Sarah's Selections

I've decided I'm going to dedicate this entire Sarah's Selections to this one article because I think it is so incredibly important that every one read it. It doesn't matter if you are single, married, childless or a Gosselin, this article is about our culture and the expectations we all have about gender and parenting.

Favorite part: Where the housework ratio is two to one, the wife-to-husband ratio for child care in the United States is close to five to one. As with housework, that ratio does not change as much as you would expect when you account for who brings home a paycheck. In a family where Mom stays home and Dad goes to work, she spends 15 hours a week caring for children and he spends 2. In families in which both parents are wage earners, Mom’s average drops to 11 and Dad’s goes up to 3. Lest you think this is at least a significant improvement over our parents and grandparents, not so fast. “The most striking part,” Blair says, “is that none of this is all that different, in terms of ratio, from 90 years ago.”