Doing housework is not a great American pastime. How’s that for a true revelation?
It’s not like going to the movies. It’s not like going to a baseball game.
When was the last time you rang someone up to go out for lunch or go to the mall and they said that they couldn’t because they had a day of really fun housework planned?
Housework is a pretty important deal to the Soap and Detergent Association. Without dirty houses that need housework, the Soap and Detergent Association would be clean out of business.
To get a handle on what exactly is what on the new millennium housework front, the association commissioned Opinion Research Corporation International to conduct a national survey of housecleaning habits in this, the what’s-supposed-to-be-highly-significant year 2000.
It should come as no whopping surprise that 87 percent of respondents said they learned to clean house from good old Mom. Only 10 percent said they learned anything at all about housework from Dad.
What does come across as rather interesting is that while 57 percent of respondents said that Mom did most of the housework in their childhood home, just 46 percent said that a woman is doing the majority of the cleaning in their current household.
And when the he-said, she-said thing is figured in, it really gets interesting.
Men in the survey are more likely than women in the survey to claim that everybody helps with the housework (41 percent vs. 27 percent). How the word “helps” is defined was not available.
When asked about the cleaning jobs their moms did but they don’t do themselves, 35 percent of respondents selected ironing. It’s become a wash-and-wear world, which is quite OK by me. I’d much rather go to lunch than heat up the iron.
Other things we don’t do that Mom does or did is hand-wash delicate items (35 percent — the closest thing I have to a delicate item is sweat socks); scrub floors (27 percent — these have to be the smartest folks in the survey); wash windows or woodwork (22 percent — woodwork I can understand; windows I can’t).
While it seems that who does how much of the housework is changing ever so gradually, some things like parental nagging about neatsie/cleansie issues has not followed suit.
According to the survey’s nag-o-meter, 49 percent of respondents said that the one really big deal their parents nagged them about was keeping their room neat and clean.
Just about the same percentage of parents who have children living at home nag their own kids most about this little task. How successful they are in getting results remains a mystery.
Other nag-o-meter nags should sound familiar: Washing hands after using the bathroom (12 percent) and taking your shoes off when you come inside (12 percent, all that messy snow in Fullerton, you know); putting dirty clothes in the hamper (10 percent); hanging up wet bath towels (7 percent).
Ten percent of the respondents said that they don’t know what their parents nagged them about when they were a child.
Hum. Perfection? I think not. Repression? That’s more like it.
