RESEARCH General Home & Garden

WORK & FAMILY
Fathers in India more socially connected to family than U.S. dads

Jim Barlow, Life Sciences Editor
(217) 333-5802; b-james3@uiuc.edu

9/1/2001

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Emotional baggage from a day's work may arrive home with dad, but it gives way to relaxation with family, including regular, lengthy close-knit discussions with the kids.

Such is a snapshot of the white-collar working and family lives of 100 middle class fathers in Chandigarh, an urban area in northern India. The findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of Family Psychology.

The study is part of a series that looks at Indian family life using the experience-sampling method developed by Reed Larson, a professor in the University of Illinois department of human and community development. Earlier this year, Larson and co-author Suman Verma of the Government Home Science College in Chandigarh reported in the Indian Journal of Social Work that mothers spend more time than their husbands doing household chores, but they find fulfillment doing so.

In the United States, Larson said, fathers generally are absorbed in their working lives, and their job-related emotions often dictate their moods and that of their families. Adolescents in the United States tend to spend less time with family; daughters rarely engage in personal conversation with dads.

In India, a different picture came into focus as dads responded about what they were doing and what they were thinking whenever researchers activated the beepers the men were carrying. "We have found that the male and female roles are much more clearly demarcated than they are in the United States," Larson said. "Dads in India do very little housework – much less than American fathers – and they are rarely in the role of handyman around the house."

The study broke down the activity of families with eighth-graders, based on 4,308 randomly timed reports taken while fathers were engaged in work, family and other activities. Seventy of the families were Hindu; 30 were Sikh. The findings represent "only a moment of time" in the country’s rapidly emerging middle class, Larson said.

Indian men's work and family lives were found to be relatively independent. They are more socially oriented than are American men. They rated their work time as more important than home life, but they felt less engaged, more content and in control of their time while at home. They also viewed themselves "as the leader across all family interactions."

At home, "they clearly reported being quite connected to their adolescent children," Larson said. "A lot of kids, including daughters, reported having lengthy discussions with their dads about all sorts of topics, including politics, philosophy, social lives and the future."

The study focusing on men was co-written by Larson, Verma and Jodi Dworkin, a UI graduate student. The Alfred P. Sloan Center on Working Families funded the work by Larson and Dworkin. Larson also was supported by a Fulbright grant from the U.S. Educational Foundation in India.