As a tenured professor and mother of four young sons, I am constantly asked, “How do you do it?” What people mean is: “How can you have a full-time job and still manage child care and housework?” 
 
 I usually respond, “High-quality husband and high-quality child care, in that order.” From the outset, my husband, a full-time, clinical pharmacist, has been a committed partner in caring for our house and raising our children. 
 
 But I’ve learned that, with our equal division of housework and child care, he’s an outlier. There may be some like him, but our research group at The Ohio State University recently discovered that such husbands in dual-earner households are, indeed, rare. 
 
 Unequal workloads 
 
 In our new study of 182 dual-earner couples who became parents for the first time, we found that fathers generally did less work around the home after their baby was born, and also became less involved in childcare than mothers. This was surprising given that both parents worked at their jobs about the same amount of hours. 
 
 Before their baby arrived, men and women in our study were both working roughly the same number of hours inside and outside the home. And after having a baby, they still worked the same number of hours at their jobs. 
 
 However, during the first weeks of parenthood, men cut back their housework by five hours per week, while women dropped theirs by only one hour. For men, their extra five hours did go towards child care, about 15 hours a week. This included around 10 hours per week of physical child care (the less “fun” work of caring for a child that includes changing diapers and bathing the baby), and about four hours per week of engagement (more enjoyable child care that includes playing with the baby). Thus, men added about 10 hours a week to their total workload after their child was born. 
 
 In contrast, we found that parenthood added about 21 hours per week to women’s workload. Because women maintained their 40-hour work weeks and their time in housework across the transition to parenthood, most of their additional work came from child care. Women spent about 15 hours in physical child care and about six hours in engagement. 
 
 Altogether, after becoming parents, women averaged more than an additional hour of work each day compared to their husbands. And it wasn’t the “fun” kind, either – it was primarily in the form of physical childcare. 
 
 Author provided 
 
 Deeply rooted parental roles 
 
 How could one tiny baby cause so much havoc for these couples who were previously enjoying equal divisions of labor? 
 
 When families experience big transitions or changes, family members have to create new roles and routines to accommodate the change. Thus, the transition to parenthood is a critical juncture in families whereby men and women create new routines and roles as mothers and fathers that may persist for years. 
 
 It is at this point that dual-career, college-educated couples stop sharing the work of the family equally and, we believe, fall back on what they observed in their own homes as children. They are also more likely to adopt societal norms that dictate what mothers and fathers should do: housework and child care as the domain of moms, with dads acting as supportive partners. 
 
 Interestingly, new fathers don’t seem to realize that they aren’t keeping up with their partners’ growing workload. When we asked, both men and women perceived that they increased their total work by more than 30 hours a week each after they became parents. But our more accurate time diaries told a different story – one where parenthood added much more work for women than men. 
 
 What should couples do? First, men need to take the initiative to be full partners in housework and child care. This means doing just as much housework after becoming a parent and taking equal part in the mundane work of parenting, such as changing diapers, in addition to the more fun work of parenting, like playing peek-a-boo or “airplane.” 
 
 Unfortunately, women have been taught to believe that they are primarily responsible for housework and child care. Therefore, some will micromanage their partner’s parenting. 
 
 They might ask the father, “Will you get the baby dressed?” – but then tell him what the baby should wear. Or they might criticize the father if the baby’s diaper falls off. Some of these parenting duties take time to learn, and women should let men learn for themselves and make mistakes. Nonetheless, men ought to learn how to take on roles and duties as dads that they never engaged in growing up. 
 
 You might wonder how my husband answers the question “How do you do it?” 
 
 He doesn’t, actually – because he’s never asked the question. Strangers, upon learning that he has four sons, assume that I am a stay-at-home mother. No one expects that a dual-career couple can be happily married and have four children. 
 
 Unfortunately, in America, a husband who does half of all housework and child care continues to remain a rare, semi-mythical creature, who no one believes exists. ||||| When the baby comes, working couples no longer share housework equally Women add more than 2 hours of daily work, men only 40 minutes 
 
 COLUMBUS, Ohio – When highly educated, dual-career couples have their first child, both spouses think the baby increases their workloads by equal amounts – but a new study suggests that’s not true. 
 
 When asked directly, both men and women thought their own daily workloads had increased by more than four hours after their child was born. 
 
 Detailed time diaries that the new mothers and fathers kept told a different story. Both spouses overestimated their increased workload – but by widely varying amounts. Compared to the parents’ estimated four hours of extra work each day, the time diaries showed women’s workloads increased by two hours a day, while men’s total working time each day increased by only about 40 minutes. 
 
 “Women ended up shouldering a lot more of the work that comes with a new baby, even though both men and women thought they added the same amount of additional work,” said Claire Kamp Dush, co-author of the study an associate professor of human sciences at The Ohio State University. 
 
 The results were especially surprising because before the baby was born, these couples were sharing household chores relatively equally. 
 
 Claire Kamp Dush 
 
 “The birth of the child dramatically changed the division of labor in these couples,” said Jill Yavorsky, co-author of the study and doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State. 
 
