The idea of the “second shift” is one that mostly mothers experience in
a two working parent family. After a long hard day at work they come
home only to endure another shift of unpaid work, taking care of the
family. This shift usually takes up the rest of the day as women are
forced to balance cooking, cleaning, child care and many other tasks.
With limited time they feel overwhelmed and unappreciated as they
receive minimal help from their husbands. This causes stress on the
relationship, especially since at the root of this is an issue between
the ideologies of husband and wife. This is evident in the marriage of
Evan and Nancy Holt. She is forced to give up her idea of an equal
marriage in order to sustain it. Her husband didn’t think it was his
job to equally help out, convincer her that she was better suited for
the job. They ended up coming up with a system they thought was equal
in which he took care of the dog. It became his fetish since it was his
one responsibility. They had tried to implement other ways of sharing
the work but it never worked out. Nancy tried to hide her feelings of
“being taken advantage of” by staring to compare her work to other
mothers instead of her husband. This gave the illusion that things were
fair.
Homosexual families tend to follow similar patterns as heterosexual
ones, even though they try to portray their relationship as ideal both
to themselves and the outside world. Lesbigay families tend to describe
their relationship at egalitarian. Much of domesticity is invisible.
This sometimes causes resentment and anger between partners. Paid work
greatly determines the organization of domesticity. Wealthier lesbigay
often buy domesticity, which allows them to enhance their
egalitarianism within the relationship. The “Downsized family” also
sees egalitarianism. They tend to hire whatever domestic necessities
they need but it is very limited since they are rarely home. Sometimes
the terms fair and equal are misinterpreted. Some couples claim to have
equal responsibilities when one is specialized in paid-work and the
other domestically. What they really mean usually is that this is a
fair relationship. Practical economic concerns and occupational
characteristics play the largest role in determining who gravitates
towards domesticity involvement. Although not many, some people choose
to become more involved in family and domestic affairs. One reason for
this could be the “glass ceiling” effect lesbians and gays run into. On
a whole, those individuals who gravitate towards greater domestic
involvement than their partners often share common socioeconomic
characteristics. The usually share their lives with partners who earn
more, have greater career opportunities, work more hours, and work
outside the home. Many of the families interviewed for this study sort
and arrange domesticity differently, but equality is never really
reached even when they believe so.
The apparently routine work that supports a household is complex and
more meaningful than is typically acknowledged. There are complex
family relations involved that are difficult to put into texts and
articulate. This unpaid work is described as “something different than
work.” Love is a common element involved in household activities such
as preparing food. Meal time and feeding has been affected by changing
society. People eat less meals all togheer at home. Some of the causes
of this include increase in restaurant business and people working
farther away form home. Even so, many families make a special effort to
enjoy meals together, seeing it as quality family time. A lot of
planning goes into these meals, trying to determine what will satisfy
everyone. During actually dinner talk was a very important aspect for
many families. Behavior also must be monitored and controlled.
Professional households are more likely to work successfully at
arranging family means while single mothers were somewhat less likely
than married women to arrange regular meals together for their family.
Meal planning and other family management work is invisible. Practices
seem natural and therefore much credit is not given to it. There is
logic to the work women do, learned through experience and principles.
According to a National Survey of Families and Households, women’s
housework is affected only by their own earning, not by their husbands’
and not by their earnings compared to their husbands’. The findings
also suggest dependence of women’s absolute rather than relative
earnings. It suggests that married women have a substantial degree of
economic autonomy in the areas of domestic life for which they are
normatively responsible. Some women have a dependence on men because
they exchange their domestic labor in return for access to monetary
resources. Women whose earnings are greater than their husbands’ will
spend more time on housework than other women in order to affirm their
gender identities. The main theory is that women’s housework is
affected by their earnings compared to their husbands’ and their time
spent on domestic labor. My analysis also addresses another crucial gap
in the existing research, namely, its failure to account for the
relationship between women’s absolute and relative earnings. Research
has shown that married women with low earnings are more likely than
other women to have high relative earnings, that is, earnings compared
to their husbands.
Men spent more time working for pay and women spent more time on
domestic labor because they were better at doing it. Since men’s
earnings are higher on average than women’s, the economic dependence
hypothesis is a possible explanation for the gender gap in housework.
Partners with incomes that are unusually high or low for their
gender are predicted to compensate by exaggerating their
gender-normative housework performance. married women whose earnings
exceed their husbands’ will spend more time on domestic labor than
other women, and men whose earnings are unusually low compared to their
spouses’ are predicted to spent less time on housework than other men.
