Parents do £70k of unpaid work in the home

[1Wanda1]

From an article in The Times today (have pasted a few bits as most people won't be able to read the article if I link it. This might be of interest to the many MNers whose partners seem to think they sit around doing nothing all day!

A separate study found British parents undertake £70,768 of unpaid work a year around the house and running around for the children.

It found that the average parent spends more than 100 hours a week juggling household tasks, from cooking and cleaning to ferrying children around and helping with their homework.

Parents were spending 29 hours a week cooking, preparing and serving food and drinks, ten hours playing with the children, the same amount of time driving on the school run, to activities, clubs and playdates, and nine hours giving advice.

Unpaid work? It’s called looking after your family.

The other part of the article is even more odd. That 1 in 3 people have a family member they are NC with but of the reasons listed not one is abuse. For most people it takes a lot to cut off contact entirely with a family member and people would only do so for pretty extreme behaviour. Not just "different life choices" or "parenting differences" as the article states. I wonder whether survey respondents had to select from a set of predetermined options so just chose the closest one they could find in the list which may not reflect reality.

A lot of the jobs aren’t really additive though as they can be done in parallel so I don’t really think it’s true that there is 100 hours of work or whatever. Eg if I’m cooking I’ll be talking to my children but it doesn’t mean I can add the time together to come up with a really high figure. If I’m talking my children to an activity they often get 30-45 minutes to play with my phone while they’re there or do something else. Loading the washing machine takes 5 minutes.

I agree with this.
I also cook for myself when cooking for the children. It is living. I hate this idea that we should cost up the cost of living.

This is a really strange argument. The state take severely neglected children into care because they are at risk.

well peopple with kids also do 'unpaid work' work in the home - cooking, cleaning, pet care, elderly parent care etc etc. It is just part of life.

But i do agree that we no longer value the contribution of SAHP. These are the people that used to help in the community - coffee mornings and gardening of community places, ad hoc child care when people were stuck, going to visit the elderly, running playgroups etc etc. We were much more connected as a community but not people wont do anything unless they are directly getting something out of it and everyone is a stranger, even neighbours

And true you could just as easily argue that someone with pets does lots on unpaid care because if they abandoned them, they would be taken into a rescue.

@BrieAndChilli

That doesn't reflect the community I live in.

It's because people don't see unpaid labour of this sort as actual work that men not pulling their weight at home and with caring for children is not recognised widely enough as economic exploitation of women.

@Goldbar

It is actual work. But it has no economic value to society.

Men get away with it for lots of reasons, not least because women let them.

You do realise 'economic value' isn't something that's intrinsic to a goods or service but more something we as a (patriarchal capitalist) society bestow on things.

When you think about it there is no real reason we as a species wouldn't value childcare and caring duties in general very highly? All of us will need care at probably multiple points in our lives and the standard of this care will be very important. The problem is it has historically been done by women for free and because women have been considered lower status than men then it has been considered lower status work and therefore lacking in value. Even traditional supply and demand arguments don't really work for caring, as supply is currently low and demand is through the roof and yet still we are extremely keen as a society to devalue it further.

@Bumpitybumper

'You do realise 'economic value' isn't something that's intrinsic to a goods or service but more something we as a (patriarchal capitalist) society bestow on things.'

Yes.

Obviously

I'm working with the actual meaning of economic value in its current form.

Not what you want it to be.

No one will or should pay you to care for your own children or do your own housework

Men not pulling their weight is absolutely exploitation. But who sanctions it? Will the state issue fines to men who don't clean up after themselves?

I think it's a misleading argument. The better argument is to say that it is part of life, no one likes doing the shit work, but we all have to get on with it. We can raise the bar high, refuse to carry the entire load ourselves, expect men to be able to feed and house themselves and their children, and raise our kids to expect the same.

To women like the OP, who do more than their fair share and feel resentful: what would happen if you stopped doing it all? Would would change? Would your partner notice or care? If not, do they respect you fully?

@Botw1
No one will or should pay you to care for your own children or do your own housework
I think it's important to break this argument down. So we all agree that raising children and maintaining a family home is a lot more work than an adult simply looking after themselves. All of this work has to be done by somebody otherwise it will lead to at worst child neglect.

