Young men make their own birthday calls to Mom
The researchers saw that men in the younger generations themselves made birthday calls to their parents and siblings. Photo: Getty Images
Younger men take more responsibility for joint family communication than their fathers did. This is one of the findings of a new study from Uppsala University in which Swedes from several generations were interviewed about their communication patterns.
In the past, it was the mother’s responsibility to send postcards from the whole family or to be sure to congratulate children, parents and in-laws on their birthdays. But today, new norms exist for this type of unpaid work in the home. In a study published in the scholarly journal Convergence: In the International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Lina Eklund, Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Uppsala University, interviewed forty Swedes of different ages about their communication patterns.
“Especially in the younger generations, we see that women are no longer willing to do men’s family work for them. In the oldest generations, it’s often still taken for granted that it’s the woman’s job to make landline calls to relatives and send Christmas cards. But in the younger generations, where private mobile phones have replaced shared landlines, we see that men call their parents and siblings themselves and support their kids in their communication with grandparents,” says Lina Eklund.
Men takes greater responsibility
Newer types of communication technologies have contributed to a shift from group-based communication to individual communication. The new study shows that with these new technologies, men perform more family communication and in some cases even take greater responsibility for it. Older types of communication technology (such as landlines and “snail mail” cards) continue to be female-coded and, in some cases, appear to be on the verge of being abandoned altogether.
Yet not everything depends on the technology. New norms about how we communicate in society at large are creating different conditions for how men and women divide up the unpaid work of being in contact with family members. While in the older generations, it is women who do the unpaid family work, among the younger generation, men and women often share this job more equally.
“We see this pattern among the different generations within the same families - that younger people share the unpaid family communication work more equally. This indicates that it may not come down to different families doing different things; we could actually be seeing a trend,” says Lina Eklund.
To be able to establish with certainty that there has been a major change in this area, more studies are needed.
“We would need to see more large-scale studies looking at big portions of the population. There are probably major differences within our society, for example due to gender equality in the family, the use of technology, etc.,” says Lina Eklund.
Linda Koffmar