正文
为啥妈妈老嫌爸爸家务干得少
而对父亲们来说,呆在家里会将他们处理多重任务的可能性减少逾30%。这也许可以解释,为什么几年前加州大学洛杉矶分校(UCLA)的研究人员在针对32个家庭展开的细致入户研究中发现,父亲独自呆在房间里是“最常见的个人─空间格局”。这也许还可以解释为什么许多父亲都能看完星期天的报纸,而他们的妻子则无法看完──因为父亲不需要不断起身往碗里加麦圈。
Being compelled to divide and subdivide your time doesn't just compromise your productivity and lead to garden-variety discombobulation. It also creates a feeling of urgency-a sense that no matter how tranquil the moment, no matter how uNPRessured the circumstances, there's always a pot somewhere that's about to boil over.
被迫把你的时间一分再分不仅会影响工作效率,而且常常会让人头晕脑胀。它还会带来一种紧迫感──也就是不管当下有多平静,也不管环境有多轻松,你也总觉得某个地方有一罐即将沸腾的水。
'My husband says I cause some of the worry unnecessarily,' another Minnesota mother, who was part of the same parenting program, told me when I spent some time in her home.
参加上述育儿活动的另一位妈妈在我到她家拜访时对我说:“我丈夫说,是我造成了一些不必要的担忧。”
It's something that I hear a lot from parents. One of them-usually the mother-is more alive to the emotional undercurrents of the household. As a result, this more intuitive parent feels that the other parent-usually the father-is not doing his fair share, while the father feels that his wife is excessively emotional and wretchedly inefficient. But what really may be going on is that the couple is experiencing time differently, because each person is paying attention to different things.
我经常听父母们说这句话。父母中的一方(通常是母亲)对家庭的情绪潜流更敏感。于是,直觉更敏锐的这一方会感觉另一方(通常是父亲)没有尽到应尽的义务,而父亲则感觉自己的妻子太过情绪化而且做事效率低得可怜。但真相也许是夫妇双方对时间的感知不同,因为他们在关注不同的东西。
It's important to remember that fairness isn't just about absolute equality. It's about the perception of equality. Women may work fewer paid hours than men, but because they devote nearly twice as much time to family care (housework, child care, shopping), it doesn't look to women like their husbands are sharing the load evenly when they're all home together. It looks instead like their husbands are watching 'SportsCenter.'
我们必须牢记,公平不仅仅是绝对的平等,而是对平等的感知。女性的有酬工作时间可能比男性短,但她们用于照顾家庭(家务、照顾孩子、购物)的时间几乎相当于男性的两倍,因此在女性看来,当双方都在家时,她们的丈夫并没有均等地分担家务。她们感觉丈夫总是在看体育新闻。
It's hard to overstate how stressful these perceived imbalances can be. At one point, the UCLA researchers took saliva samples from most of the subjects of their study to measure levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. They found that while leisure time went a long way toward relaxing fathers, it did far less to subdue anxiety in mothers. So what, you may ask, did calm the mothers?
这些感受到的不平衡带来的压力之大怎么形容都不过分。加州大学洛杉矶分校的的研究人员在研究中提取了多数对象的唾液样本,以测量压力荷尔蒙皮质醇的水平。他们发现,尽管闲暇时间能很好地帮助父亲放松,但对减轻母亲焦虑情绪的效果却要差得多。那么你也许会问,什么才能让妈妈们恢复平静呢?
Simple: Seeing their husbands make a bigger effort to reduce the pandemonium in the house.
答案很简单:看到丈夫能更加努力地减轻家里的乱局。