Housework

Although considered primarily recipients of care, children are also substantial contributors to housework performance, often supplying up to seven hours or more per week of unpaid family work, mostly on routine indoor tasks (Blair 1992). Younger children's housework is less typed by gender than that of adults or teenagers, but as they become teens, they take on more gender-segregated tasks. Adolescent girls do about twice as much household labor as adolescent boys, with girls doing more routine chores like cooking and cleaning, and boys doing occasional outside chores like yard care. This division of adolescent chores socializes young people into accepting marriage and family roles that are bifurcated by gender.