Even though many women now work outside the home, studies and surveys have found that they still tend to do most of the household chores commonly associated with females. Washing the dishes, doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning the house are just some of these chores. Not to mention, society dictates that women should also help their kids with homework, read to them, and put them to bed. All of these causes a lot of strain in the marriage.
If you still have to clean and polish your engineered timber flooring in Melbourne after a 10-hour work shift, you’re bound to lose your cool. Still, women are almost always ashamed to speak out against the unfairness of gender roles. When they do speak out, they turn out to be the bad guys—the anti-thesis to the image of a woman who stays at home, waiting for her husband and kids to arrive from work and school, respectively.
Divorces
This unequal distribution of household tasks contributes to about 30% of divorces, surveys said. Why is that? When the other party is doing more work (and this mostly applies to women), it means that her quality of life goes down. She’s stressed and exhausted. If she complains and nobody listens to her, she will get frustrated. As a result, women are mostly stressed, her physical, emotional, and mental well-being compromised.
Grudges between the husband and wife form because there’s an unfair distribution of chores in the house. Women feel that they are undervalued, and men—even those who are not earning enough—will exercise their “dominance” in the house. The reason for this is that men can barely accept the fact that some women might be earning more than they do and that there should be a reversal of roles when this happens.
If you’re a husband and working half the time your wife does, will it kill you to wash the dishes, pick up the kids from school, and do their homework with them? Is it such a travesty on your part to cook dinner and wash the dishes? Unfortunately, even in this modern age and in Western countries, the reversal of roles is still widely frowned upon.
Dividing Household Chores
It is important to speak out in your household. If you’re a wife and a mother who does all the work, you might feel that it is your obligation to the family to work, provide, nurture, and serve. You have to take care of yourself, too, though. Dividing household chores is commonly done in many households. Talk to your partner and children about sharing and dividing the tasks at home.
Kids as young as five years old can already make their beds in the morning. That will save you at least 15 minutes of folding the comforter and plumping the pillows. Your teenage kids can take out the garbage, wash the dishes, wipe the tables clean, and even buy the groceries. If they are old enough to drive, let them pay the bills and process some checks at the bank.
Marriages can crumble because of something as trivial as household chores. So many marriages could have been saved if women had only learned to speak up and if they had only been heard. Sharing the tasks at home will go a long way toward de-stressing the women in the household, making them feel valued, appreciated, and important.
