by John Ettorre

When it comes to deciding whether it’s worth having a little messier house in exchange for having more time for the kids, most working moms have no qualms about putting up with a few additional dust bunnies.

That’s the not too surprising conclusion of a recent study of thousands of American families. The study, overseen by researchers at the University of Maryland, found that while only about 30 percent of American kids now live in families with a stay-at-home mom and working dad, about half the ratio of 1965, parents still spend about the same amount of time with their children as they did 40 years ago. The thing that suffers the most in double-paycheck families is the household chores.

After all the sound and fury from the so called "mommy wars," the debate between stay-at-home moms and working moms, this was indeed welcome news. But it’s also not very surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention to the state of the American nuclear family.

Researchers found that parents actually spend slightly more time interacting with their kids today than parents did four decades ago. I loved how news reports of the survey treated this as a counterintuitive finding. But it’s only surprising if you’ve spent your entire life in a research lab tabulating statistical surveys.

If you’ve instead lived through both eras of family life and paid attention a little, you know that parents these days find a way to squeeze in time with Johnny and Susie, even if it means putting in longer hours to do so. After all, why do we have such popular terms as "helicopter parents," a reference to overprotective parents who hover over their children too much? There weren’t many helicopter parents when I was growing up. Back then, parents were more like heavy bombers—powerful, omnipresent craft flying at higher altitudes, which you’d mostly observe off in the distance. But you also knew they were within easy striking range of your rear end if you fouled up.

One of the more interesting threads in this research involved the amount of time purportedly invested in household chores. The report found that some of the slack in housework in homes with working moms is apparently being picked up by dads. According to the study, dads today perform more than twice as much housework as their 1965 counterparts did. Funny, but my memory of 1965 dads is that they spent precisely zero time on housework, if you don’t count the occasional emptying of their ash trays, so isn’t two times zero still zero?

When it comes to the perennially loaded subject of the division of household labor, I’m just glad that the master narrative might finally be shifting from where it was just a decade ago. Back then, the gender wars over housework were perhaps best summed up by a feminist tract whose title, Second Shift, told you all you needed to know about its take on working moms and their unfair break at home.

Of course, nothing has really changed about the harried state of the working mom. Women will always find reasons why their husbands should get up off the couch during the football game, and married men especially will persist in their stubborn optimism, seeing every room in the house as half-clean. In the end, our brain wiring is just different, though that too may naturally be interpreted as a sexist cop-out.

After listening to my routine complaints about marriage, my friend Claudia, herself a harried working mom, sent me an e-mail that was supposedly about how women’s brains work. When I opened it, I instead found a document approved by the sisterhood. It contained an elaborate moving schematic, a Rube Goldberg-like contraption, illustrating how all the dozens of daily tasks women perform weigh on their minds, and how they intricately affect each other, like parts in a finely synchronized watch. I couldn’t really argue with the ideas behind the diagram. Let’s just say the companion model for working dads contains fewer elements, none of them moving quite so fast.

There was, however, one troubling detail arising from this research that left me less than eager to publicize its findings in my own house. I noticed that the average dad does 9.7 hours of household chores each week. That made me wince, thinking of how such an errant data point could well touch off a retro Second Shift-style debate in my own home. I now have a formal request pending with the research task force, asking if they might consider time spent reading on the couch among the list of standard household chores, for the purposes of their next report. I eagerly await their ruling.

John Ettorre is a Cleveland-based writer and editor whose writing has appeared in more than 70 publications. To reach John, send e-mail to: jettorre@voyager.net or call him at (216) 382-6548.