 Jill Yavorsky 
 
 “What was once a relatively even division of household work no longer looked that way.” 
 
 The new study appears in the June 2015 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family. The study results are also discussed in the Council on Contemporary Families’ Symposium on Housework, Gender and Parenthood that was released today. 
 
 Kamp Dush and Yavorsky co-authored the research with Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, professor of human sciences at Ohio State. 
 
 The data came from The New Parents Project, a long-term study that is investigating how dual-earner couples adjust to becoming parents for the first time. In all, 182 couples participated in this study. 
 
 These aren’t average U.S. couples. Participants in the study tend to have higher-than-average levels of education, both spouses have jobs and both spouses report their intention to keep working after the child is born. 
 
 “These are the couples you would expect to have the most egalitarian relationships,” Kamp Dush said. 
 
 “They have the education, the financial resources and the other factors that researchers have believed would lead to equal sharing of responsibilities. But that’s not what we found.” 
 
 The couples were studied twice – once during the third trimester of pregnancy and then again when their babies were about 9 months old. 
 
 At both times, the couples separately completed a detailed time diary for one workday and one non-workday. They recorded all their activities on a paper time diary beginning at 4 a.m. and ending 24 hours later. This included any simultaneous activities they did while multitasking. 
 
 Results showed that the couples shared duties equally before the baby was born. Both men and women reported doing about 15 hours of housework per week, as well as 42 to 45 hours of paid work, respectively. 
 
 Moreover, 95 percent of both men and women agreed during the pregnancy that mothers and fathers should equally share the child care responsibility. 
 
 That’s not what happened, though. After the arrival of their child, men did about 10 hours a week of physical child care – the less fun work like changing diapers and bathing the baby. Meanwhile, women did 15 hours per week. 
 
 The more “fun” part of parenting, such as reading to the baby and playing, is called child engagement, and the time diaries showed a much smaller gender gap here. Men spent about four hours per week in child engagement, while women spent about six hours. 
 
 In addition, men cut back their housework by five hours per week, while women did not reduce their housework to compensate for additional childcare work. 
 
 One explanation for women’s increased post-parenthood workloads compared to men has been that they are spending less time at their paid jobs. But this study didn’t find that. Neither men nor women had significantly decreased the number of hours spent at their paid jobs, the results showed. 
 
 “A lot of data shows that many women eventually decrease their time spent at paid work after having children, but we don’t know when it happens,” Yavorsky said. “This study shows that they’re not doing it right after the birth of their first child.” 
 
 “Nine months after the birth of their first child, when couples are questioned for the second time in the study, they are starting to settle into a new pattern of how they will divide the work,” Kamp Dush said. 
 
 “And the key is that this new routine seems to be that the woman is doing more of the housework and more of the child care, while not doing any less paid work,” she said. 
 
 “The egalitarian relationship they had before the baby was born is essentially gone.” 
 
 What’s the reason behind the change? Kamp Dush and Yavorsky said the reasons are complex and not entirely the fault of mothers or fathers. 
 
 Other research led by Schoppe-Sullivan shows that some mothers “gatekeep” – essentially controlling how much fathers are involved in child care and what they can do. 
 
 “Women shouldn’t try to manage their partner’s parenting. But men also need to take the initiative and learn child care duties that their own socialization may have neglected,” Kamp Dush said. 
 
 Yavorsky noted that couples successfully shared nonchild-related housework before they became parents, but only men significantly dropped the number of hours they spent doing this post-childbirth. 
 
 “Men can continue to be full partners in doing housework after the child is born and share in the mundane tasks that neither partner necessarily wants to do,” she said. 
 
 The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. 
 
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– "These are the couples you would expect to have the most egalitarian relationships," is how researcher Claire Kamp Dush describes the participants in her study of dual-earner straight couples as they transitioned to parenthood. The male and female both work, are more highly educated than the average American, and plan to keep those jobs after they have a child—so what happened when that child was born? Kamp Dush and Jill Yavorsky of Ohio State University said participants both anticipated their daily workload would get a lot heavier, and equally so: The 182 couples reported divvying up household chores equally pre-baby (logging about 15 hours a week on top of 42 to 45 hours at their job); post-baby, they thought their workload would increase by four hours a day. The reality, as told by their time diaries, was a lot lighter and less balanced: about 10 more hours a week for men to women's 21, writes Kamp Dush (herself a tenured professor and mother of four) at the Conversation. How Yavorsky sums it up in an OSU article: "The birth of the child dramatically changed the division of labor in these couples. What was once a relatively even division of household work no longer looked that way." Neither men nor women reported working less at their job, post-baby. The findings appear in the Journal of Marriage and Family and were based on a somewhat slim pool of data: a total of just four diary entries per participant in which they logged 24 hours of activity on one weekday and one weekend; they recorded the activity once during the third trimester and once 9 months after birth. (If you're a woman who out-earns your husband, we have related disappointing news for you.)