So many of my friends with young children complain about an imbalance of parenting and household chores between themselves and their husbands. They complain that they do 90 percent of the parenting, and 90 percent of the housecleaning and upkeep, while their husbands do next to nothing. This happens with my stay-at-home mom friends as well as with my full-time working mom friends. Why is this? Is it because these dads are all deadbeats who would rather drink a beer and watch TV than help out? Is it because all of these dads are negligent and don’t care about their children or their households? Are these men, who were great husbands before the kids came along, suddenly changing and becoming people who don’t want to put their time into their families? I don’t think so.
This will likely be a very unpopular point of view, but I believe that we women are sabotaging ourselves and creating this situation of parental imbalance. We are doing this by creating a situation both before the baby comes and immediately following where we do most of the work, thus making it hard to change from the status quo, and by not speaking up enough and telling our husbands what we need from them.
When newly married, many women decide to take it upon themselves to clean the house, cook the meals, and generally take care of the household. We do this for various reasons. We do this because we like a clean house and we think it’s easier to do it for ourselves. (“If you want something done right, do it yourself,” right?) We do this because we want to be good wives and we think this is what a good wife should do. And we do this because we enjoy doing it. We like cooking or we use cleaning as a stress reliever (yes, many women do). We enjoy making our house a home and we enjoy making new and exciting dishes to enjoy with our dear husbands.
When we move into the stage where we are expecting a baby, we women nest even more. It’s a hormonal thing as much as a choice we make. We enjoy decorating the baby’s room. We like figuring out what we’ll need for our new baby. We get excited thinking about how things will be when the baby arrives. Our dear husbands do not have the hormonal drive we women have. Often the imminent arrival of a baby does not even seem real to them. After all, they aren’t the ones who feel the baby moving inside them at all hours of the day. They aren’t the ones who have to watch what they eat for the sake of the baby. They don’t have their lives turned upside down … yet. Also, in many cases, women have more experience with babies than men do. Women have watched their sister’s kids, or have talked in detail with their close friends who have had babies, or have done tons of research to try to learn what to expect.
