Does live-in domestic help reduce unpaid household labor? The paradox of intensive parenting and domestic outsourcing

Abstract

This two-stage mixed-method study pulls the literature of domestic outsourcing and intensive parenting together to investigate the role of employing live-in domestic helpers in the time-use patterns of household labor among working parents in Hong Kong. In the first stage, regression models are used to analyze data from a representative household survey of working parents ( N = 791). Regression results show that working parents who hire live-in domestic help spent less time in housework. Yet, the reduction in housework time was partially offset by the managing tasks brought about by the use of live-in help. Working parents with live-in helpers also spent significantly more time on childcare than did working parents without such help. To interpret the regression results, the study draws on qualitative data from in-depth interviews ( N = 20) to unpack the meaning of hiring help and its relationship with the notion and practices of parenting. The findings highlight that the use of live-in domestic help is a specialization strategy to strive for perfection in parenting for parents who juggle work, childcare and household chores. By outsourcing household chores and more routinized childcare tasks to the helpers, working parents, especially mothers, can focus on emotional bonding and tasks conducive to the development of their children.

Outsourcing for How Long? Factors and Duration of Employing Foreign Live-in Domestic Helpers

“…Significant factors shown in past studies include indicators of high household demand, housework inequality that leads the wife to bear the entire burden, and high demands from work domains. Past studies have consistently shown the significance of child-related factors in domestic outsourcing (Cheung & Lui, 2021). Since the transition to parenthood significantly increases the housework burden, especially for women (Baxter et al, 2008; Craig et al, 2016; Kim & Cheung, 2019), past studies have found that couples with young children are more likely to outsource domestic labor (Cheung, 2014; Craig & Baxter, 2016; Sullivan & Gershuny, 2013).…”

“…Using paid domestic help is increasingly common in most post-industrial societies (Kornrich, 2012). Among societies where using paid domestic help is common, Hong Kong is a notable case for its high proportion of families employing foreign live-in domestic helpers (Cheung & Lui, 2017, 2021; Cortes & Pan, 2013; Groves & Lui, 2012). According to the last population by-census, about 15% of domestic households with married couples in Hong Kong employed at least one foreign live-in domestic helper (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 2017).…”

Re-examining the middle-class thesis: Class profiles of families employing migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong

“…The issues relating to trust, parental jealousy, privacy, and difficulty in handling employer–employee relationships, which came up in past studies on middle-class families employing MDWs, remain important (Chan, 2005; Cheung and Lui, 2021; Groves and Lui, 2012; Lui, 2012; Lan, 2006). However, there may be more pressing issues regarding the living and working experiences of migrant workers in working-class families.…”

“…I also included several covariates to predict whether a family employed MDWs in both sets of analyses: husbands’ and wives’ ages, the presence of a dependent child (1 = had a child who was five years old or younger, 0 if otherwise), and co-residence with parents/parents-in-law (0 = no, 1 = yes). The presence of a dependent and not living with parents/in-laws often indicates a heavier housework burden for married couples because of the time-consuming nature of childcare and a lack of support from family members (Cheung and Lui, 2021). In addition to the descriptive analyses, a logistic regression model and a discrete-time logit model were estimated to examine the relationship between SES and employing MDWs from cross-sectional and event-history perspectives, respectively.…”

“…In general, past studies suggested that families with higher levels of resources (e.g., socio-economic status and availability of parental help) and greater work and family burdens (e.g., dependent children and long working hours) are more likely to outsource domestic labor by employing domestic workers, mostly MDWs (Baxter et al, 2009; Cheung, 2021; Cheung and Lui, 2017, 2021; De Ruijter et al, 2005; Gonalons-Pons, 2015; Spitze, 1999). The practice of employing MDWs has positive impacts on the employers’ families (Cortes and Pan, 2013; He and Wu, 2019), but may also create problems in host families, including issues related to trust and privacy, employer–employee conflict, and disputes over parenting (Cheung and Lui, 2021; Groves and Lui, 2012; Chan, 2005; Lan, 2006). On the other hand, studies have also found that MDWs in Hong Kong work long hours—78 to 90 hours per week (Chung and Mak, 2020) and that a significant proportion of them have experienced work-related aggression.…”