As we slide toward Father’s Day, according to Insure.com’s Father’s Day Index, if you calculated the work Dad does around the house, he’s doing about $20,248 worth of work.
Mom’s work, on the other hand, is worth closer to $60,182.
You can earn more here. The original index is a part of a push to encourage people to buy life insurance, and who knows if it’s accurate, but it’s interesting
1. To see what jobs are associated with dads, but even while taking a jaundiced view of the gender-specificity of Insure.com’s ideas of household chores,
2. To think that women may still be doing the heavy lifting at home while earning less in the marketplace.
Dating Jesus 
Growing up my parents made sure that my brother and I understood how the house works, to do simple maintenance and make repairs if we could. You know, “guy stuff”. They also made sure we could cook, do laundry, iron a shirt and keep the place clean. Over the years when I’ve heard the crack from male friends that I “would make somebody a good wife”, I respond by quoting my mother who used to tell us, “I want you to know how to do this stuff because when you get older, I want you to look for a wife and not a mommy”. It worked.
That was how it was in my house — not my house of origin, where we all were a bunch of slobs, save for my mother. An attempt was made to teach me (the girl) to cook, which I resisted mightily. I sure showed her! In my house of creation (not origin), the sons were told that if they wanted to eat, they needed to learn to cook. It worked. Both are wonderful cooks and both know which end of the vacuum sucks.
You can have my Miele when you pry my cold dead fingers from it.
:)
I was 7 when my mother went back to school to finish her degree. My 9th grade educated father took over a lot of the cooking and cleaning chores and it was quickly pointed out to me that there was no such thing as “man’s” work or “woman’s” work but that it was work that needed to be done and I needed to get off my butt and do it. This was in KY in the late 50s, so a bit uncommon for the time and place.
Your father was a wise man.
I don’t find it surprising that women still do the heavy lifting on unpaid household work. It’s a painful fight to get it any other way, in a world in which we’re so liberated that men help with the housework. (At least men babysitting their own children seems to have bitten the lexical dust.) Dirty households are attributed to the women who live in them, and the men are pitied. Women are criticized as sluts. When kids have problems people wonder about what their mothers could possibly have been doing.
I’m consciously and explicitly trying to raise my son not to be a great big leech, but a responsible adult in whatever sort of household he ends up in.
What you said? Amen. The message was well-received in my house when it was framed in the “You will want to be a big boy in the kitchen of your first apartment” school of thought.
I think Paul’s mom had it exactly right. A wife should be a partner, not a caretaker. It works the other way around, too. Maybe the divorce rate is as high as it is because lots of people don’t seem to think that way.
We made sure our kids (a son and a daughter) knew how to do basic stuff, too. When they got to college they were astounded to find out how many of their peers could not do the simplest things, like laundry.
But, hey. The problem is the teachers, right? The parents who helicopter and hover to protect their little darlings are simply being great parents, right?
I thought all the work here was done …