Parents and childcare.

[MitchDash]

I am really struggling with this of topic. I've seen it so many times on mumsnet.

Why is childcare 100% the mums responsibility? ie, husband changes job/hours and mum has to sort out childcare changes. ex husband does the same and it's still mums job even though they share custody. Mum gets job and dad makes literally no adjustments to working life to particpate in the managing of childcare. Or any other change to anyones employment. Don't even get me started on 'helping' with housework.

Is it 2018 or not?

For us the conversation went "would you like to stay home with dd1", "yes, maybe" (do maths), "we'll be £x,000 worse off if we do that, and you'd gave to probably quit your job." "Oh". The end.

Yeah, obviously, that is a structural problem. We did give up some money, though, to divide the leave up equally (I earned a bit more than my partner back then). But if it is a prohibitive penalty, obviously, that is not possible.

I guess, one thing to learn from this is for women to choose partners, who do not earn more than them, then.

@RomanyRoots yes, he already does a lot of that stuff anyway. He's a very involved father, I guess I'm just lucky. Shouldn't be luck though, it should be the norm.

The other thing that is a norm in society is for women to be with men who are a few years older and so tend to earn more.

Loads of couples I know the woman stepped back as the man earns more now, but he's 7 years older, and her earning potential over time is actually much higher....

TBH most of teh dads I know do loads of stuff including housework and whathaveyou

What they do have to be is TOLD though which is the mental load piece

I have one of these - he never baulks at doing anything at all BUT I have to tell him what needs doing.

I did get all the school contact numbers switched over to him though on the basis that his work is nearer and the sky hasn't fallen in yet...

Green

I totally agree and so glad you have a normal dh.
I've mostly been a sahm so have done more domestic stuff than my dh, but he is capable, does more than his fair share and doesn't leave certain jobs to me, because he sees it as women's work.
He's always been the same and our eldest is 27 and having his own child soon.
There really is no excuse for it not to be the norm.

I really don’t think it is. People tend to post when they have a problem.

All the new Mums I know have chosen to take on the childcare. I love being at home with my baby and wouldn’t have it any other way. Husbands job pays better anyway. We each do our fair share of the housework though and he does all the cooking.

Why do they need to be told though?
We can blame a certain amount on their parents not teaching them to manage the home, but my dh didn't have parents or anyone else to teach him, he just got stuck in because he wanted a happy family and nice home.

I've discovered recently that even if childcare ISN'T all the woman's responsibility, we still get blamed for anything that might go wrong with it. When we had DS, I decided that I wanted to work part time, because my FT job was very demanding and I worried that I'd never see him and would be too exhausted to make the most of our time together. Fortunately, my workplace were flexible enough for me to do this, and I earn only slightly less doing 3 days a week than DH does FT. My job has long shifts, some nights and weekends, and I move locations every year or so (junior-ish doctor) so we picked a nursery near DH's work so he could do all the ferrying and they wouldn't have to move every time I moved jobs.

In the last year, I have NEVER had a day off for DS being ill, never left early to pick him up, have always had DH or grandparents around for my nights/weekends. There have been two occasions in the year when DH has been ill first thing in the morning so I have had to do the nursery run. This makes me late for work as nursery opens at 7.30 and work starts at 8, 45 mins away. So twice in a year, I've been late because of this. And in my latest round of feedback, I've had two anonymous comments of "needs better childcare." WTAF? I can bet if it was a man who said "Sorry I'm late, my wife was ill so I had to take the kids to nursery" everyone would be fawning over what a great dad he is, but for me, it's gone down as being sloppy and disorganised.

DH didn't earn more than me, I got very generous maternity leave, but who's going to turn down thousands of pounds? Plus DH would have no guaranteed job after time off, as I had. The point is, it's often made out to be all about choice and it very often isn't a free choice or at the least the scales are heavily weighted.

I agree it’s often down to work and who earns more and that really does make sense except the amount of times it’s the Mother earning less is significant.

I don't think the argument is about who works and who doesn't but that men should be expected to be equal ito all household chores and parenting when they are at home.
I believe we are going backwards, whether it's because women aren't expecting this from their partners/ hence society not expecting it or men aren't getting the message.

I remember comparing two babycare books (before internet) one from the 70's and another from the 80's.
The advice from the 70's was tackling the problems women find with men these days. The one from the 80's was further ahead than we are now.
The baby magazines spoke about "Modern Man" how he was expected to step up and the days of women doing it all were gone, men no longer paced outside the delivery room and were expected to be hands on from day one.
The 90's men seemed far more capable than young fathers these days.

Why do they need to be told though?

This is an issue of personality type (not sure how much is socialization and how much genes). I and my partner are 'gender nonconforming' in this, I guess.

This is a test that is also used by HR (so nothing esoteric).
www.16personalities.com/languages

I am INTP, my partner is ESTJ.

I will simply not see what needs to be done (really not an intentional thing). Until he explicitly tells me to remove the socks from the couch... One can work on this, obviously, but it is very easy to slip back, particularly, when there is a lot going on.

No idea, if personality types are differently distributed between sexes.

men should be expected to be equal ito all household chores and parenting when they are at home. I believe we are going backwards, whether it's because women aren't expecting this from their partners/ hence society not expecting it or men aren't getting the message.

