Once I complained to my husband that he wasn't helping enough with our daughter, and I gave him a long list of the parenting chores   I was shouldering on my own. "But you like doing all that stuff," he said. I thought about that while reading a new study about the responsibilities of parenting. Researchers asked 191 college professors, both men and women, who had children 2 or younger, the pleasure they experienced from childcare. On 16 out of 25 childcare tasks--like taking a child to the doctor or buying clothes for a child--women reported statistically higher levels of enjoyment than men. The only parenting issue that gave women less pleasure than it gave men was having to manage who does what for the child. On the whole, women's scores were 10 percent higher than men's. Women are also far more likely to take advantage of family-leave benefits to care for children. In the study, all the universities offered paid family leave, and 69 percent of the women took it, while only 12 percent of the men did. In Sweden, where family leave for both parents is particularly generous, men use about 20 percent of the 480-day benefit. Women use nearly all of it. It's difficult to know how cultural and economic pressures or biological functions influence parenting. Plenty of men change diapers  , and studies show that mothers and fathers alike spend more time with children than they used to. Men have more than doubled the time they spend on childcare since 1985. Yet women still spend twice as much time with the kids as men, says the University of Maryland sociologist John Robinson. Notably in the study, the parenting activity that gave men the most pleasure (and women, too) was playing and talking with their kids. But when men were asked to rate how often they actually did those things, their scores were about 10 and 40 percent lower than women's. In the end, perhaps the issue is not that mothers are doing too many childcare tasks--my husband was right when he said I liked being a mother--but that men, for all their progress as fathers, are still missing out. What can we learn from the passage?
More men take family leave to care for children than before. Women gain more pleasure in every childcare task than men. Men play and talk with their children more than women. Women spend more time with children than before.