By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

A new study out by the group “People Who Study Stuff That the Rest of Us Already Know” has come to the conclusion that husbands who spend more time doing housework have wives that spend more time doing “bed-work.”

The actual group who did the study is the “Council on Contemporary Families” and they researched how men’s roles around the house have changed in the last 40 or so years. Their findings were only shocking to people who had locked themselves in a time capsule in 1960 and were just released yesterday.

The study showed that over the last four decades the amount of work men do around the house (I guess this means IN the house since men have been keeping up the outside of the house since it meant arranging Mastodon rib bones into an annuals planter) has doubled, and the amount of time spent in child rearing has tripled. Many news releases on this study have the stereotypical jab at Dad having to surrender the couch and the remote to do his share around the house. As a side note, not all men are couch jockeys; some of us like to do other New Age things with our extra time like tinker with crap in the garage!

After the “good news” about modern Dads and their increased domestic efforts they quickly added that fathers that help out more around the house were “rewarded” with more sex. What are we men…circus dogs doing our household “tricks” in the hope of some treats? OK… um… don’t answer that. The study’s premise is actually refreshing in it’s non-political correctness.

I am happy there are still some folks out there who aren’t frightened to comment on at least one of the world’s truths, that guys like sex! Here is another fact that may confuse this latest study, guys liked sex and were for sure, by the fact of the ever-expanding world population, getting some before they increased their share of laundry folding and dish washing. On a domestic-political angle, I wonder if the planet’s Dads stopped pitching in around the house so damn much would we stabilize the global overpopulation problem?

So wanting to get the whole picture on this study; number one because I am an inquisitive person and secondly the fact that I like to have sex frequency statistics on hand to help seduce the wife in the evenings, I read the research to see how much more sex the helping husbands were getting compared to those men who didn’t pitch in. You can imagine my shock when no such numbers were available.

Hey researcher people, men aren’t just stereotypically into sex they are also stereotypically rational and having the sex stats available would let men do a little basic math and create a ratio of chores/sex, but alas that side of the equation is an unknown, a fact many men can attest to. The study also showed that men’s contribution to the household chores and childcare freed up at least two hours per week in a mother’s schedule. Armed with this information I believe husbands can at least petition for one extra hour of “date night” per week.

The study is one sided in another way there is no information on how husbands are dealing with the time constraints of working longer hours, helping around the house and owning the lion’s share of yard work and things-with-motors maintenance. While Dad is now pitching in at a greater degree than ever before in the kitchen, laundry room and romper room, no-one is falling over themselves to help out when it is time for the husband to take care of the yard, fix the busted sprinkler head, wheel gigantic frost-sensitive plants into the garage (every time John Edd mentions the word freeze), pick-up the children’s outside toys, pressure wash the house and driveway and take out the trash.

I wonder if this study will help out men who end up in Mobile’s Environmental Court for untidy yards? Will the accused argue that with 20 percent more housework and 30 percent more child care to do that they just don’t have the time to get that Buick Skylark on blocks out of the front yard?

As the study shows, family roles have definitely changed from our parent’s generation to ours; anecdotally I know I never had to walk 10 miles, uphill both ways, through a blinding snowstorm to get to school like my parents had to and my Dad did a lot less laundry than I do. The roles my wife and I occupy are different than the home I grew up in and much has changed for the modern Dad—the three things in particular as detailed by the researchers; more household chores, more time with his children and more sex with his wife. From where I’m sitting two out of three ain’t bad.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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