? Why?
It’s perfectly plausible that you might pay someone to look after your child *and* do other things.
I think it’s reasonable that a stay-at-home parent do more housework than a work-out-of-the-house one. My reasoning is that watching a child isn’t a 100%-of-time task, and the at-home parent is in closer proximity to it than the one who is out of the house. Laundry, for example, is a multi-hour task that actually doesn’t take a whole lot of attention-time.
I would expect the not-at-home parent to do more erranding, especially if it’s stuff that can be done on the way to or from the workplace.
In order for someone to do any of those other things they would have to be a one-to-one nanny. In the bay area full-time nannies who live out typically earn between $2950 and $4200 per month. That would be either right at what I used to earn at my job or more than I made.
edited for crappy grammar.
Noah does almost zero erranding because it takes him substantially longer than me to do that kind of thing and then it extends the time he is away from us.
And watching a child is probably far more of a time suck than you think. Especially during the baby stage.
Danny works and I am a stat at home mom. I do pretty much all of the cleaning, cooking, and housework. I would love if we met in the middle and thing’s were 50/50. But he works, and I don’t. We have agreed however, that taking care of Faith is a full-time job. I believe it’s wishful thinking to say it should be about even.
There are folks who do it. My husband would be up for that, I wouldn’t. In our situation the problem is that he does 50% of the stuff that he thinks *needs* to be done. The far more than 50% that I do is because I have a different definition of what *needs* to be done. So I feel like things are overall doing really well at our house.
I generally do about 2 hours per day of chore/errand/housework on top of working, more if you count cooking. I would hope that a stay-at-home partner would do the same, but I can’t count on it.
I think it is funny that you satisfy the stereotype that the female in a heterosexual dyad is more likely to do the housework whether or not the male is the one earning money.
ARGH.
Anybody that does any housework
needs to aim slightly above
the level of cooties and plague.
Anything more than that is a simple waste of time.
Unless, of course, it’s *my* bathroom we’re talking about.
Yeah, my bathroom is one place that slides more than I am actually happy about.
how funny…
my bathroom is the only room that perfectly pleases.
I think it depends entirely on the kid and the situation. We have a kind of idea that it’s nice if the stay at home parent for the day gets some cleaning and/or cooking done, but realize that it may not happen every day if a lot of kid activities or challenges happen. Of course, this arrangement takes a good bit of goodwill on the part of both parties, and in our home we’ve had to institute an additional stay-at-home parent isn’t allowed to sit in front of the computer while the munchkin is awake rule, which cut out the biggest time sink for us. These days, whatever work is left at the end of the day gets split down the middle, or, realistically, done in the evening while we all hang out together and one of us mostly watches River (usually the parent who worked elsewhere during the day).
I have a really hard time with that “turn off the computer” part. I think I get a lot done if you average things out but I have days where I get very little done. Noah thinks that it’s ok to look at the average when judging and I tend to feel guilty that I am ‘lazy’ some days.
I think it will vary a lot and it should be more about doing what can be done without feeling resentful or angry, and that the working person can trust the stay at home person is doing what they can.
Perhaps unsurprisingly I totally agree…
It depends on so many things. How old the kids are, how capable the stay-at-home person is, how much each of the people who could clean enjoy doing the cleaning. What each person’s need for a clean space is.
How would they divide things up if both were at home? If both worked outside of the home? Does it make sense for them to hire someone to do cleaning? Would they enjoy doing the cleaning together on weekends perhaps?
I don’t think there’s any one right answer, and the answer may change over time. “Should-ing” over this issue could easily lead to resentment and anger. Figure out what works for you, without the “should.”
Totally agree here too.
It’s what we do here.
well –
childcare arrangements vary a good deal.
My daughter’s daycare provider cooks for the children, cleans her daycare area, washes clothes that are soiled during the visit and returns them clean. This is in addition to providing a loving, stimulating environment where my daughter thrives while I’m at work.
I have seen in-home nanny ads (not sure whether I’ve also seen it with Nanny Share) requesting light housekeeping in addition to the child care duties.
So… assuming that during the “business” day a stay-at-home parent is doing about the same thing as Wonderful M – the cleaning of the family home, laundry for the family, food shopping and preparation for the family, remain to be done.
In our 2-career household, we split the work, maybe not evenly, but split it. A lot of the work is split the way it was before we married/lived together – we do laundry individually, for example. We trade off on the dishwasher. A lot of housework isn’t done as frequenly or prefectly as it would be if we hired someone, but we’re living with it.
I think it’s more important for the people in the household to negotiate/agree than for there to be some strict division of labor – no matter whether one adult stays home or both work outside the home.
“Should”? What do you mean by this strange word “should”?
The work is there to be done, and someone has to do it. Choice One: you do it yourself. Choice two: your spouse/partner does it. Choice three: you hire someone to do it. Which of these you choose depends on how much you hate it, how much your partner hates it, what agreements govern your relationship, and how much money you have to throw at the problem.
Coming at a problem like that carrying a “should” is an exercise in futility.
Most people don’t seem to work this way though. It’s interesting to me.
