(Press-News.org) COLUMBUS, Ohio - When highly educated, dual-career couples have their first child, both spouses think the baby increases their workloads by equal amounts - but a new study suggests that's not true.
When asked directly, both men and women thought their own daily workloads had increased by more than four hours after their child was born.
Detailed time diaries that the new mothers and fathers kept told a different story. Both spouses overestimated their increased workload - but by widely varying amounts. Compared to the parents' estimated four hours of extra work each day, the time diaries showed women's workloads increased by two hours a day, while men's total working time each day increased by only about 40 minutes.
"Women ended up shouldering a lot more of the work that comes with a new baby, even though both men and women thought they added the same amount of additional work," said Claire Kamp Dush, co-author of the study an associate professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University.
The results were especially surprising because before the baby was born, these couples were sharing household chores relatively equally.
"The birth of the child dramatically changed the division of labor in these couples," said Jill Yavorsky, co-author of the study and doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State.
"What was once a relatively even division of household work no longer looked that way."
The new study appears in the June 2015 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family. The study results are also discussed in the Council on Contemporary Families' Symposium on Housework, Gender and Parenthood that was released today.
Kamp Dush and Yavorsky co-authored the research with Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, professor of human sciences at Ohio State.
The data came from The New Parents Project, a long-term study that is investigating how dual-earner couples adjust to becoming parents for the first time. In all, 182 couples participated in this study.
These aren't average U.S. couples. Participants in the study tend to have higher-than-average levels of education, both spouses have jobs and both spouses report their intention to keep working after the child is born.
"These are the couples you would expect to have the most egalitarian relationships," Kamp Dush said.
"They have the education, the financial resources and the other factors that researchers have believed would lead to equal sharing of responsibilities. But that's not what we found."
The couples were studied twice - once during the third trimester of pregnancy and then again when their babies were about 9 months old.
At both times, the couples separately completed a detailed time diary for one workday and one non-workday. They recorded all their activities on a paper time diary beginning at 4 a.m. and ending 24 hours later. This included any simultaneous activities they did while multitasking.
Results showed that the couples shared duties equally before the baby was born. Both men and women reported doing about 15 hours of housework per week, as well as 42 to 45 hours of paid work, respectively.
Moreover, 95 percent of both men and women agreed during the pregnancy that mothers and fathers should equally share the child care responsibility.
That's not what happened, though. After the arrival of their child, men did about 10 hours a week of physical child care - the less fun work like changing diapers and bathing the baby. Meanwhile, women did 15 hours per week.
The more "fun" part of parenting, such as reading to the baby and playing, is called child engagement, and the time diaries showed a much smaller gender gap here. Men spent about four hours per week in child engagement, while women spent about six hours.
In addition, men cut back their housework by five hours per week, while women did not reduce their housework to compensate for additional childcare work.
One explanation for women's increased post-parenthood workloads compared to men has been that they are spending less time at their paid jobs. But this study didn't find that. Neither men nor women had significantly decreased the number of hours spent at their paid jobs, the results showed.
"A lot of data shows that many women eventually decrease their time spent at paid work after having children, but we don't know when it happens," Yavorsky said. "This study shows that they're not doing it right after the birth of their first child."
"Nine months after the birth of their first child, when couples are questioned for the second time in the study, they are starting to settle into a new pattern of how they will divide the work," Kamp Dush said.
"And the key is that this new routine seems to be that the woman is doing more of the housework and more of the child care, while not doing any less paid work," she said.
"The egalitarian relationship they had before the baby was born is essentially gone."
What's the reason behind the change? Kamp Dush and Yavorsky said the reasons are complex and not entirely the fault of mothers or fathers.
Other research led by Schoppe-Sullivan shows that some mothers "gatekeep" - essentially controlling how much fathers are involved in child care and what they can do.
"Women shouldn't try to manage their partner's parenting. But men also need to take the initiative and learn child care duties that their own socialization may have neglected," Kamp Dush said.
Yavorsky noted that couples successfully shared nonchild-related housework before they became parents, but only men significantly dropped the number of hours they spent doing this post-childbirth.
"Men can continue to be full partners in doing housework after the child is born and share in the mundane tasks that neither partner necessarily wants to do," she said.
