DarrenBarefoot.com

As someone who will be a stay-at-home mom any minute right now, I can tell you my experience.

1. The major medical associations favour exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months’ of a child’s life, followed by solids and breastmilk for at least the next six months. Although it’s possible to pump milk and have the father stay home, it’s a lot easier for the mother to do it — no worries about cleaning/sterilizing bottles, managing flow, heating, freezing, etc.

2. Maternity leave last 15 weeks (assuming you are not self-employed and therefore ineligible. Grrr.). After that, either the mother or the father can take up to 35 weeks of parental leave. Given that 15 weeks is not a long time (especially if you stopped working ahead of labour), a lot of new mothers want to stay home for a longer period, especially if they want to breastfeed.

3. Many women earn less than their child’s father, especially if they have made concessions to manage pregnancy conditions. Faced with living on one partner’s income, many couple opt for the higher income.

4. Women are the fastest growing group of people starting small businesses. Since most small businesses are home-based, these women may have flexible work schedules, allowing them to go out during the day.

Also, when they say women do 80% of work in the home, I wonder how this work is classified. Does the survey only ask about cleaning, cooking and shopping? What about painting, drywalling, plumbing, car repair, lawn mowing, calling contractors, etc? I bet many people don’t think of this as work in the home.

That being said, I’m very thankful for a husband who does 50% of work in the home — and who has taken on 90% these past 40 weeks.

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Andrea: One thing about “mens work” vs. “womens work” that you mention (say, painting vs. cooking) is that cooking is a “must be done right now” activity, and it repeats frequently. Painting, on the other hand, is a “when it’s convenient” activity, and rarely repeats.

When one things of housework, you’re right — we usually think of things like cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. But that’s because they happen much more frequently than the drywalling, the mechanical work, the painting, etc. Even minor maintenance that crops up in all homes tends to be a “when it’s convenient” chore, rather than a “the kids are screaming and need to eat.”

Through both research (via my womens studies classes) & observation, it seems that before children, housework tends to be fairly evenly split in most couples. After children… everything goes all to hell, and more work falls to the woman. Even if the man is doing the same amount of housework that he was doing before, the sheer volume of housework required has gone up exponentially.

My parents have a fairly interesting arrangement. They both work full time, and my sister is not in daycare — they both work shift work, and work opposite to each other’s shifts. So there’s always someone home with the kid (save for 4 hours on Monday nights when my best friend babysits.)

My mother’s husband does the same chores he did before my sister came along — cleaning up after dinner, etc — but my mother does the lions share of the childcare when she’s home. My sister is three now, and has started taking all sorts of interesting classes (preschool, dance, swimming, etc) and they’re all scheduled during times that my mother is home, not her husband. So even though they both work at least 40 hours a week (my mother also makes slightly more — within a few thousand/year — than her husband) Mom still ends up with more work.

This is pretty standard.

Stay-at-home Mom’s don’t necessarily have it all that easy either — raising kids is *hard*, even if you don’t work. I know a few SAHM’s who have been asked by well-meaning non-parents… “So what do you do all day?” Yagh. What a question. What DON’T they do all day…

Funny thing: You rarely hear men asking about how they’re going to balance a career with having children. :) Everyone who says that women have come so far… well, we haven’t come THAT far. Once the kids show up, we may as well be in the 50’s. Except with a *two* jobs — Mom & Career… that’s hard.

Anyhoo. That was somewhat rambly. The concept of “The Second Shift” is quite interesting, though… even though I have no intention of ever having children. I LIKE my free time, damnit.

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Whoa! I’m not suggesting that the work is balanced. I was just wondering if anyone has ever looked at all the time spent on work that we might not think of as housework. Such work is probably much more flexible, but I wonder how many hours it represents each week. It never occurred to me to classify this as men’s work or women’s work. However, I wonder if men do bear a bigger workload in house, appliance and car upkeep. My curiousity may be because I grew up in a working class neighbourhood, where most people did all the work themselves and had homes and cars that constantly needed major work just to keep them going. An overflowing hot water heater or a broken-down car can be things that need to be done right now. (Although I bet the work is appreciated more than the drudgery of day-to-day housework and childcare.)

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I had quite a different experience when my daughters were young. I was the stay-at-home dad primary caregiver, and at the time my wife had our one car when she went to work, so I spent a lot of time walking around with a front-pack or stroller (or both, for a time) the Metrotown area in Burnaby, where I live.

There are _tons_ of dads with kids in the daytime around here. Not as many as moms, but certainly a significant percentage. Perhaps Yaletown is demographically skewed differently.

In any case, I’m in that minority where my wife and I now work alternating days so the other one can be home with the kids (who are now in preschool and grade 1). I’m not all that good at housework, but I do it: laundry (not as much as I should to keep up), tidying, vacuuming, dishes, beds, etc. I get up in the morning and get the oldest to school. She re-tiled the tub, but I painted the laundry room floor. My wife and I don’t do the same things, but I think we have a pretty good split here in the house.

Really it only takes practice and the willpower to get away from the blog and do some actual work around here.

