The American family today
by Mira and Charles on May 24th, 2010“Tell me: how messed up is my family?”
There are a lot of ways to look at the American family. You can collect statistics and die of boredom. You can look at your own family and, in too many cases, die of shame.
Or you can look at a bunch of real families and how they actually spend their time. And that’s what some scientists at UCLA have been doing for the past several years. Their work has just been written up in The New York Times.
Basically, there were 32 families, all middle class, all with both parents working, all with more than one child, and for one week each had every waking moment at home videotaped. According to one UCLA professor quoted in the article, “This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the world.”
And what does all this teach us?
The most important lesson is that if you’ve been measuring yourself against some image you have of the normal family and feeling badly about yourself, then you’re probably making a big mistake. The truth is that the normal average family is an imperfect matrix in which imperfect parents take imperfect children and imperfectly turn them into imperfect adults who then go on to repeat the whole process.
That may sound like a criticism. It isn’t. I don’t want to criticize these families. I want us to accept ourselves and each other. We have to stop the idea that there is this wonderful mythical norm and therefore we should feel badly about our own families. My point is: our families are imperfect, and so what? I don’t want us to feel badly about ourselves. I want us to accept ourselves.
So what is in this picture that we have to accept?
Some details:
–Moms spend 50 percent more time doing housework than dads do. If housework were a pie, women get stuck with two thirds of it.
–Children spend a tiny 3 percent of their time doing house work. And by the way, kids do the same amount of housework whether or not they get an allowance. So every parent who thought their kids were useless and selfish: you’re right!
–Husbands and wives spend only 10 percent of their waking time together alone in the house. So, yes, kids and modern life in general are an anti-intimacy machine.
–Families spend only 14 percent of their time together. Most of it in front of the TV (that’s my guess). Family togetherness is a dream, not a reality.
–There is a lot of stress in family life—and you thought it was just you!
–No one uses their yard. They could. Probably they should. But they just don’t.
–We all envy parents who seem to have their shit together. Well, let’s cut it out. There actually aren’t a lot of parents like that. Most couples are continually negotiating who does what on the fly, with very unclear boundaries. And it’s all very stressful.
–By the way, it’s couples with the most rigid divisions of labor who show the least stress. Gotta say it: this is something we have advocated in our books and in our therapy for a long time. We call them domains, who’s in charge of what: the clearer, the more separate the domains, the happier everyone is.
–Fathers and mothers spend an equal amount of time chatting to family members: there goes the idea of blabby women and silent men. BUT men spend TWICE as much time in leisure than women do. So I guess it’s not that women are blabby; it’s that men are lazy. Glad that’s cleared up.
–And women spend 25 percent more time with their kids than men do. I’m just saying…
–Most disturbing finding: the more time women spent talking with their husbands in the evening, chatting about their day, the faster their stress levels dropped. (They carefully measured stress levels.) But talking with a spouse caused men’s stress levels to fall off more slowly. What’s up here? Is it that men find talking with their wives a stressful minefield? Is it that the stress women dump by talking piles up on their husbands? Folks, this is a problem.
–Clutter. It’s out of control.
Well, those are most of the highlights from the article. What do you think? How does your family compare? What difference does knowing this mean to you?
For help with your family, we have books that will make a huge difference. Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad will help improve your marriage. The Weekend Marriage will help you cope much better with the stresses our lifestyles put in our families. And of course you could come to us here at The Chestnut Hill Institute for some one-on-one help.