INFORMATION:
The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Contact: Claire Kamp Dush, 614-247-2126; Kamp-dush.1@osu.edu
Jill Yavorsky, Yavorsky.3@osu.edu
Written by Jeff Grabmeier, 614-292-8457; Grabmeier.1@osu.edu
SAN FRANCISCO - Only half of women with cystic fibrosis (CF) report using contraception and frequently apt to become pregnant unintentionally, according to a new study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The results of the study were presented earlier this week at the 2015 American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Annual Clinical and Scientific Meeting in San Francisco. As recently as the 1960s, children with cystic fibrosis - an inherited disease that causes thick, sticky mucus to form in the lungs, pancreas, ...
Quantity of water on Earth not unique
Water likely reached Earth via comets and asteroids crashing into Earth's surface
Evidence found in the atmosphere of white dwarf star
Asteroid found to contain 30-35% Earth's water content
Research led by the University of Warwick and published by Royal Astronomical Society
Water delivery via asteroids or comets is likely taking place in many other planetary systems, just as it happened on Earth, new research strongly suggests.
Published by the Royal Astronomical Society and led by the University of Warwick, the research ...
PHILADELPHIA, PA, May 7, 2015 -- For residents of areas with limited access to healthy foods, also known as food deserts, multiple barriers exist that amplify the health risks of living in those areas. Likewise, risks for poor diet and being overweight or obese are also increased. Researchers from the RAND Corporation, however, found that use of a list when shopping among low-income, predominantly African-American participants living in a food desert was associated with a better-quality diet and lower weight. Their results are published in the current issue of the Journal ...
PHILADELPHIA, PA, May 7, 2015 - Vitamin D is essential for the maintenance of bone health and may be implicated in other chronic diseases, as well as immunity, but adults in Canada are consistently deficient in dietary vitamin D, by nearly 400 international units per day (IU/d) on average. Coupled with low vitamin D synthesis from the sun during fall and winter at Canadian latitudes, tracking intake of vitamin D is vital for those lacking the nutrient. In an article in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, a group from the University of Guelph examined the validity ...
Climate change denial in public discourse may encourage climate scientists to over-emphasise scientific uncertainty and is also affecting how they themselves speak - and perhaps even think - about their own research, a new study from the University of Bristol, UK argues.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, from Bristol's School of Experimental Psychology and the Cabot Institute, and colleagues from Harvard University and three institutions in Australia show how the language used by people who oppose the scientific consensus on climate change has seeped into scientists' discussion ...
Philadelphia - Some at-risk patients opted out of comprehensive cancer gene screening when presented with the opportunity to be tested for the presence of genes linked to various cancers, according to a recent study led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Basser Center for BRCA in Penn's Abramson Cancer Center. Concern for uncertainty and potential distress were cited among the most common reasons to refuse testing. The results, published in Genetics in Medicine, were released just weeks ahead of an announcement of ...
Following lifestyle guidelines about diet, physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight is associated with an improved likelihood of survival when diagnosed with bowel cancer. This is based on the findings of a large study of over 500,000 published in the open access journal BMC Medicine.
Bowel cancer, also called colorectal cancer, is the second most common cancer in men and the third most common cancer in women worldwide, with 55% cases occurring in developed regions such as North America and Western Europe. Survival rates of bowel cancer have wide variations ...
Fans of The Lord of the Rings may disagree, but when it comes to exquisite excavation, the dwarves of Moria have nothing on the mighty fire ants of Georgia Tech. But Dan Goldman and Michael Goodisman aren't fascinated by the aesthetics of fire ant architecture alone. 'I have an interest in animals interacting with complex materials', explains Goldman, who has studied creatures such as sidewinder snakes and sandfish lizards moving through and across sand. With the ants on their doorstep, Goldman and Goodisman were intrigued to learn more about how the insects work together ...
"It took human culture millennia to arrive at a mathematical formulation of non-Euclidean spaces", comments SISSA neuroscientist Alessandro Treves, "but it's very likely that our brains could get there long before. In fact, it's likely that the brain of rodents gets there very naturally every day".
Treves coordinated a study just published in the journal Interface. Euclidean geometry is the kind of geometry we normally study at school, whereas non-Euclidean geometries are all those that reject one or more of Euclid's five postulates. A geometry that unfolds on a curved ...
New developments in personalised and precision medicine (PPM) could offer enormous gains in healthy life expectancy for Americans, but the incentives to develop them are weak, according to Dr Victor Dzau, President of the US Institute of Medicine, and colleagues [1], writing in a Personal View in The Lancet.
PPM tailors medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient, according to their susceptibility to a particular illness. But PPM goes beyond just targeting therapies at individuals who are ill; it includes the ability to identify those at highest ...
