Dads may be helping out but Moms still multi-tasking and stressed: Study

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDDec 4 2011

A new study shows that in dual earning families, fathers and mothers are spending roughly equal amounts of time doing paid and unpaid work, but mothers are spending nine more hours a week multi-tasking.

Although in the United States men have taken up their share of housework and child care, the new study reveals that women are still doing more.

The findings, published Thursday in the American Sociological Review, come from a two-year study of 500 middle-class, dual-earner families from eight urban and suburban communities across the country.

The results showed that while fathers and mothers log nearly equal time performing paid and unpaid work combined, mothers spend nine more hours per week multi-tasking at home and work than do their husbands. This is stressing the women out the study notes.

The study aims, say its authors, to explain why working moms continue to feel a “greater sense of burden and emotional stress” despite getting more help than ever from their husbands. “This is what parents have been living,” said study leader Barbara Schneider, a sociologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Schneider acknowledged that all the participants in the 500 Family Study may not be representative of American families economically, educationally or by ethnicity but by focusing on some of the busiest parents, she said, the study underscores the disproportionate emotional toll that multitasking may be taking on women as they shoulder a wider range of responsibilities in the family.

Schneider and her colleagues issued 369 mothers and 241 fathers in dual-earner families across the U.S. parents a watch that beeped at eight random times throughout the day. Each time it beeped, parents were asked to log what activity they were engaged in, how they were feeling, where they were and with whom. It also asked parents whether they were engaged in a simultaneous secondary activity, and if so, what it was. Volunteers wore the watch for one week.

The researchers supplemented those logs with standard survey data as well as in-home interviews with both parents and children. The data were collected in 1999 and 2000, before the worst of the recession put greater financial strain on families and layoffs allowed (or forced) some parents to spend more time on household chores.

The study also found that multi-tasking by fathers was far less likely to involve child care and unlike moms, dads tended to report they were more focused when in charge of their kids. For men, multitasking tends to involve less burdensome tasks like carrying on a three-way conversation or engaging in self-care, according to study author Dr. Shira Offer, associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Israel's Bar-Ilan University.

Among working mothers, 53 percent of multitasking at home involves housework compared with 42 percent among working fathers. Additionally, 36 percent of women's multitasking at home involves child care compared with 28 percent for fathers.

Researchers said this jibes with much research showing that fathers are more likely than mothers to engage with their children in interactive activities that are “more pleasurable than routine child care tasks.” When mothers had child care duties, they were more likely to take the kids along on errands, drive them to activities or supervise their homework, the study found.
Schneider said the new data help explain a “paradox” — that while men's contributions to household work have increased substantially, they have not resulted in happier mothers.

“We have this cultural belief that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they're not,” said Wake Forest University sociologist Robin Simon, who in 2005 found that no parents — irrespective of their kids' stage in life — were happier than adults who had no children. Simon called the latest study “fascinating.”

Ellen Galinsky, president of the New York-based Work and Families Institute, said the study appeared to be the first to consider multitasking and its psychological impact on parents. In the current economic environment, where she said “multitasking on steroids” is the norm among working parents, the study suggests one important antidote to stress: Multitasking in the presence of a spouse eased the psychological strain of doing several things at once. “Men want to be more involved in their families' lives,” she suggested.