Early Childhood Recognition of Gender Inequality in the Home: The Case of Household Labor

• In Event: Parenting, family and moral development

Abstract

Many children living in heterosexual, two-parent households, grow up observing a gendered division of household labor (Greenstein, 2009; Lachance-Grzela & Bouchard, 2010). The gendered division of household labor is associated with women’s rates of depression (Oshio, Nozaki, Kobayashi, 2013), the gendering of children’s chore participation (Lam, Greene, & McHale, 2016), and the perpetuation of inequitable gender relations (Coltrane, 2000). Despite the fact that inequality in household labor is a part of many children’s daily lives, little work has investigated whether and when children become aware of their family’s division as gender unequal. Recent scholarship has found that children as young as nine years of age recognize inequality in their family’s household labor division (Midgette, 2020). In the present study, we investigated the developmental trajectory and origins of children’s recognition of who does the majority of their family’s household labor. We investigated 46 (21 female) 3- to 6-year-olds (Mage=4.72, SD=0.85; 60% European American, 26.6% Asian American, 6.6% Other, 2.2% African American, 2.2% White Latinx, 2.2% American Indian/ Alaskan Native), and one of their parents’ reports of their family’s current division of labor across six housework tasks: general cleaning, cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, taking out the trash, fixing things around the house; and two childcare tasks: playing with child; taking care of child when sick (adapted from other housework research, Askari et al., 2010; Sabattini & Leaper, 2004). Children and parents were each asked to identify which of the parents did more or if both did an equal amount of each task. Children made binary choices, while parents indicated their choices on a -2 (completely father) to +2 (completely mother) range. We explored two main questions: 1) Do children recognize their parents’ division as unequal, if it is? 2) Do children become more adept at recognizing inequality as they develop? As found previously, the majority of parents reported that the mother did most of the housework and childcare (one-sampled t-test comparing scores to 0: childcare: t(42) = 5.080, p < 0.001; housework: t(42) = 2.401, p = 0.021 (See Figures 1 & 2)). On the other hand, the majority of children reported that their parents divided the housework and childcare evenly (one-sampled t-tests of children’s scores compared to 0: childcare: t(43) = 1.566, p = 0.125; housework: t(44) = 0.765, p = 0.450). In spite of these differences, we found a significant correlation between children’s summed scores and parents’ summed scores across all tasks, r(42) = 0.43, p = 0.005. However, we did not find age-related differences in children’s tendencies to report unequal labor, nor in discrepancies between children’s reports and parents’ reports. Together, these results suggest that while children do not yet perceive gendered inequality the same way that their parents do, children whose parents report unequal labor are also more likely to report unequal labor, thus pointing to early-developing sensitivity to inequality in the household. Our findings have implications for future developmental research on children’s developing concepts of fairness, equality, and recognition of everyday inequalities within the home.

Authors

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

• Nadia Chernyak, University of California - Irvine
  Non-Presenting Author