While Janet’s right about the “should” thing, it’s worth remembering that those working outside the home have to commute, which is essentially dead time (mostly). Even if the commute is only 10 minutes, that’s 20 minutes a day that the “at home” person doesn’t have to spend to achieve the same notional volume of work.
In addition to the commute dead time, there’s also the odd bits and pieces of time (e.g. at midday) that occur out of the home that could (had you been home) been used to (e.g.) put another load of laundry in.
Consider both of those, the out-of-home person generally has some number of hours per week that is “wasted” and which could, had they been at home, been used for housework.
But part of the problem is that SAHP have almost no true ‘down time’ during the day from child-watching. If the parent has to take advantage of all down time to be cleaning that becomes pretty stressful. When folks are at work they get to take breaks from work. They get to have time when they are not working, not doing housework, not dealing with anyone else. It’s pretty hard to get that sort of time as a SAHP. It’s interesting to see who believes that the down time is ‘wasted’ at work so the SAHP shouldn’t ‘waste’ down time.
Who’s talking about “down time”? And anyway, I’m not buying that argument unless the kid never sleeps, never plays on their own, never reads mom’s English lit books and shakes their head at bizarre abuse of monarch-based historical periods.
And I’m really not aware of significant chunks of time when people at work are “not working, not doing housework, not dealing with anyone else”. Oh, sure, it happens, but its not like the dependability of the commute time. And obviously “pretty stressful” is often the common baseline condition for workers!
But that said, the point I was referring was the unassailable fact that those outside the home _cannot_ put that load of laundry in. This is not a “should/should not” observation, it’s a practical obstacle, and if one is going to head down the simple equality road (despite the lack-of-wisdom in so doing), one needs to recognize what time each person has available as a starting point, otherwise you risk end up decreeing strange things like that 25 hours of housework need to be done each day!
There are also more than just the two choices of stay-at-home versus get-a-nanny. I appreciate that you, yourself, for your situation and family, have vetoed those other choices (most notably, out-of-home childcare), but one’s inability to afford something doesn’t invalidate the market rate for that thing. Which is to say that nannies can command something of a premium rate precisely because there are a lot of parents who don’t want to work (outside the home) and don’t want to work (inside the home). And who can blame them?
At the end of the day, everybody makes choices based on values and priorities. You wanted to teach — had you gone into (say) commercial banking your nanny-equation would have looked very different. And it is worth something to you (quite a lot, I gather) for you to be at home with your kid everyday. If it’s acceptable to work two or three jobs to be able to have what one wants, then surely its acceptable to work the childcare job _and_ some of the housework job so you can get what you want?
Or turn it around: there is a number of hours that the work-outside parent has available while the kid is awake. Do you want that parent to (a) spend the time with the kid, bonding etc, or (b) doing housework?
In short, there’s a bit of a double standard amongst those that want to treat stay-at-home parenting as qualitatively and quantitatively the same as working outside, while declining to consider ways of NOT staying at home. They want the cake of being with the kids, and the “eating it” of chore-equality. Me, I’d like the cake of being paid what I make, with the “eating it” of doing it from my home without my somewhat annoying co-workers, which would save me about 6 hours and 250 miles per week and untold aggravation and stress… but that’s not an option.
Even more interesting is when you start measuring each person’s “minimum acceptable housework” standard. If one partner is Martha Stewart, and the other, err, not, then whose standard do you work to? Surely the “fair” approach is the lower of the two, right?? And anything above that is obviously the responsibility of the one who cares? Is time spent doing something that one partner loves (e.g. cooking) counted towards the balance, leaving the things that neither likes doing to the other? That hardly seems fair…
And so on. As Janet said, what is this “should”?
In my job, my work is not measured by the hour. I work to meet a set of responsibilities that comes with my role. Sometimes that means working nights and weekends. Sometimes that means I can take off days as “comp” time because I worked a lot when there is stuff to do, so I can work less when there is less to do. But in general, I feel like I’ve done “enough” when I meet my goals and feel good about what I’ve produced, when I have supported other people in meeting our shared goals.
I do much better at focusing on goal-oriented activities when I have less busy work to do. I would rather pay someone else to book my travel and track my expenses, so I can spend my time on the parts of my job that interest me. There is some amount of maintenance work that is either not worth offloading or that I don’t mind, but the stuff I am bad at keeping up with or that I really hate to do, I offload whenever possible.
I think of creating a home the same way. You have goals for your self-care, the comfort of your shared environment, the education of your child, your family’s health/nutrition/exercise, and generally creating a life that is meaningful and happy. The time spent that is related directly to supporting those goals yields tangible value, and feels rewarding. It doesn’t really matter how much time you spend on them, as long as the time you spend takes you where you want to go.
There are some tasks that are necessary but really detract focus from your main goals, because the time/benefit ratio is low, or they are repetitive and boring and support the overall goals of meaning and happiness at only the base level, or whatever. Those merit less time, and less mental and emotional energy. Good enough *is* good enough. If you have the means to “outsource” them, all the better. The energy you don’t spend on drudge is energy you will spend on your important goals, including being happy together.
