If it was compulsory to do 50/50 do you think a lot of men would not agree to have children?

[honeylulu]

If it was compulsory for all childcare and domestic tasks to be split 50/50, do you think that a lot less men would agree to have children?

It's hypothetical as of course itsunenforceable (but imagine that it was enforceable). I guess you also have to assume in that scenario that both parties work equal hours outside the home.

I share everything equally with my husband and it's worked out fine BUT I would say that he enjoyed our dual income/ no kids lifestyle and was happy to leave it like that. I had to talk him into having children and he kind of assumed I'd bear the brunt of the increase in domestic life and take a bit to my career (while his would remain unaffected). I was honest about wanting to share everything and go back to work but he admitted afterwards he thought I would change my mind about this once I'd had the baby.

Things worked out fine for us (we now have two and he's a great dad) but sometimes I doubt he would have agreed to have a baby (an idea he was otherwise not terribly keen on) if he knew he was getting lumbered with half of everything as well as what we already had on our plates.

I don't think he was that unusual. Interested in what others think.

I think there is something in this - plenty of women not so keen on having more DC when they know in reality they will be doing 90% of the associated work.

I know the stereotype is that the mad broody woman harangues the reluctant man into having kids but that doesn't really tally up with my experience. IRL I think it's quite often the man, especially in a more unequal set up, who gets misty eyed at the idea of more children, knowing that he has a preinstalled nanny, cook, cleaner and household manager in his wife!

Some women aren't keen, but plenty are. Just look at the number of posts on here like "Help, my lazy DP does absolutely nothing, he works 2 hours per week, no house work, makes mess and does no parenting. Anyway now I'm pregnant with dc3".

Surely its not about 50/50 though but getting the balance right. Currently I work 3 days and my OH does 5 the chores/childcare are probably split on a similar basis 65:35 to me. We are both happy with this - me adding a day would not really enable me to increase my responsibilities up to a middle manager level (I am at the top of my job without being a manager) and him losing a day would mean he could not cover all his responsibilities. So it works for us.

At the weekends though it very much becomes more like 50/50

Most no, with mine there was a time when he actually did more but I had a shocking commute. However I didn't want dc and DH did, it was him that did the persuading.

If he didn't just do domestic stuff I would have walked. I have a lot of sisters who are much older than me, I'm talking seven to seventeen years so I saw how their relationships panned out when I was a teenager.

My sister who is now widowed was married to a very traditional man she was basically chief cook and bottle washer. He did literally nothing round the house for the forty years they were married. I was very sad for my sister when he died but honestly he was exactly the kind of man who just expected a woman to do everything and my sister let him be like that from day one. There is no way I would have wanted a man like that I suppose the heart can't help who it falls in love with. Some women will put up with all manner of bad behaviour, we have to ask ourselves why and what can we do to help them not put up with it.

My sisters literally showed by their actions how bad and unbalanced relationships can be.

My husband would have loved to have been able to not work & have days with the kids.

If we could both have worked pt that would have been great.

He lived alone before we met so knew how to "keep house", as did I.

I managed to look after kids & keep the house going-no reason why he couldn't also have learnt/managed.

Somebody mentioned the Scandinavian model. Do more women return to full time work there?
I find it depressing how little has changed if you go by the MN boards but this may be because the SAHMs are more likely to post.
Just today there are at least two threads from women moaning about their lot as stay at home mums and I long to tell them to get a job and enjoy feeling valued in the work place.
I do totally understand why mothers of very young children want to stay at home but lose patience with them once their children are in their teens and twenties.

My XH would swear absolutely blind that he did 50/50 with the kids. Despite this, he never cooked a meal, washed up, cleaned the house, took them out without me, shopped, etc etc. Instead, he'd do something like cut the lawn (once every fortnight or so) and then say that that equalled (for example) me cooking dinner every night. Or he'd put up a shelf and that was supposed to be the same as me cleaning the house every day.

Sometimes men just don't 'see' it.

I remember saying to my ex when he started talking about more children (when DS was less than a month old) that if I was a Dad I'd have a house full of kids - but I'm not, I'm a mum so I'll stick to the one.

He was working full time, provided nothing and still saw that it was my job to do everything for our son. So YANBU.

I know the stereotype is that the mad broody woman harangues the reluctant man into having kids but that doesn't really tally up with my experience. IRL I think it's quite often the man, especially in a more unequal set up, who gets misty eyed at the idea of more children, knowing that he has a preinstalled nanny, cook, cleaner and household manager in his wife!

Yep. That makes sense.

So why does the research I have linked to show the opposite? According to this research men would like to be more involved in childcare but having to shoulder the financial burden of being the breadwinner relegates them to being second class parents.
I do wonder if it was the norm for women to return to work after having children, how many of them would want more children?

DH would have loved to do 50/50. We did the financial calculations, worked out how many thousands and thousands of pounds poorer we would be, had long talks about what we should do, and he works and I'm a sahm. It's not the ideal for either of us, but it's the best choice for us as a family.

I don't think it's a choice for most people.