Well my experience is that as a child it seemed to be the norm among my friends that their Mums would cook and Dads (all of whom worked fulltime outside the home) would do the washing up as "whoever cooked didn't have to wash up". My Dad did loads of housework and my Mum cooked amd he always washed up. Most of the Mums were either SAHM or worked part time. Among my friends it seems more common that the entire meal (planning, cooking, clearing up) is somehow the woman's responsibility and maybe the DH will "help". Of course this isn't true of all couples I know, there are exceptions but far more than half heterosexual couples i know fit this model.

I wonder if being a SAH parent used to be accorded more respect, and that's part of it. Unless you have a very hard job, I fail to see why anyone would expect to come home and essentially have someone wait on them. Especially if the stay at home person has been looking after kids all day (and looking after kids whilst simultaneously cooking!). But that's the way it seems to be for a depressing number of my friends.

Sorry bold fail...

The tasks associated with childrearing are so undervalued in our society that women often overestimate how easy it will be to manage.

'My lovely DP is a bit crap and disorganized but I'm sure we'll be fine' pre kids quickly turns into 'I'm overwhelmed but don't have the energy necessary to manage DP doing his share too' when kids arrive.

Because we're so much better at it! Most men are overgrown children themselves.

And I should add that far more of the couples I know have the wife working full time (compared to the couples who were my friends parents as a child), but somehow still responsible for more at home. My experience is that in the home things were much more equal in the 80s/90s even though I suspect things were less equal in the workplace. Maybe I just grew up in some kind of bastion of housework equality though

Well I was born in the 80s and my father's sole contribution to our upbringing was financial. He earnt a lot of money and my mother did absolutely everything else.

As far as my personal circumstances go, my generation is doing a hell of a lot better than my parents' generation at sharing all responsibilities equally. But on a society wide level you may well be right.

It does depend on the individuals involved. We both like and are good at our jobs, but we both absolutely love parenting, so now maternity leave is over (which we didn’t split as I’m breastfeeding) both of us do part time and have 3 days working our jobs and 2 days childcare at home. My son will grow up seeing that it’s normal for both parents to want to work, and normal for both parents to want to be at home in a caring role. We have less money but the difference is pretty negligible when you factor in the savings on childcare. My husband also had some weird responses to his decision to go part time but is an adult who knows his own mind and is happy to shrug and move on.

I think maybe it helps that his mum was seriously ill when he was little so his dad did loads of childcare, and my mum was doing her PHD when we were little so again my dad was very involved in parenting.

both of us do part time and have 3 days working our jobs and 2 days childcare at home.

I do think this is ideal but requires that a) both parents can find part time work / are allowed to go part-time and b) that part-time work pays as well (pro-rata) as its full time equivalent. Some jobs don't seem to really do part-time, I know quite a few women who asked to go back part-time after maternity and were refused.

both of us do part time and have 3 days working our jobs and 2 days childcare at home.

Ah, that was our utopian dream, I'm so glad it's actually working for someone! We were going to do that until we did the maths, and then we had a double whammy of spectacularly bad timing that killed it stone dead - eldest was seriously ill shortly after birth then a very intense baby; and he landed a much better paid job with excellent prospects just as the project I worked for lost funding. My career (such as it was, being a second start after coming out of badly paid academia) just died. I ran my own business for a while then retrained into education but yet again, poor timing as the govt slashed edu funding.

On the upside my ILs brought up their boy well - he's perfectly capable of every chore, his dad cooked (family joke that MIL is dreadful in the kitchen), neater than me and disgustingly organised. We do all the school meetings together, yadda yadda. Actually it is pretty utopian, it's just that my earning power in the current climate is pathetic.

I do think this is ideal but requires that a) both parents can find part time work / are allowed to go part-time and b) that part-time work pays as well (pro-rata) as its full time equivalent.

Yes, I’m under no illusion that we’re very lucky with this. Work did initially refuse my part time request, then when I said “ok, give me a firm decision in writing in the next few days then because I need to get my resignation in before the deadline” and lo and behold they magically found me 0.6. Makes me wonder how much they rely on being able to scare people into accepting full time.

silentcrow that sounds tough, sorry stuff didn’t work out as you’d initially hoped. I think the research suggests that the way household chores are shared has more influence on kids’ expectations than who works outside the home anyway.

With the chores thing, I do think it's just very easy not to realise. Especially when you're young. I have a couple of pals who are in relationships like this and in retrospect, you can see the seeds way before they had the DC. In one case, that was blindingly obvious: if you're arguing about this before kids come along, that's a bad sign. Having had a kid before she did, I actually advised her not to TTC with the issue so unresolved. In the other, it wasn't.

I think as well, there often just isn't very much housework to do when it's only the two of you. Couples without DC often live in smaller flats as they're younger and nobody spends much time in them because both are at work, so they don't need a lot of cleaning. If you're making your own bed anyway then it doesn't create any more labour if someone else sleeps in it too. Not really much difference in washing, especially if you do separate loads for towels, whites etc. I look back to when DH and I were pre DC and tbh neither of us did anything much. Because we didn't really need to. I mean, there was zero tidying ever needed because we didn't mess it up in the first place! Bit of cooking but we kind of did that as a hobby anyway. Then all of a sudden there's hugely more to do.

We've always had a pretty equal set up, both part time around childcare etc. One thing I did notice though is how the family brain has always resided in my head.