How to successfully divide child care duties and chores at home
Research shows there is still inequality at home, with women taking on most household responsibilities. One of The New York Times' most shared articles this week is called "What 'Good' Dads Get Away With," unpacking why women still handle most of the child care and chores.
One study estimates it will be another 75 years before men do half of the unpaid work at home.
The article by clinical psychologist Darcy Lockman is based on her new book, "All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership."
"There's so much work involved when children come around that everyone's doing a ton more," Lockman told "CBS This Morning." "So it's hard for fathers sometimes to see the proportionality of it, and because of our assumption about who the primary parent should be, it often just defaults to the woman and what I found in my research is women are really angry about it."
Lockman interviewed about 50 women for the book and found many common themes of frustration, with fathers not necessarily being bad dads, but not realizing mothers were shouldering a heavier burden.
"This predicament is so predictable," Lockman said. "And I think what has happened is there's this kind of idea of the modern involved father, who's way more involved than, like, Don Draper, right? Who's sort of like what we ... all hold in our minds as the '50s dad. So there has been a lot of improvement in how much parenting work men do."
Despite that, the level of child care fathers handle still typically pales compared to mothers.
"The percentage which the Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently shows is about 35 percent, that's how much of the child care work the father takes on," Lockman said. "That's held steady for the last 20 years. So the numbers climbed, but they leveled off without ever reaching parity, and a lot of parents today go into this expecting parity. So when it doesn't manifest, there's a lot of upset."
Lockman found that couples who worked out who would handle what tasks tended to be happier.
"If couples had outlined their expectations, it almost didn't matter how it was divided," Lockman said. "But most couples don't think to do that. You don't know all that goes into raising a kid, all the kind of behind-the-scenes labor, until you have one and you encounter it. So people don't tend to get together and say how are we gonna do this. And it all kind of comes on and then it often defaults to the mother. So defaulting to the mother is where there's a problem."
Lockman said the best way to manage the problem was with thorough communication, and understand how traditional gender roles can impact any couple.
"I think the first thing is to really understand that the sexism out there in our world permeates our personal relationships," Lockman said. "We don't expect it to, we think our homes are separate from our culture, and they're not at all. And I think if you go into parenting with that realization, you can do the second thing that successful couples do, which is just really stay on top of how things are being divided."
"It doesn't have to be split down the middle 50-50 with a hatchet. That's not realistic," he said. "But if you're constantly checking in with each other to see how things are going and people have their assigned tasks, agree upon them and agree the standards that those tasks need to kind of meet. Things work out a lot better. So couples who achieve parity are really on top of that as a goal."
