Why I Want My Kids To See Us Do (And Argue Over) The Chores

What does it look like to have gender equality at home? In celebration of International Women's Day, we roped in modern dads to share the ways they are pulling their weight in domestic matters - and why it's important to them.

We don’t have a helper at home. Our kids are nine, 10 and 11 years old now, so we don’t need a caregiver for them, and it’s just not a part of our lifestyle. A cleaner comes in every other Friday but aside from that, all the housework and chores are done by my wife and I. (We’ve never solved the mystery of how to correctly apportion chores to the children. Yes, I could let them do the sweeping but it would take three times as long and end up three times as dirty!)

The truth is, I enjoy housework. I love it. There is a great deal of mindfulness that I glean when I clean. Sweeping the floor; hanging up clothes to dry; dusting the tops of the frames – putting the house in order has always given me a great sense of personal cleanliness which makes me feel good about the state of the world. My world, at least.

I think my wife has a similar motivation because she is certainly not a messy person. Both my wife and I will do all the housework, depending on who has the time, that day. That’s not to say we don’t diverge and disagree a great deal! We both think the other “doesn’t do the chores quite as well as I do”, naturally. Our differences in terms of chore "ability" and "expectation" can be quite vast but I think that’s just down to personality. I doubt that it is a generic Men Vs. Women issue. Or is it? You tell me! Let’s see how many nods per married couple I get in this article.

The differences start here

I do not, and cannot, bring myself to put the dishes in the sink, a crime that my wife seems to consider equivalent to murdering puppies. When she cooks, she cleans as she goes along. When I cook, I am like Salvador Dali in his studio – a mad frenzy of creativity with the salt, garlic and sesame oil as the wondrous hues being splashed on the canvas of the frying pan. Needless to say, I don’t wash up as I go along and the kitchen resembles a burglary at Gordon Ramsay’s as we sit down to dinner.

Meanwhile, she can’t crush boxes. She appears completely oblivious to the simple logic that a cardboard box will fit better in a bin when efficiently crushed down in size. Instead, it’s left to me to constantly reduce the milk cartons or shoe boxes or Amazon packages. And who, may I ask, is responsible for all these Amazon boxes? You know it’s not me adding to cart every single night like she’s training for the Retail Olympics!

She also can’t believe I don’t fold underwear. I can’t believe anyone would fold underwear. Who is ever going to know? Do you think there’s a single guy out there tonight who is going back to a girl’s place only for his erotic plans to be scuppered when she rejects him for having creases in his Calvin Kleins? No.

Folding underwear is just a short step away from ironing your bedsheets, aka full-blown psychopathic.

And we have a big philosophical divide over drying clothes. Consider me a tie-dye wearing hippie if you will, because I love the idea of drying clothes as nature intended. Hang ‘em up and let the wind blow. But my wife can’t stand the constant clothes horses that proliferate in our narrow corridors. She would much rather charge up a big, expensive, power-sucking dryer, and eschew my genius plan of letting the humid winds of Singapore slowly make our clothes just damp enough so that we can wear them again. There is a deep rift in the household over DryerGate, and the tense negotiations continue.

What matters is we are doing it all together

But regardless of our tensions and disagreements over housework, I am ultimately very pleased that we share the housework, and that our kids see that. It’s very easy in a place like Singapore to be surrounded by "help". Many friends in our family and social circle operate with one, if not multiple, helpers in the house. It’s highly likely that Singapore kids might never see their parents doing the nitty-gritty of daily chores. But I would one day like my kids to experience living in a different country.

I want them to know that having a maid isn’t the norm in the vast majority of countries around the world.

I am also pleased that my two sons and our daughter see gender equality in their own home. I grew up in a very conventional structure of my mum being the housewife and my dad being away as the breadwinner. But I’d like to think that ego-free gender equality flowed very easily to me as a natural progression, and that hopefully this is the norm in many homes in 2024. I mean, why wouldn’t I do the washing up, I’M SO MUCH BETTER AT IT THAN SHE IS!

Shan Wee is a DJ and the music director for ONE FM 91.3. He is also the author of fiction novel "The Short Life of Raven Monroe".