The Secret to Staying Married - CareforKids.com.au®

The Secret to Staying Married
Do your share…

With the World Cup now behind us it's safe to assume that during this time many Dads who succumbed to the 4am match viewing times may well been a bit useless in terms of helping around the house and with the kids the next day. For some, however, the World Cup is not the only time they fall short in the "doing their share" stakes and according to recent research, they'd better buck up or they'll be given the boot.

Apparently the research by the London School of Economics released last month, men who help out with the housework and childcare are less likely to get ditched by their wives!

"The lowest-risk combination is one in which the mother does not work and the father engages in the highest level of housework and childcare," the study found.

"The results suggest that the risk of divorce among working mothers, while greater, is substantially reduced when fathers contribute more to housework and childcare," said researcher Wendy Sigle-Rushton.

The conclusion basically took a shotgun to the idea that men should focus on paid work while women should focus on the home. Do people really still believe that anyway?

With women making up half the workforce in Australia it's pretty obvious that there will be a huge number of families where both parents work full time, which lends itself to the belief that both will take equal share of the home duties…Apparently not.

This subject was raised a couple of years ago in the Sydney Morning Herald's former parenting blog "Who's Your Daddy", by journalist and author Sacha Molitorisz. In a heated reader discussion about Dads who didn't pull their weight after mums had gone back to work and were still doing the lion's share of the housework, one reader decided she'd had enough and formally "outed" her husband to all and sundry, announcing her intention to divorce!

World Cup Soccer aside, we're sure that Australian Dads are getting better at pulling their weight with kids and chores and given it's only two months to Fathers' Day, any Dads who aren't being as good as they should be better watch out… the Fathers' Day fairy is watching!!!

Does your partner help out with child care and housework? How do you get him to help? Does he do it willingly?

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