But parenting is hard, whether it’s one kid or twelve. Vicki Iovine’s limited but excellent “Girlfriends’ Guide” books put it correctly: two kids is more than twice as hard as one. Apparently, she writes, three is more than three times as hard as one too, but four is slightly less than four times as hard. I have no experience there, but beyond that, the older kids start being in a position to help.

The key thing about having children is that you’re always on alert, even when you’re somewhere else. You never really relax the way you did before they were born. But there are myriad rewards to make up for that.

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Victoria has tons of dads taking a bigger role in staying at home and raising their kids. My partner works part-time for IBM and I work full-time at the legislature, so he’s the one who hangs out more at the park/playground. His afternoons during the week are spent out and about with our 1 1/2 year old. Maybe James Bay/Fairfield is skewed towards more of these types, but there are quite the number of Baby Bjorn-wearing, bike-trailer pulling, stroller pushing daddies in my neighbourhood.

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It’s not true that it’s *easier* to raise kids now, despite cell phones and stainfree fabrics. That’s just ignorant. In the 1950s it was common to turn your school age kids outside for the day, with minimal supervision. They learned a lot and they also got into a lot of trouble. Also remember that a lot of those housewives were depressed and were either self-treating with alcohol or put on amphetamines by their doctors. (Being alone at home with small children is difficult and draining.) They were also expected to be in the classrooms as room parents (helpers) and to do volunteer work.

By contrast these days all parents (including working parents) are expected to fully schedule kids’ free time with lessons and clubs and sports, all of which require at least some supervision (my kids never went to a practice or a game without a parent).

This is quite typical of society’s reaction to technology. When a new invention is supposed to free women from drudgery, what happens instead is that the standards get raised. Clothes washers didn’t make the weekly laundry easier, it meant we were all expected to have perfectly clean clothes every single day instead of putting on yesterday’s clothes and having one set of Sunday best.

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There may well be fewer children per home, but your statistic doesn’t prove it. You’re just showing birth rates without comparing childless families versus families with children. To figure number of children per family, look at http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/famil50a.htm, which shows statistics for Canada for 2001. I figure 1.8 children per family (of families with children). At http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/famil40a.htm you find that as long ago as 1971 the average family (which includes families with no children) included 3.7 members, which dropped to 3.0 members by 2000.

None of this proves fewer children per family-with-children.

At http://www.statcan.ca/english/Pgdb/famil40b.htm it is apparent that single parent families are more likely to have two or more children in the home than two-parent families. Which still proves nothing, as I can’t find Canadian census results in a form that would let me compare number of children per family from 1950 and 2001 (or similar dates).

This information is available for the US, however, and I don’t think it’s too far a reach to assume that Canadian rates would be similar. At (pdf) http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/tabHH-6.pdf you can see that in 1955 the average US family was 3.59, and the average number of children (under 18) in families was 1.3. In 2001 the comparable figures were 3.14 and 0.96, respectively. So we’re talking about a difference of a child or two, not half as many children per family (unless you have built an argument out of the difference between 2-child families and 3-child ones).

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The difference in difficulty of parenting (or, really, amount of work) between one child and two children is not significant. You implied a larger difference, which I could accept if family sizes had gone from 6 or more children to 3 or fewer. And I argue that parenting is more difficult because more is expected in the way of enrichment: most parents are expected to produce college graduates (which leads to more lessons–music, dance, art, gymnastics; more emphasis on getting into good primary and secondary schools, and taking college prep classes; more community involvement in volunteer work and clubs like Scouting, so your college application resume looks good), which was not the case in the 50s; most parents are expected to have their kids in a sports league instead of letting the kids play pick-up games on the neighborhood empty lot. And so on.

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How many studies have been done on this subject? How can you expect science to prove raising children was more difficult/easier/the same in the 50s versus now when there appear to be few or no studies on this topic?

I have an idea.

Darren, ask a family with two or three children to let you look after their children for say one weekend or one week.

After that do the same experiment but look after one child.

Then report back on how it went. Of course to do a truly scientific experiment you need what, 1,000 samples or something.

I believe the challenges are different for parents raising one child or several. Expectations were different in the 1950s so I’ll speak about challenges today.

I don’t have scientific data to back me up but I think common sense predicts that if a family is raising an only child, that child will demand, maybe even depend on their parents for entertainment and attention. Parents with two children or more find themselves mediating conflicts between children, negotiating the attention they give each child individually and adapting to different stages of child development.

The basics - feeding, clothing, housing, taking your child to the doctor, to a hospital, to school, to extracurricular activities, vacation, camp, co-parenting, money issues, housework etc. are pretty much the same across the board. There are variables. For instance, a child’s temperament and how it meshes with a parent’s temperament definitely plays a role.

Of course it costs more to have more children. Some costs are lower - you may not have to buy new baby gear or clothing, new Tupperware for your toddler or you get a discount on camp fees but overall you’ll pay out and do more housework, chauffering etc. with more kids.

I can attest as a single parent that raising one child is a lot of (rewarding) work. I’d write it down for you if I had the time.

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