The Associated Press reports that men's contributions to housework have doubled in the past 40 years, and the time they have spent caring for their children has tripled over the same time period. "More couples are sharing family tasks than ever before, and the movement toward sharing has been especially significant for full-time dual-earner couples," the published report says. "Men and women may not be fully equal yet, but the rules of the game have been profoundly and irreversibly changed."
Find out the REAL reason why women feel so desperate. (Men, listen up!)
The payoff for men who get busy helping their wives is big: more sex! That's the assessment of Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco-area psychologist and author of "The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework." He claims that equitable sharing of housework can lead to a happier marriage and more frequent sex. "If a guy does housework, it looks to the woman like he really cares about her--he's not treating her like a servant," Coleman, who is affiliated with the Council on Contemporary Families, explained to AP. "And if a woman feels stressed out because the house is a mess and the guy's sitting on the couch while she's vacuuming, that's not going to put her in the mood."
Men are very competent at just about every aspect of life...except this.
"The typical punch line of many news stories has been that even though women are working longer hours on the job and cutting back their own housework, men are not picking up the slack," wrote co-authors Scott Coltrane of the University of California, Riverside and Oriel Sullivan of Ben Gurion University, both of whom are sociologists. But that theory is wrong. Instead there has been a quiet, behind-the-scenes change taking place where men are helping more with the household chores and women cutting back some. "Men share more family work if their female partners are employed more hours, earn more money and have spent more years in education," said Coltrane and Sullivan.
