Don't Work if You Don't Have To

Neil Gilbert is the Chernin Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of "Capitalism and the Welfare State" and, most recently, "A Mother's Work: How Feminism, the Market and Policy Shape Family Life."

Since the mid-1960s, men in the United States have taken on an increasing share of household and child care responsibilities. Their level of participation in these activities more than doubled between 1965 and 1999, at which point it leveled off.

The elite few, who essentially promote the commercialization of child-rearing and idealize everyone working full-time, have options that others don't.

Despite this increase, women continue to assume the brunt of these domestic responsibilities -- about 40 percent more of the unpaid work than men. Whether complete equality in the division of labor can or should be achieved in these realms is an open question. It is a question, however, that masks a much more serious issue for parents and children, particularly those in the middle and working classes.

During the first three to five years of life, the work of raising children is extremely labor intensive, a 24/7 job with no time off for vacations. No matter how it is split, the child-rearing and household production activities of a two-earner family with two children under 5 is an immensely time-consuming enterprise. Even if the children are placed in the care of others from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., a considerable amount of work -- cooking, feeding, dressing, driving, cleaning, buying and washing clothes, visiting doctors -- remains to be done by parents every day. And that’s before finding the so-called quality time to play, chatter and cuddle

The expectation that both parents work full-time during the early years of child-rearing is widely held by most of the people who regularly write, think and talk about this issue. These are journalists, professors and pundits who write, think and talk for a living. None of them has a real 9-to-5 job, with an hour for lunch. They think “doing lunch” is work. For these elite few, work is varied, interesting, with flexible hours and rewarding enough to pay for full-time nannies. For most others, after a few years on the job, paid employment is cramped and repetitious. With the increasing life-span and rising age of retirement, devoting an extra five years to caring for preschool children would still leave a stay-at-home parent, male or female, 30 to 40 years to test the joys of paid employment.

The elite have framed a discourse that promotes the commercialization of child-rearing and idealizes everyone working full-time in the market, under the banner of equality in the division of family labor. In the first three to five years of child-rearing, even if a two-earner family achieved complete equality on the domestic front it would leave both members with the equivalent of 1.5 jobs, while their children were effectively being socialized by strangers during the most critical developmental stage of life. Is this the ideal toward which modern family-life should be striving?

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/05/how-can-we-get-men-to-do-more-at-home/dont-work-if-you-dont-have-to