Housework is an unavoidable, time-consuming labour-intensive reality of adulthood. Whether you own your own home or rent, live alone, with friends, strangers or family members, the house-keeping tasks that make a house a home need doing.
The part that home-making plays in a person’s work-life balance varies from person to person.
The subject of “domesticity” doesn’t always come up when I interview people about how they balance their work with everything else in their life.
For some, home-making forms part of a person’s ambition; for others it’s a chore that stokes up emotions of guilt and resentment. And in some cases, it just doesn’t come up at all as part of the work-life balance equation.
Preparing this podcast episode raised more questions than answers as I reflected on the patterns I’ve observed on the impact that housework, home-making, and domesticity have on a person’s work:life ratio, including:
- Why the subject of housework stirs up such strong emotions, particularly for women.
- Why more women than men seem to bring up the subject of domesticity when I interview them about how they balance work with other things in life.
- Whether housework only starts impacting a woman’s sense of balance after she becomes a carer or parent.
I would love to hear more views on this emotionally charged topic to test my conclusions. Join the conversation via the contact box below.
You can listen to the episode here, and subscribe wherever you usually get your podcasts to be notified when the episode is ready to drop.