Podcast 93 - B2 Household chores

And today I'm going to be talking about household chores. So the word chore, which means housework, a task that we do at home, to keep the home, the house and the family running efficiently. This is a B2 session, and I think the phrases and expressions here will be essential for those students who want to do a B2 exam in the near future. So here we go...

Couples, parents and household chores

B2 household chores vocabulary

So first of all, I'm going to look from the point of view of parents or the couple who are in the home and the importance of sharing chores so that both members of the couple do the same amount of work. I found a survey about couples, married couples. In this case, men and women, a survey about how much work the wife and the husband actually did in the home. In this age of equality, we would expect that the husband would do as much work in the home as the wife, but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be the case.

In a recent study by the Bureau of Labour of Statistics in the US (in the United States), it was found that women who were working a 35-hour week were doing 5.9 hours per day of housework. And on average their husbands, who were also working 35 hours a week, were only doing 3.9 hours of housework. And here, when we say housework, we're talking about not just the chores of the house, but also looking after the children, looking after elderly members of the family as well. And those statistics take on an added meaning when we see that women in the US are working in 50% of the jobs in the United States and they are earning just 70% of the man's salary.

Men and housework

What sort of tasks, what sort of chores do the men do around the house (we say, around the house). Well, it seems that they usually get the simpler tasks - the most attractive tasks or chores. For example, hanging out the washing in the garden, or sorting the recycling or loading the dishwasher, or washing machine even though they don't know how to operate the machine, which is usually done by the woman or the wife.

When it comes to making the meals, it seems that most of the women in the survey were the ones who made the daily meals - breakfast, lunch and dinner - and the men in the family cooked less often - sometimes just the dinner on a Saturday night, for example. Men also prefer to wash the car, even though washing the car often is just a visit to the local car wash!

Women and housework

The women, then, often get the least attractive tasks. For example, clearing up the mess after everybody else. That means putting things away in the cupboards, folding clothes to put away in the drawers or in the wardrobe, sweeping the floor and doing the vacuuming. That's that machine that goes over the carpets and sucks up all the dust - and as well as doing the dusting, which often seems to be a woman's task, according to the survey. Other things they have to do: wiping and cleaning the surfaces in the kitchen and doing the worst chore of all, in my opinion, which is ironing clothes.

The shopping seems to be shared more or less equally. But often when the man goes shopping, it's interesting that the wife is the one who writes the shopping list. Often, going shopping is a family excursion to the local supermarket or hypermarket. It's interesting that it's often the man who just pushes the supermarket trolley while the wife is taking things off the shelves, selecting the products that she wants for the home and putting them into the supermarket trolley.

And of course, for those families with children, it is often the wife who has to look after the children, to dress the children, when they're very small, to feed the baby, to change the nappies. And, as I said, she will usually cook most of the meals during the week, and the husband helps out but not with the same frequency as his wife.

So basically then, the wife is doing two hours a day more housework than her husband. So something is definitely not right there!

Teenagers and housework

Looking at the household chores from the point of view of the younger members of the family, the children and especially older children, adolescents, or teenagers, what do they have to do about the house? Well, I made a little survey among my students here in Spain, in the south of Spain, to see what they did in the house. And they said that, most of them said, that they had to make their bed and also tidy their room. And then there was sort of additional things they had to do as well like setting the table or laying the table or clearing the things away after a meal.

There is the argument that perhaps children, especially at secondary school, shouldn't have to do so many things around the home because they have a lot of homework to do. So instead of doing housework, they should just be doing their homework. I asked the students in my class (there were actually 30 in total). And they said that they had to do, usually, about two hours of homework a day after school - so we're talking about teenagers now. It's true that in Spain, they do do a lot of homework, even at primary school. My daughter, who is in a Spanish school, should do about 45 minutes to an hour of homework. Sometimes that's more, especially when she has exams, which seem to be quite frequent.

I can remember when I was at school, at primary school I'm talking about now, that we didn't have homework at all. We had no homework after school. We came home and we could watch the television and we didn't have anything to do! Now that's changed, actually, in the UK. According to a survey, children at primary school do on average five hours a week of homework. But compare that to children at primary school in Shanghai in China, where they do up to 14 hours a week!

So I asked my students what they thought about doing housework, whether they should do it or perhaps they should be allowed not to do it because they had so much work to do. But they all agreed, in fact, without any exception, that they should do some housework to help their parents. In most cases, in these families, the mother and the father went out to work. So they felt that they should help their parents around the home even though they had a lot of homework themselves to do, which was very time consuming.

It was also quite interesting as well, when I asked them about payment for those household chores that they did. They said they didn't get any payment at all. I can remember when I was a child, we received pocket money for doing chores around the home, and we could even save up to buy something. In Spain, it seems that pocket money is not a tradition. They did receive some money from their parents for specific things they wanted to do. For example, if they wanted to go out and hang out or meet up with friends, their parents would give them some money for a sandwich and a soft drink.

That's all I'm going to say about household chores - lots of interesting vocabulary there!

Interesting, isn't it, that although we live in an age of apparent equality between men and women, that women still seem to be doing a lot more housework than their husbands.

I hope you found that interesting. There's lots of vocabulary there, which you can find in the audio script at Practising English at podcast number 93. And at the bottom of the podcast notes, you'll find a link to a vocabulary and expressions game which you can play by yourself to practise this language or that you can also play as a teacher with your class at school.

Okay, thank you very much! Goodbye for now!

Play a hangman game on this household chores vocabulary...