I guess I’m saying, comparing the value of your activities is more important than comparing hours, and doing things that are meaningful is far more important than comparisons of any kind.
Fair enough. But the problem here is that there are many tasks in the home related to house maintenance that will cheerfully suck up as much time as you have and still be undone. If the SAHP’s job includes those tasks they don’t ever get a break from being ‘on’.
It’s all complex and interesting. 🙂
This is something that we struggled with figure out in our house. For me (and this could do with the way we parent, since we cosleep, i’m still nursing, etc) my job doesn’t just end because its 6 at night. Its 24 hours. I’m ‘working’ throughout the night too. So, i need my partner to maybe do a bit more of his share, because frankly i’m just exhausted. Also, i figured out that nap time is going to be MY time. If i want to spend it cleaning or cooking–that’s fine. But sometimes i need to stare at the wall and take time for me.
That said, we have found that its better for our evenings if i get dinner ready. Mainly so we don’t eat super late, but also it allows Jon to take over in the evenings and i can get some down time by the way of cleaning up.
This question doesn’t really compute for me. My mom was a stay at home mom. Every once in a blue moon I saw mom reading a book and or watching TV. If she ran out of stuff to do at home she went out and did charity work, or took classes. Even when mom had a maid to the house, she was working along side her.
If my dad isn’t working, he’s asleep or he’s finding some task around the house that needs doing.
Both of them grew up in family businesses, my mom’s parents were farmers, my dad’s parents owned a shop, as such, there was no such thing as working hours or a distinction between home work and business work.
Both were of the agreed contention that there was no such thing as nothing left to do. Neither of them had ‘hobbies’ as such, the whole doing things for fun thing didn’t compute for them unless it involved being social. And my dad was less about this than mom, it used to drive her bonkers wthat he would come with us to the beach and bring work.
If my dad walked down in the morning and saw plates in the sink, they were washed and put away by the time my mom came down…
As a family we rarely hire folks to do stuff for us. Probably the only tasks my dad leaves to experts are fixing the roof, rewiring the electricty, hard core plumbing jobs, cleaning the gutters up on the 3rd floor of the house, roto rootering the pipes.
I NEVER heard my parents fight because one felt the other wasn’t helping enough… although my mom said my dad had the unique ability to sleep through a screaming baby which bugged her a lot when we were babies
So really I think this is sort of cultural thing.
What happened to you then?
Oh I cause my dad to pull his hair out, and he has nothing but nasty comments about how my brother is a lazy slob while his girlfriend acts like a submissive cleaning slave.
At the same time my brother goes home to dad’s every weekend and does the lawn and rakes the leaves, or will come home mid week if there’s a heavy snow fall or the flooding in the basement.
Since I was always seen as the family whimp, my tasks are finding the plumbers, etc and being home to manage them, runing errands for dad, buying him stuff, fixing any computer issues he’s got, generally managing anything electronic (jonathan tends to break things), and any high intellect low brawn jobs that need doing.
Since Dad generally keeps a clean house, as in folks are shocked to find its a guy living alone in it. He does however fall behind on the whole dust thing — other than the stuff that starts to cause dust bunnies, so I bring in the maids (usually a troop of them) once every few months to do a search and destroy for it in all the places he tends to miss (like taking down the books, or doing the walls).
Both my brother and I jump to when asked by our parents to do stuff. We don’t even think about it much, unless there’s a reasonable excuse for why its a job that really doesn’t need doing in which case we can generally argue it… and if we lose the argument we do the job.
Friends of my parents and the neighbors have often commented on it. “I cant’ get my kids to do anything, how do you get them to do all this?”
BUT, that is THEIR house. To qoute my mom’s comment, “as long as you live in my house you live by my rules.”
In MY house I get to sit on my ass playing computer games, watching TV, and not cleaning my shower more than once a year, and letting a Roomba handle the vacuming.
So your parents managed to produce two kids who still jump when mom or dad say jump even well into their 40’s but who don’t do much for themselves.
Right. I’m going to copy that technique.
Actually, professional nannies often are expected to run errands and cook and essentially take over mommy 9-5 jobs, like cleaning up after the kids.
And they get paid more than I brought home every month. So that isn’t much of an option in our situation. 😛
I feel that being the “stay at home” parent person or whatever, automatically gives the responsibility of 2/3 to 3/4 of housework. If I was, & when I was, the stay @ home mom/wife, I did the dishes, cooked, cleaned, did laundry, and maybe the house didn’t look beautiful all the time, but I did what I could to make it at least presentable should people come over… Now that I’m the supporter & in a situation where my stay at home husband doesn’t really do much of anything, it feels terribly unfair for me to come home from work and still do all the aforementioned as well.
Also, when I was a regular in home health aide, not only did I “watch/take care of” the people, I cooked & cleaned as well. Same thing when I spent a summer being the 45 hour a week in home sitter for 2 kids.
But, that’s just my humble opinion.
Your situation is sadly pretty common from what I hear. I spend a lot of time on http://www.mothering.com/discussions and lots of work-out-of-home moms have similar complaints. 🙁