Your approach is to dismiss giving this work any value because the work has arisen as a result of people choosing to have children. Firstly, each child has two parents so really this work should be split evenly between the two parents or the the parent doing less should be compensating the parent that is doing more (hence setups like SAHPs or where one parent works PT). By implying that the work has no value, then one parent (mostly father's) will look to exploit the other parent by expecting them to take on the brunt of the work without any real recognition or compensation for the impact this will have their quality of life and career prospects. Even when both parents work equal hours, someone has to get the poorly child from nursery/school, someone has to arrange wraparound care and holiday clubs, someone has to organise the parties etc. Even you try to outsource as much as possible there is still a decent amount of stuff you need to do as a parent and this shouldn't be minimised.

This becomes even more critical when a relationship breaks down and one parent is left to do everything. How do we calculate the impact and cost this has on that parent? If we say 'well it's just part of life' then that's small consolation for the parent unable to get proper childcare stuck with very limited career prospects and free time whilst the other parent sends a small fraction of their wage as their 'share' towards raising the child.

Finally I think we need to acknowledge this work because it needs to be publicised more and put in the public domain so it can factor into people's decisions to have children in the first place. Look on MN on threads about regretting children and lots of parents will admit they regret it because they simply didn't know it would be this hard. Quantifying the work and comparing it to something people without kids can grasp is helpful as it contextualises what is expected of you.

@ItstheZwartbles could you make a video showing how you do all your laundry and hang it all up to dry in just 4 minutes I'd love to see what I'm doing wrong!

I do one load a morning, I take it out the basket, pop it in the machine and switch it on, takes less than a minute.
When it's finished I take it out the machine and hang it on an airer or outdoor rotary line, takes a couple of minutes. Why would it take any longer? I do work very quickly though whatever I'm doing.

@Bumpitybumper

I think you may be mixing me up with some one else

My argument isn't

'Your approach is to dismiss giving this work any value because the work has arisen as a result of people choosing to have children.'

I havent said that.

I've said looking after your own children and doing your own housework has no economic value because it has no value to anyone outside the family. You cant expect someone else to pay you to do your own work that you have created by existing.

That is a separate thing all together as to how family members divide the work their family creates between them

If you're daft enough to allow your male oh to leave all the family work to you, thats on them and you.

It is also a separate thing as to how hard people may find parenting as that is completely dependent on personality and family set ups

@Botw1

I don't see that @Bumpitybumper has said 'males' at all, I think she's said 'parents'?

And I've only skimmed the OP, but I think it referenced 'DW', so I imagined OP may be in a same-sex marriage with a woman, too?

@Botw1

My apologies, I didn't look far enough back. There was indeed a number of references to men.

Sorry about that,
.

But we don't all get on with it. Only some of us get on with it. And some of us leave the work - because that is what it is - to other people.

Don't apologise - its obvious what you meant. It's nor a sahp vs working parent battle, it's the value of what is done if it were outsourced that the article is about. (which IS useful for sahp to be mindful of as society especially doesn't value their contribution to raising the next generation imo)

And yes as a Carer (albeit an officially recognised by the DWP one) it's worth thinking in financial terms. My Vaters Allowance is £69.70 pw. I am 'on call' to my two on average 20 hrs a day (if you include 'overnights on call' as you would for a paid care worker role. I think I worked it out once at about 33p an hour.

But the answer isn't to calculate an imaginary expense that work (done by women) costs (men). What happens then? We ask to be paid for what is, essentially, part and parcel of living? If we quantify the cost of running a home as £70k, do we then expect to be paid for it, furthering the bullshit that it's a job and someone (women) has to do it?

In my house, and most well functioning households, we do work equally as it arises. Not to be overly simplistic, but let's just move on from the narrative that women are hard done by because they have to do all the work, and only chose to procreate with men who are functioning capable adult humans.

In my small sample size of two husbands and 2 father's to my children, it is actually quite easy to see who is going to turn out to be shit. Doesn't earn money - don't procreate with him. Can't cook - don't procreate with him. Is amusingly incompetent with work based admin - don't be amused. And don't proceed with him.

We can all create a culture where we expect more than to be paid to be a skivvy

You work at and reckon you do 14 hours A DAY of housework on top of that? That is actually impossible. You sleep, say 7 hours a day. So that leaves 3 hours a day for your job (21 hours per week). You are incorrect, my friend.

You live in cloud cuckoo-land if you think this is how it turns out for the majority of women.

Structural inequality in the division of domestic labour/unpaid work/whatever you want to call it, is endemic in our society.

You insult its victims by making it an individual issue and pretending it's all their fault for "choosing" badly.

Women aren’t responsible for shit men, but we are responsible for who we choose to have relationships and children with. We are responsible for asserting our needs and boundaries and making it clear what we expect.