Analysis implies that married women may as well be single. Even though
the sharing of life experiences and resources characterize marriage, it
seems that women’s earnings matter more than their husbands’ to certain
outcomes within it. A study implies that women act as autonomous
economic agents in the domestic sphere to the extent made possible by
their own earnings. It is unknown exactly if the autonomous
relationship between married women’s earnings and their housework is a
sign of their freedom to make economic decisions that benefit them, or
of their inability to draw on their husbands’ earnings to reduce their
household labor.
I feel as if the issues faced by Nancy and Evan Holt are very common
among today’s families. Mothers are overworked and outwork their
husbands countless with little appreciation. I myself take for granted
my mother and all that she does for me and all six of us kids. This
includes preparing meals for all of us that we all will enjoy, which is
a nearly impossible task. Each one of us always wants to eat at
different times and different foods. We forget home is not a restaurant
as our mother tries to cater to our needs and wants. I remember trying
to cook over the summer for my family and realizing how difficult it
really is. The logistics of it were a lot harder than the physical
aspect of cooking. I swore to never do it again after having to plan,
prepare, serve, and clean up after just one evening’s meal. I don’t
know how my mother does it most nights for all of us. Even though we
try to eat together as much as possible, it is a rare occasion.
Somebody is always busy and unless it is a holiday or birthday it
rarely happens. My mother doesn’t like it when we eat with the TV on
because she wants us to be able to enjoy each other’s company.
I can see how gay couples would want to even more portray their
relationship as egalitarian. With already so much stigma on such
couples, it is natural for them to want to portray themselves as an
ideal couple. In my own experience, my gay brother and his partner have
separate, and maybe fair roles. My brother tends to be the more
domestic one since he likes to cook, and works less hours therefore
allowing him the time to do more domestic tasks.

Childhood

There is an expectation that parents must exert themselves to the utmost to ensure that their children grow up to be successful. This has transformed the child into the “useless” model. There is still a division in household work between girls and boy, with most of it consumed by female children. Another trend is that children take relatively little responsibility for most household task, barely even 15% according to a study performed. Washing the dishes and cleaning the house are where children help out the most. Some responsibility is shared with children. Why is this so? Parents feel responsibility for investing their own time and money in their child’s future as long as they are home. Children’s age and gender help determine how they pitch in. As children get older, they become more involved. Girls share about 5 times more work than boys. Boys tend to cut lawns or do repairs while girls cook or clean. This helps reproduce sex segregation of household labor found among husbands and wives. This is not the case in single parent households. In this case, children share a lot more responsibility to help out the one parent. In mother-only families, daughters are the workhorses. They take on twice as much responsibility for household work than in a two-parent household. Boys’ work also increases. Overall, in every type of family, higher proportions of children living in mother-only families are contributing strongly to household chores, helping expose boy to household work.
In a study on mothers and fathers’ work on children, several questions were explored. The first focused around the idea of the effects of mothers at work on children. There is a theory that maternal employment causes harm. Fathers tend to think mothers cannot have a good relationship with children if they work. But according to children, it doesn’t matter whether a mother works or not. What really matters is how children are mothered. Warn and responsive, firm and caring characteristics are important. Ironically, it is father’s unemployment that is seen as a problem in society. The issue of child care arises when parents go to work. Many claim it is a bad thing. But it is not bad because it supplants parent care. It is only bad if the quality is bad, and neglect or abuse is present. In a study with The Families and Work Institute, it was found that dual-earner families are spending more time with their parents today than they did 20 years ago. Still, parents feel pressed for time. This had lead to the quality vs. quantity debate regarding time spend with children. Most parents think their kids want more time with them. Children, on the other hand wanted their parents to be less stressed and tire after work. Kids want more quality time with their parents. It is concluded that parents with good situations at work come home in better moods and with more energy for their children. The children develop well and this energy is reinvested back at work. It is important for there to be good communication between parents and their children. Parents need to ask their children’s opinion in order to benefit for everyone.
There are several different theories on child-rearing. Stemming from Freud, one idea is that children replicate their parents and become adults. Really, a child’s goal is to be a successful child. First they must learn how to get along with parents and siblings. Then the child must learn to get along with peers and do the things that are expected of him or her outside the home. Children keep each relationship in separate mental accounts. They learn separately how to behave at home and how to behave outside the home. This is because different behaviors are required. Our minds tend to categorize and put things and people into different groups. Children and teenagers associate themselves in certain groups. This helps explain why teens act out. They are not trying to act like grownups but differentiate themselves from them. As they grow up, it is the peers that help determine the outcome of a person, not necessarily parents, according to Judith Harris.
