A Melbourne woman is challenging fathers to take on single handedly one of the hardest jobs in the world for 48 hours. It involves obstacles, point scoring, possibly drinking and sex, and has been designed to ensure at least one person breaks down in tears.
The Tough Mother challenge sees mums taking a mini-holiday from Friday to Sunday while their partners care for the children and work through a list of domestic challenges. It has been developed by activist Alice Morell, who is also behind the Mothering Movement.
Obligatory chores (apart from keeping the children alive, fed and watered) include shopping for food for the weekend with the kids in tow, taking the children swimming, spending five hours playing at home, doing the laundry, making dinner, cleaning the house on Sunday evening and getting ready for some love-making. Men should also write down what they learnt from the experience.
The obstacles included a mixture of mundane domestic work with drama-inducing chores like a trip to the toy store to buy a present for another child, but not your own, which was sure to leave the father dealing with a public tantrum.
Optional extras include baking a cake and inviting friends over for afternoon tea, making a phone call to a bureaucracy, and setting the alarm clock to wake up half-way through the night to sit in a dark room for 10 minutes (and take photographic evidence). Points were scored for every obstacle.
The point of the weekend was to bring to the partner's attention all the invisible things that mothers do, Ms Morell said. Last year about 10 couples took part in a pilot Tough Mother weekend.
"Most of the dads thought they did [enough housework] already and were surprised when they really had to do it all. Some guys got angry because they were so stressed. [But] they all found it very useful.
"Very few guys I know do the entire thing very often. There is zero preparation from the mums [on Tough Mother weekend]. In 95 per cent of cases when a mum leaves the house she makes quite a lot of preparation for the dads to manage the kids. Whether it is to clean the house before or do the meals or writing lists. All that sort of stuff. When there is none of that [preparation], it is quite different."
Tough Mother was scheduled for the first weekend of May with Mother's Day falling on the following weekend. It also coincides with round five of the AFL and the A-League quarter finals. Mothers who usually worked full time while their partners stayed at home were also welcome to take on the challenge.
Ms Morell came up with the idea after speaking to women who said their bugbear was a lack of empathy or support from their partner. Although she admits there had been some criticism from men who found the idea patronising or insulting, she said statistics showed mothers still did most of the household and child rearing work.
Women spend nearly 34 hours a week doing household chores, including child rearing, while men did an average of 18 hours, according to the Bureau of Statistics.
Jason Kimberly took on Tough Mother last year when his three children were nine, six and four. The biggest challenge was finding the time to do everything and watching the children turn a 10-minute task into an hour-long one.
"It is the cumulative nature of the challenges that is the really taxing bit," he said. Keeping the laundry moving through its washing, drying, and folding cycles was also difficult. "Some of the things you can normally skip and think 'someone will do that in a few days time'. You really can't let it mound up. You need to address it at the time."
He found sharing the experience with friends helped, because they could send each other pictures of their failures or drinking a glass of wine at the end of a long day.
