Introduction

Power dynamics in one's family of origin shape internalized notions of normative family relationships. Previous research has documented how the division of paid and unpaid work in one's family of origin socializes children to hold specific attitudes and beliefs about how relationships should work, as well as provides a model for how to divide paid and unpaid tasks (for example, Cunningham, 2001; Gupta, 2006; Álvarez and Miles-Touya, 2012). In this chapter, we examine the extent to which the housework class membership of one's parents shapes the performance of housework tasks of adult children once they have an independent household. The adult children of the couples in the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) were interviewed in 2001/02. They provided information about their own housework performance. While we do not have data from the adult children's partners reporting their own housework time or attitudes about the gendered division of labor, we do have information about partners’ labor-market participation, absolute and relative resources, and demographic characteristics as reported by the adult child during the interview. Using the adult children's reports, we can document the extent to which children's personal performance of housework may have been informed by their parents’, especially regarding the internalization of gendered task performance. Housework performance is a dynamic process that is a reflection of negotiation not only with one's partner, but also with one's past as it informs the overall work patterns considered to be appropriate for adult women and men.

We perform latent profile analysis (LPA) on the adult children of the couples in our analytic sample from the NSFH. These data were collected approximately 14 years after the first NSFH wave, allowing for a sufficient amount of time for the children to have left their parents’ home and establish an independent household. We have data from only the adult children, not their partners, so we are unable to perform the couple-based LPA that we did for the children's parents. Instead, we present the patterns of housework task performance among the female and male children separately, noting that part of the division of housework that led to the construction of the five classes among the NSFH couples (the parents of these adult children) was a distribution of tasks by the gender of the partner.