Throughout the years children have been valued very differently. In the 19th century children were useful but in the 20th century they were seen as economically useless but emotionally priceless. The sacred child prevailed where they were to be kept off the markets, useless but loving and off the streets supervised and protected. Economically they did work around the home for allowance. This work is first to train a child, not to help the parent. The usefulness of the work is not as important. The economic value of children was legitimately combined with sentimental worth, and the instrumental use of child money was acceptable. This sacred child model changed to the valuable household model. Priceless child model became the conventional norm in the 20th century. Since emotional and practical cost increase, children are being rushed out to soon into adult-like behavior. This theory supports the idea that the “Age of protection” is being replaced by the “Age of preparation” The world of children is changing and their household responsibilities are changing a lot due to the changing family structures and new ideologies.
I think while Judith Harris makes a good point, she is overlooking the impact family and parents have on children. While I agree peers have a great influence on you, I think she dismissed the power of family. In my own experiences, I see many ways in which my parents have and still influence me as a child and now as a young adult. I do some examples of what she described as people acting differently in and out of the home. I’m not sure how much this theory applies to me, but I have definitely seen this in several of my friends. It is almost as if they are two completely different people. I find people tend to act very differently in the home then at school, and when they are just hanging around with their peers. I think part of this is because when you’re with your parents, you act more how they want you to act. Children try to meet the expectations of their parents.
When I think of children today I see them more as “useless.” Growing up my siblings, friends and I had very little responsibilities. Occasionally my parents would ask me to help out with something but for the most part they took care of everything. As a kid they wanted me to go to school and study as they supported me. Most of my friends had very little responsibilities growing up as well. Our parents focused on helping us become successful and would sacrifice so much in order to make sure we got what we needed. Looking back, I realize how much they sacrificed for me. My siblings and I were always a priority for my parents.
I completely agree with the idea that children would rather have quality time with their parents instead of more time. Just because a parent is home with a child or even in the same room doesn’t mean they are spending quality time together. A parent can be physically present but not engaging. Good interaction between parent and child is essential to building a good relationship. This is what kids want. Sometimes I see parents try to make up quality time with material items. They think giving kids material things they want will help make up for time lost. In reality, most children would give back these gifts if it meant they could spend more time with their parents, especially those who are not present most of the time.

The absent Black father epitomized the male component of family breakdown due to absent fathers. Many people tend to racialize the idea of fatherless towards Blacks. They have become the symbol of fatherlessness, even though this problem occurs in other races as well. This brands fatherlessness as a depraved condition, and offers a convenient explanation for Black people’s problems. For Black families, a female-headed household is more dominant than the nuclear-family model due to high rates of unwed mothers. There has been a negative connotation towards Black fathers for a while, ranging from them not having any positive effect on their children, to not being suitable mentors. There are a few societal forces that help discourage Black men’s family participation. Black single-mothers receive welfare benefits when they bare a child out of wedlock. The effects of racial repression such as high rates of unemployment and incarceration also help contribute to Black fathers’ absence. AFDC is likely to be paid to mothers, particularly Black mothers never married. The issue is not with a father not being nurturing or emotionally involved, but rather the expectation of marrying and remaining married to the mother. His economical and marital status is what is condemned. But, because marital breakdown is unlikely to be the cause of Black children’s poverty, marriage is unlikely to be the solution. In fact, it is racial inequality, not fatherlessness, that is leading to Black children’s’ deprivation. But the United States fails at constructing a system to help these people. Instead, they put blame on Black fathers, claiming it is the fault of their own bad habits, and not from unequal social structure.
A new style of parenting has started to emerge in which parents alternate work shifts in order to take care of the children. This is predominating in blue-collar families with dual-earning couples. While mothers are working, fathers are home acting as “Mr. Moms” since they do motherly work but are not mothers. Over 10 million workers in the US work evening, night, or rotating shift while the other parent works a noonday shift. This allows for parental caretaking. Despite the fact that some fathers in this system don’t do as much as the mothers at home, they spend on average 28.5 hours a week in solo care of their children. They usually work the early and night shift at home, putting the children to bed. Money is the main reason for dual-parenting. It is a lot cheaper to take care of your children yourself. Others mentioned the idea that children should only be cared for by family. The system of shift working between parents may be good for the children, but causes hardships in the relationship of the parents. They sacrifice their own relationship and time together in order to be with their children. This can cause tension between the family. In most families, the man in an alternation-shift family is still recognized as the breadwinner. Sometimes he had to work as many as double the hours in order to earn more than his wife. His job was usually put ahead of hers too. In contrast, the mother is still seen as the number-one parent. They tailor their work life so they can be with the children at times they define as key times. They also claim that they are still the center of emotional life in the family and that they should be.