I was insistent everything was 50/50 when we decided to have kids, but that was mainly due to DH being much more keen than me. So far it's been kept to. DH has recently got a new job, much higher pay, but I've been very insistent that I don't give a fuck how much he earns, my career (local authority so will never be well paid) is also important and he needs to maintain his commitment to DSs care.

I want a good work/life/family balance, which to me means my career also being persued and us doing 50/60 out of work

I think this is a bit of a difficult question, nobody realises how life changing children really are, I grew up in a family where my mum was at home for the best part of 20 years, dad still did all the ‘admin’

I am divorced with a DS 5 I have a live in partner of 2 years.

I know that the romantic part of him would love to have a child together but I’m way more practical and have had these discussions with him on a more practical level in terms of logistics.

He has seen first hand how hard parenting is and we have remained firmly on the fence in a if you really want another sense, I’m neither here bore there and we probably won’t but that romantic idea of having a child with a person you love remains strong.

Lucky I’m so practical

I'd also be interested to know how many of the wives of higher earners would be willing to have children if they knew they'd have to return to work say, 50 hours a week.

Women obviously get the shit end of the stick around the house, but it's worse for less well-off women.

In short, I think this is largely a class issue as well as women's issue.

Also, my husband has been far more broody than I for the entirety of our relationship. Probably because he didn't do the heavy lifting.

According to this research men would like to be more involved in childcare but having to shoulder the financial burden of being the breadwinner relegates them to being second class parents.

Yes my ex H made a lot of this sort of noise but when it actually came down to it and it was offered he backed off rapidly prioritising work and his social life every single time. I’m a single parent now and I still occasionally get misty eyed emails saying how he’d swap with me in a heart beat to live full time with his kids and provide all childcare. He has moved to SE Asia and pays no child support, has seen his children three times this year for no more than two hours at a time so I am not sure how that would work...

A lot if women would probably also refuse to live like that. I'm happy doing the bulk of domestic work so that I don't have to work. My husband on the other hand loves his work and doesn't mind missing out on time at home for it too much. Each person does what they do best.

My dh is a good parent. He works long hrs but he does parent well and does chores.
He never really wanted to have kids and would definitely not have wanted them if he had to do 50/50 care.
It would never have occurred to him that he might have actually wanted to!

I think you could plausibly have some kind of rota system where you ensured that actual "tasks" were being done equally (though to me that sounds like more of a hassle than it's worth).

However, I don't think it would ever be truly 50/50 because of the biological facts of pregnancy / childbirth and breastfeeding. I can only speak from my own experience obviously, but when I came home from the hospital after all my DC, it was as if I was physically programmed to not sleep for more than two hours at a stint. I knew when the baby was going to wake up before they did - it was like some kind of adrenaline had kicked in or something and this went in for months. DH, in the other hand, just didn't have this instinct. The baby would literally need to be screaming before he woke up and he just wasn't tuned in in the same way. There was no point t in him getting up anyway as I was BF. So the pattern of the "mental load" and being the primary responder to DC is established from the early days, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure how you could break that cycle, without a real concerted effort and in my case, I couldn't really be bothered tbh.

But I am amazed at how dishonest some couples are about children. I know of a few cases where the bloke has not been keen and the wife has basically begged, and part of that begging has been "I will do all the work". I am not sure this is a good basis for an equitable division of the labour involved at a later date.

Where's the dishonesty in that? And why should there be an equal division of labour in an unequal division has been agreed in advance?

Surely there is only a problem here if one of them is lying? The guy does want kids and doesn't want the work, or the women says she will do the work but then doesn't. But I see no reason to assume that.

I used to think women wanted children and men mostly had them to keep the women happy. However when I researched it, I found a statistic that said men were only about 10% less likely than women to say they wanted children. Think it was something like 83% of women and 73% of men said they wanted children.

I remain a bit skeptical. I think maybe a better question is needed. We need to know how much each sex wants children. What sacrifices/costs are each willing to incur to have them. I suspect more men than women are wanting them on the basis that someone else will be doing most of the work.

@mrsmuddlepies

I have experience of working in Sweden and Norway. In the Scandinavian model yes women do tend to go back to work full time, but full time work in modern industries (I’m in IT) presumes that both parents will take leave when children are little, men (in my experience) have little shame about leaving the office early to pick up children. Childcare outside of the home is high quality and affordable, so its seen as a positive for 2+ year olds to be outside the home during working hours. This results in more women with more than one child in senior positions.

Anecdotally there are still those men who are ‘too busy at work’ to ever get home for bathtime, and there are women who feel judged for wanting to be with the children all the time instead of at work.

By the way, posters who say 'no one knows what it's like having kids til you have kids' - some of us have an outline idea and that's why we don't have any!!

So chestylarue, better childcare is the way to persuade parents to return to work full time? It sounds as if a change in attitudes would also help so that men are more comfortable about mentioning their children and childcare responsibilities in the work place.
I do so hope that the next 20 years sees a real shift towards equal parenting and equal financial responsibilities. Both sides have to acknowledge the need for change.

I agree

Not in my husbands case but certainly in many others

We do 50/50. Included in that 50/50 is the fact that someone has to go out and earn some money, so he does 90% of that, I do 90% of the housework. We both know the other works extremely hard at what they do.