The previous two chapters explored the decisions made by 25 mothers and fathers about how to reconcile their paid work and childcare, looking especially at decisions about their hours of paid work and how these were shaped by moral values and responsibilities governing expectations about breadwinning and caregiving. This chapter examines how, within that context, couples divided childcare on a daily/weekly basis. It draws on data from the first set of interviews and the couples’ joint creation of their ‘household portrait’. This methodology, discussed in Chapter 1, involves each couple together placing a number of childcare and housework task cards in columns marked ‘woman only’, ‘woman man helps’, ‘shared’, ‘man only’, and ‘man woman helps’ to indicate which of them carried out the task most of the time.

Building on the work of those that suggest that childcare and housework tasks should be explored separately (Sullivan, 2013; Doucet, 2015), this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of couple's discussions of how they divided individual childcare tasks and their reasoning for this. A distinction is made between two categories of childcare, namely ‘everyday’ and ‘unpredictable’ childcare. Everyday childcare includes getting children ready in the morning, dropping them off or picking them up from school, nursery, or another childcare provider. These everyday tasks can be planned for and organized around a couple's respective working hours. Unpredictable childcare refers to tasks which cannot be planned in advance, such as taking them to an emergency doctor's appointment or looking after a child who is unwell or at home because the school/nursery is closed due to bad weather.