Carolyn Hax: House husband vs. working mom

Dear Carolyn: I am a mom and my husband is a stay-at-home dad. We have three school-age children. Our age-old problem is the division of housework.

I work nine-hour days. On the weekend, I do all the cooking and usually all of the dishes.

He does shopping, plans an activity for the kids after school once a week, prepares dinner Monday through Thursday, does laundry, meets friends for lunch once a week, conducts family business (doctors, etc.), and works out at the gym two or three times a week.

My husband complains that he has to clean the house all by himself while nobody helps out. While we have both tried to get our kids to help clean, they often spend more energy trying to avoid housework. So what typically happens is either my husband cleans up the house during the week (and complains bitterly about it to me) or we as a family spend most of one weekend day cleaning the house.

My husband resents the first approach and thinks I need to do more housework. I think he has much more time during weekdays to clean and resent the implication that I’m not pulling my share of the workload.

What can we do to enjoy our family time more and not make one another resentful? – Anonymous

Well, you have to work full time and presumably no one helps you out. Managing a home and children is just as much of a full-time job as yours, albeit with no pay, vacations, 401(k), future, promotions or meetings.

So the path of least resentment is to compare your two jobs to make sure the family workload is being distributed equally. How many hours of your daily nine do you spend actively working? Are you pressing ever onward and eating at your desk, or do you get stretch/surf breaks and lunch with colleagues? What are your husband’s afternoons like – do the kids play and do homework quietly, or do they wring Daddy dry?

Not only will this help each of you understand the true nature and demands of what the other does, it will also, ideally, flush out any lurking resentments that aren’t just about soap scum. Is he feeling underappreciated? Are you? Did he feel pressured into househusbandry, or you into breadwinning?

While I’m in no position to say which of you has grounds to complain, I’m going to stomp in anyway with a suggestion: It appears (hedging!) as if your husband could add a relatively painless 30 minutes of housekeeping to his weekdays. You, too, could put in an extra 30 minutes yourself on one weeknight and both weekend days. That’s four hours of cleaning split 60-40, with his larger share reflecting his job as keeper of the home.

Ideally, that gentle and equitable distribution of chores will leave you both feeling pleasant and unencumbered enough to dedicate one hour of one weekend day to family chore time. This hour will not, realistically, be about getting the house any cleaner. The point will be to teach your kids that: couples work best together; all members of a household contribute; keeping things short, contained, routine and set to upbeat music is the secret to cheerful cooperation.