Husbands and wives, different to begin with, become even more
separate and distinct in their years after their first child is born. An
increasing specialization of family roles and emotional distance between
partners-become-parents combine to affect their satisfaction with the
relationship.
Behind today's ideology of the egalitarian couple lies a much more
traditional reality. Although more than half of mothers with children
under five have entered the labor force and contemporary fathers have
been taking a small but significantly greater role in cooking, cleaning,
and looking after their children than fathers used to do, women continue
to carry the overwhelming responsibility for managing the household and
caring for the children. Women have the primary responsibility for family
work even when both partners are employed full time.
Couples whose division of household and family tasks was not
equitable when they began our study tended to predict that it would be
after the baby was born. They never expected to split baby care 50-50 but
to work as a team in rearing their children. Once the babies are born,
however, the women do more of the housework than before they became
mothers, and the men do much less of the care of the baby than they or
their wives predicted they would. After children appear, a couple's role
arrangements--and how both husband and wife feel about them--become
entwined with their intimacy.
Ideology vs Reality
In both expectant and childless couples, spouses divide up the
overall burden of family tasks fairly equitably. But new parents begin to
divide up these tasks in more gender-stereotyped ways. Instead of both
partners performing some of each task, he tends to take on a few specific
household responsibilities and she tends to do most of the others. His
and her overall responsibility for maintaining the household may not
shift significantly after having a baby, but it feels more traditional
because each has become more specialized.
In the last trimester of pregnancy, men and women predict that the
mothers will be responsible for more of the baby care tasks than the
father. Nine months later, when the babies are six months old, a majority
describe their arrangements as even more Mother's and less Father's
responsibility than either had predicted. Among parents of six-month-old
babies, mothers are shouldering more of the baby care than either parent
predicted on eight of 12 items on our questionnaire: deciding about
meals, managing mealtime, diapering, bathing, taking the baby out,
playing with the baby, arranging for baby sitters, and dealing with the
pediatrician. On four items, women and men predicted that mothers would
do more and their expectations proved to be on the mark: responding to
baby's cries, getting up in the middle of the night, doing the child's
laundry, and choosing the baby's toys.
From this we contend that the ideology of the new egalitarian
couple is way ahead of the reality. The fallout from their unmet
expectations seems to convert both spouses' surprise and disappointment
into tension between them.
Jackson and Tanya talked a lot about their commitment to raising
Kevin together. Three months later, when the baby was six months old,
Tanya explained that Jackson had begun to do more housework than ever
before but that he wasn't available for Kevin nearly as much as she would
have liked.
Tanya: He wasn't being a chauvinist or anything, expecting me to do
everything and him nothing. He just didn't volunteer to do things that
obviously needed doing, so I had to put down some ground rules. Like if
I'm in a bad mood, I may just yell: "I work eight hours just like you.
This is half your house and half your child, too. You've got to do your
share!" Jackson never changed the kitty litter box once in four years,
but he changes it now, so we've made great progress. I just didn't expect
it to take so much work. We planned this child together and we went
through Lamaze together, and Jackson stayed home for the first two weeks.
But then--wham--the partnership was over.
Tanya underscores a theme we hear over and over: The tension
between new parents about the father's involvement in the family
threatens the intimacy between them.
The fact that mothers are doing most of the primary child care in
the first months of parenthood is hardly news. What we are demonstrating
is that the couples' arrangements for taking care of their infants are
less equitable than they expected them to be. They are amazed they became
so traditional so fast.
It's not just that couples are startled by how the division of
labor falls along gender lines, but they describe the change as if it
were a mysterious virus they picked up while in the hospital having their
baby. They don't seem to view their arrangements as choices they have
made.
Husbands' and wives' descriptions of their division of labor are
quite similar but they do shade things differently: Each claims to be
doing more than the other gives him or her credit for. The feeling of not
being appreciated for the endless amount of work each partner actually
does undoubtedly increases the tension between them. Compared with the
childless couples, new parents' overall satisfaction with their role
arrangements (household tasks plus decision making plus child care)
declined significantly--most dramatically between pregnancy and six
months after baby's birth.
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