Our thanks to Radford for this fascinating piece.
If you’d like email notifications of our new blog pieces, please enter your email address in the box near the top of the right-hand column and click ‘Subscribe’.
Our YouTube channel is here, our Facebook channel here, our Twitter channel here.
If everyone who reads this gives us £5.00 – or even better, £5.00 or more, monthly – we could change the world. You can support our work by making a donation here.
This has of course been known for decades in research. One of the things that comes out of the “time use surveys” used by economists is that men tend to treat anything they do as a “job”. So for instance single men spend less time on cooking, cleaning, household tasks in general because they simply get on with the task in hand, without lots of breaks or watching TV (somebody is watching all that daytime TV) . Similarly with shopping where again men generally get on with the task without lots of wandering about looking of coffee breaks. One wonders if the same is true of parenting. Particularly as the majority of single fathers are in full time paid work ( unlike single mothers) so have to be more focussed with the time they have with their children. In a strange way single fathers are a model of the “have it all” lifestyle, its curious that feminists don’t laud them as proof you can bring up children well with one parent. But that begs the question of how fathers can do this when the evidence shows mothers seem to find it so much harder. I’m sure non of them want to investigate that question.