Analysis: Irish parents wishing to balance work and family life are best living elsewhere, writes Kathryn Holmquist
The price of a booming economy is that we're spending less time with our children. If proof was needed, there's plenty of it in a study to be launched at a conference at Trinity College Dublin today.
If you want to balance your work life and your family life, go live in Denmark. Prof Lis Højgaard, of the University of Copenhagen, will tell the conference that it takes 74.7 working hours to support a family in Denmark, and 77.5 hours in Ireland.
Also in Denmark, 88 per cent of children are cared for in public daycare - contrasting with Ireland, where parents spend more of their incomes on childcare than in any other EU state.
Danish parents are also closer to equality in the personal lives. Danish mothers work 35 hours per week on average - three hours more than Irish mothers; this enables Danish fathers to limit their work to 40 hours per week outside the home - five hours less than Irish fathers.
Inside the home, however, Danish parents have the same problems as Irish parents do - women still carry the burden of greater responsibility in terms of managing the home, doing housework and caring for the children.
Irish parents work more, spend more time in traffic, spend more money on childcare and have a harder time convincing their employers that time spent with family is time well spent, the research found.
Fathers and Mothers: Dilemmas of the Work-Life Balance - A Comparative Study in Four European Countries has been completed by Margret Fine-Davis, Jeanne Fagnani, Dino Giovannini, Lis Hojgaard and Hilary Clarke.
The results were unexpected for Margret Fine-Davis of the Centre for Gender and Women's Studies at TCD. She foresaw factors like age, education and number of children as being significant for parents in their attempts to balance work and family. She and her colleagues were surprised to learn that the most important factor in domestic happiness was actually the length of parents' commuting time and working hours.
The longer the commuting time, the less time there was to help with the family.
"The challenge which still faces even the most advanced of the EU member states is how to facilitate more egalitarian sharing of roles, that is to say, how to relieve women of the double burden of employment and domestic duties, while encouraging men to take an active part in family and domestic life?" says Margret Fine-Davis.
Could it be that the real solution isn't learning how to divide the housework, but actually finding the will to provide families with a decent public transport system? The survey indicates that countries with quality public transport, are also those with better qualities of life for families.
This study brought together an interdisciplinary team of social scientists working in countries with different experiences. Researchers found that along with shorter commuting times, the secret to family happiness was the hours spent at work - the more hours fathers worked, the unhappier the family was.
What fathers - and especially Irish fathers - are really good at is playing with the children, according to the report. Nine out of 10 Irish fathers say that they play with their children and, unusually, nine out of 10 Irish mothers agree. This is one area where there is no conflict in perception between what responsibilities men say they carry out, and the responsibilities which women feel men actually do carry out. With food preparation, 48 per cent of Irish fathers say both partners do it, while only 28 per cent of Irish mothers agree with this view.
However, whether or not fathers do the washing up, the involvement of fathers in playing with their children is good news because research has shown that children benefit intellectually, socially and emotionally from their fathers' involvement in their lives. The question is, how do we give fathers the space to be more involved with their children?
There's no doubt that men love their father role. This was true in the case of feeding, bathing, taking to school/crèche, changing nappies and playing with children in all four countries. So there seems to be a cross-cultural trend that in the time they have to spare, fathers are concentrating on the fun stuff with their children, and leaving the drudgery to their partners.
Funnily enough, Irish women were less likely to say that they wanted their partners to spend more time with the children. Seven in 10 Irish women wanted this, compared to eight in 10 European women on average. For Irish women, a father would be better showing his mettle at the washing up.