Husbands add housework

My friend Richard sent me this article. I follow their documented pattern exactly - I do MUCH more housework now, with 4 children (I'm counting Larry) than I did when I was single.

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6452

Study shows that husbands create 7 hours of extra housework a week
Fri Apr 4, 2008

For married women who can't figure out why they always have so much housework researchers may have the answer -- husbands.

A new study from the University of Michigan shows that having a husband creates an extra seven hours of extra housework a week for women. But a wife saves her husband from an hour of chores around the house each week.

"It's a well-known pattern. There's still a significant reallocation of labor that occurs at marriage -- men tend to work more outside the home, while women take on more of the household labor," said Frank Stafford, of the university's Institute for Social Research (ISR), who directed the study.

Stafford's findings are based on 2005 time-diary data from a study on income dynamics that has been conducted since 1968 at ISR. The researchers studied diaries to assess how people spent their time and questioned men and women about how much time they spend cooking, cleaning and doing basic work around the house.

They found that young single women did the least amount of housework, at about 12 hours a week, while women with more than three children spent 28 hours a week cleaning, cooking and washing. Married men with more than three kids, by comparison, logged only about 10 hours of housework a week.