Poster #36 - In the US and China, preschoolers know that moms do more housework and childcare

• In Event: Poster Session 01

Abstract

The majority of families across the world experience daily, pervasive, and historically long-standing inequality in the form of unequal labor distribution in the home (Greenstein, 2009; Jansen et al., 2016; Tai & Baxter, 2018). Despite the ubiquitous nature of this experience of inequality, little research has paid attention to how children interpret, uptake, and make sense of their family’s unequal division of labor. Here, we surveyed 210 3-10-year-old children and their parents in two distinct cultural contexts (China and the US) about their family’s division of labor across three types of household tasks: childcare (e.g., bathing, diapering), housework (e.g., cleaning, vacuuming) and maintenance (e.g., fixing appliances). The present study thus investigates children from both US and China and their awareness of gender-based unequal labor distribution within their given household, as well as their interpretation of this inequality depending on their respective sociocultural background.

Children and parents completed an 18-item questionnaire about their perceived household chores distribution in their native languages. Children were shown examples before completing the survey. Both parents and children were asked to identify who does more chores: mom, dad, or both about the same. Children and caretakers were also asked how fair or unfair they found about this inequality and the reasons for why the division was the way it was were asked at the end of the survey.

We generally found that children in both cultures were firmly aware of their family’s division of labor, even at age 3. By age 5, children in both the US and China were aware of the gendered division of labor (that their moms generally do more) in childcare and housework. There were age-related changes, but no cultural differences in reports of household labor inequality based on either parent or child report. Despite recognizing that chores were unequally divided, the majority of children all perceived the division as fair. In the US, the top one justification for the existence of housework and childcare inequity were action restatements (e.g., “mom plays with me”; 20% of responses) and affection (e.g., “mom loves me”; 17.39% of responses). In China, the top justification (22.11% of responses) for both housework and childcare inequity was time availability (e.g., “dad is busy”). These results demonstrate that children might pick up the inequality within their household by the preschool age, which may contribute to their early representations of fairness and understanding of larger systemic inequalities.

Authors

• Danyang Ma, University of California - Riverside
  Presenting Author

• Allegra Midgette, Texas A&M University - College Station

• Marla Sarmiento, Texas A&M University - College Station

• Lucy Stowe, University of California Davis

• Nadia Chernyak, University of California - Irvine