THE INFLUENCE OF PARENTS AND FAMILY CONTEXT ON CHILDRENS INVOLVEMENT IN HOUSEHOLD TASKS

To determine the relative impact of a number of family variables on ch ildren's performance of gender-typed household tasks this study took a ccount of the gender of the child, the gender of a sibling within the same age range (8-14 years), whether a first or second chill and three parental variables: the degree of encouragement given to perform masc uline and feminine tasks parental involvement in the same tasks and pa rents' general egalitarianism The sample consisted of 191 white, mainl y Angle Australian two-parent families, with the two oldest children i n a boy-boy, girl-girl, boy-girl, or girl-boy sequence. To check on th e robustness of effects measures were taken on two occasions, on avera ge 16 months apart Among the family context variables, the gender of t he child was the strongest contributing variable, with girls doing mor e feminine tasks than bays and boys doing more masculine tasks than gi rls There was limited support for the proposition that first children do more housework than second children of the same gender, while the r esults for gender of sibling were small and inconsistent. Among the pa rental variables encouragement had strong positive effects for feminin e tasks (i.e., more encouragement by parents corresponded to more invo lvement by children). In contrast, parental involvement in the same ta sks (modeling) and parental egalitarianism predicted only the performa nce of masculine tasks and the direction of the effects was mostly neg ative (e.g., the more a father was involved in masculine tasks the les s a child did of those tasks). The results point to involvement in gen der-typed activities being influenced by multiple factors, with parent al encouragement and gender of child being most prominent among these. They also point to the value of sampling on more than one occasion an d of considering separately the performance of feminine and masculine tasks.