Gulp! Moms Spend 27 Percent of Time on Housework

A great story in the New York Times --  "Families' Every Fuss, Archived and Analyzed" --discussed a UCLA study wherein researchers videotaped 32 dual-income, middle-class families for three years.

Here's what the researchers found:

• Moms do most of the housework, spending 27 percent of their time on it. Dads spend 18 percent of their time on housework, and kids spend 3 percent of their time on it.  

• Husbands and wives were alone together in the house for only about 10 percent of their waking time. 

• The entire family was gathered in one room about 14 percent of the time. 

• Couples who reported the least stress tended to have rigid divisions of labor, whether equal or not. 

• Mothers spent 19 percent of their time talking with family members or on the phone, and 11 percent taking occasional breathers that the study classified as "leisure." Dads spent 20 percent of their time chatting, and 23 percent on leisure. 

• Parents spent large amounts of solo time with their children -- 34 percent for mothers and 25 percent for fathers. 

• The clutter on the fridge door tended to predict the amount of clutter elsewhere.

Do these stats surprise you?

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