There has been observation of change and lack there of in men’s lives regarding family. The decline of the male as primary breadwinner is the most apparent aspect of change. This is no longer the predominate household model. Only about a third of Americans still depend solely or primarily on a male breadwinner. This has led to many men searching for other ways to show manhood and masculinity. Men’s participation in family involvement has not risen proportionally to women’s involvement in paid work. Men are also resisting marriage more and living on their own. A gender gap in domestic work exits, but men’s domestic participation has increase slowly. Men, in general, have increased help in child-rearing by spending more time with children. Some of men show resistance to equality in the family, while others are turning away from the family altogether. Even if a man doesn’t help out equally in the home, more and more are feeling they should be.
The decline of the male breadwinner model has caused confusion and discomfort, calling into question beliefs regarding manhood and masculinity. In the past, economic comfort coincided with being a “man.” Today, it is harder for men to justify their power as new relationships form in the home with women and children. They are now considered in some theories to be in “no man’s land.” Men are participating more in child-rearing, especially after a second marriage. Childhood has played a large role in the way men turn out. How they evaluate, respond and resolve conflicts established in childhood depends on experiences encountered later in life. As a whole, men are starting to reject work achievements and find more gratification in relationships with nurture and intimacy. The word “masculine” typically has been associated with independence, rationality, and aggression. A new vision of manhood has emerged focusing on interdependence and emotional openness. It rejects the views that manhood is the opposite of womanhood. Male dominance is still prevalent. This ties in with patriarch, which focuses on how institutional arrangements bestow power and privilege on men and how they behave as a group to perpetuate these advantages. The workplace allows for males to avoid domestic work. Men also have social political and economic advantages just because they are men. But changes are seen in the recent years in favor of women’s rights, employment opportunities, and women’s independence. Men’s dominance is now being challenge. Over the last several decades, men have seen economic security and entitlements decrease. The job market has changed along with wages. Committed employment among women has also risen. They are going into many managerial positions once dominated by men. This has allowed mens freedom to not feel economically responsible for a woman, and also gives a woman more leverage in a relationship. There is also a rise of alternatives to permanent marriage. Partnerships, divorce, remarriage, cohabitation outside marriage, and permanent singlehood have all grown in popularity. Men have been freed from the obligation to maintain a lifelong economic and emotional commitment to one woman, and women have more discretion about marriage as well. This has caused a bigger distinction between marriage and parenting. It is more common to be a parent, yet not be married. Some men have retained patriarchal control in traditional households while others haven’t.
I feel as if the model of “Mr. Mom” is becoming very common and more accepted throughout society today. Media has made light of this term in hit songs and tv shows. There is a country song by LoneStar called “Mr. Mom” in which the dad loses his job and therefore the mother goes to work while the dad stays home. He thinks it is going to be fun and easy doing nothing but comes to realize the job entails more than he imagine. He ends up wanting to go back to work in the end because being the role of mom is a lot harder than he originally thought. In the popular show “Desperate Housewives” one of the characters ends up being a “stay-at-home dad” because he loses his job, forcing his wife to go back to work. In both forms of media, the idea of men helping out more in the home, so much so they act like the mom is seen positively. In the past, this might be looked down upon and a man would not be considered masculine.
The model of the dual-shift parenting system is one that I have personally witnessed. I know a few families personally that operate this way. One family does this because they are not able to afford any other form of child-care. The mother, as with most, works in the evenings until midnight while the father works in the early morning until the evening. They seem to split tasks pretty equally. The children are very attached to both parents, especially the father. I believe this system really helps establish a good relationship between children and their father since he has to be a lot more involved. Another family I know which operates through a version of the dual-shift system does it not for financial reason but because they don’t want to put their children in day-care systems. They are firm believers of raising your own children and instilling your own values into them yourself. The mother is a nurse so she only works 3 days of the week to begin with. But when she does work, she either schedules weekends, (when her husband can take care of the children) or during the night shift (where the husband is also home).