There’s an urban myth about being able to maintain your ideal work-life balance after having children. We all want it, but it rare that we can all do it.
A new study from Ohio State University actually found that new parents underestimate the time they spend at work and overestimate how long they spend on childcare and household chores. Researchers followed 182 couples both before and after they had babies. Nine months after the babies were born, women and men both felt that they had decreased the time spent at their jobs and were spending an adequate amount of time on household duties (women estimated that they were spending 28 hours on childcare. Men guessed that they were doing 35 hours of housework per week).
However, the opposite was actually true: Both men and women were spending more time at work than they thought, and they both had grossly overestimated their time spent at home (on average, most women spent about 15 hours looking after kids. Men spent a mere nine hours on housework).
Of course, your routines are expected to change after you have a baby, but how do you make sure that you’re not spending too much time in the office? How do you balance your job and time with your kids? Take our poll and leave us a comment telling us what your secret is.
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