Want kids to do more chores? Give dad the duster

MOTHERS who despair of their children ever helping with the housework should not get mad, they should get even – with their husbands.

Research suggests boys and girls take more notice of domestic chores if an adult male lends a hand, as the younger generation tend to learn by example.

The study of British households found that mothers devote on average almost twice as much time to doing the washing up, laundry, cleaning and other chores during the week as fathers, while boys do less cleaning than girls.

The research, co-authored by Dundee University Professor of Economics Yu Zhu, found that while women spend more than four hours per day on housework, cooking, cleaning and ferrying people around, men do only two hours.

Nearly a third of boys and a sixth of girls did no housework at all, while the rest averaged an hour a day. The report states: ‘Women continue to devote comparatively more time to household tasks than do men, despite the increase in women’s education and labour market participation.’

But the more equal the share between the parents, the more their children contribute – especially boys. For every extra minute a man spends daily on housework, children of both sexes increase their contribution by 30 seconds.

The researchers said old stereotypes stick, and ‘father’s housework is relatively more important than mother’s in influencing the housework behaviour of the children, given that any variation in father’s housework time may be more visible to children than the variation in mother’s housework time’.

Children follow their mothers’ and fathers’ example over division of labour when they set up their own home with a partner.

The study, published in the Review of Economics of the Household, concludes: ‘These results highlight the greater importance of personal and family characteristics on housework when adults.’