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| Chapter 15: How the World Creates Who You Are: Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory |
My parents were married on May 14, 1950. I am the oldest child in my family, and after my mom gave birth to me she never returned to work. She took care of the home while my father earned a living for the family. My mother was a Girl Scout leader and a PTA board member at my school. She collected canned goods and we recycled everything for charity. For the most part, my parents were ideal examples of stereotypic gender roles.
I was a teenager in the 1970s. I watched as Barbara Walters became the first female anchor of the evening news. I learned about feminism in high school, and I heard that women could be more than "just a housewife." We were told we could have it all: a family, a career, everything! Women's attitudes were changing, men's attitudes were changing, and the traditional walls between gender roles were crumbling. My generation would change everything. We would have egalitarian marriages where career pressures and household labor would be divided equally among the husband and wife. We would assume equal roles in paying the mortgage, keeping the house clean, raising children, and we would all reap the benefits.
Now it is 2007. Surely, 30 years later we have equality among the sexes—at work and at home. Right? Well . . . actually it depends. Sociologist Scott Coltrane and colleagues' research shows that the degree to which you find equality depends on what data you are working with. If you ask dual-career husbands and wives if they do an equivalent amount of work, husbands will say they pretty much do about half of the housework and child rearing. Wives will say they do well over half. Who's right?
If you videotape or otherwise record the daily behavior of husbands and wives, you will find that, despite more than 30 years of feminism and the pressure of dual-career households, women still do the bulk of the household work, and this is especially true for child—rearing tasks. Now many women have two jobs—the job my mom had and their career.
Does this result surprise you?
I have found repeatedly that once you start recording behavior, a lot of things about human behavior may surprise you (especially your own behavior). For this activity you should pick a behavior and observe it for some period of time. You can choose to record how much time you spend on the phone each day, how much time you spend listening to your iPod, how much time you spend on the Internet or sending IMs; the idea is to just pick something and track it for several days.
Many people have found it informative, and health promoting, to keep track of what they eat and drink! Maintaining awareness of how much you eat, when you eat, and what you eat (your eating behavior) is one of the main premises behind the weight-loss program, Weight Watchers. When you track your food portions and compare it to a healthy standard, it can be surprising to find how much you actually eat. You can compare what you eat to the guidelines set by the U.S. government—see the "Smart Nutrition 101" web site:
http://www.nutrition.gov/index.php?mode=subject&subject=ng_recommendations&d_subject=Smart%20Nutrition%20101
If you experience difficulty with the link above type: www.nutrition.gov and link to the Smart Nutrition 101 page.
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