Household Chore Battles Spill Into Bedroom

Aug. 20 -- Every day, mother of four Stacy Murray tackles a giant and exhausting list of the daily chores: feedings, laundry, diapers, dishes, cleaning and baths.

"I have plenty of days when I'm completely stressed out," Murray told Good Morning America.

Her husband often receives emotional phone calls from his wife at work.

"I usually get a phone call saying that you're going to be minus a child when you get home," Chris Murray said. "Then I have to try to talk, you know, calm her down?"

The Murrays' situation is not unusual. In a recent mail-in survey in BabyTalk magazine, 70 percent of moms and 64 percent of dads told the publication that mom is more frazzled than dad. On average, wives tackle 40 hours of housework a week, compared to 16 hours by husbands, the 26,500 mothers and fathers told the magazine.

While those results are not scientific, they are not too far off some recent random surveys. A 1998 ABCNEWS poll found the vast majority of married women, 84 percent, said they do most of the household chores in their family, and most men, 67 percent, agreed. A quarter of married men said they do most of the chores, or at least share in them equally. Only one in 10 women saw it that way. A 1999 CBS poll found 70 percent of Americans think that women do more.

Problems can definitely arise when mom does a lot more chores than dad. According to a recent study at Brown University, overworked mothers whose husbands are sluggish about housework are much more likely to feel resentful, anxious and depressed than women whose husbands do their fair share.

Ice Queen in Bedroom

When her husband shirks household duties, she takes withholding measures of her own, Stacy Murray says.

"Either I won't talk to him or you know he'll say something that'll just set me off and I'll just yell at him for a while and let him know that I'm not approving of him not helping," she said. Stacy admits that the chore disputes carry over to the bedroom, where she can be quite icy.