New Study From Uppsala University Shows Younger Men Get To Congratulate Mom Themselves

Younger men take more responsibility for joint family communication than their fathers did. This is shown by a new study from Uppsala University where Swedes from several generations have been interviewed about their communication patterns.

If in the past it was the mother’s responsibility to send postcards from the whole family, or make sure that children, parents and in-laws were congratulated on their birthdays, today there are new norms for this type of unpaid work in the home. In a study published in the scientific journal Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Lina Eklund, docent in human-computer interaction at Uppsala University, interviewed forty Swedes of different ages about their communication patterns.

– We see above all in the younger generations how women are no longer willing to do men’s family work for them. In the oldest generations, it is often still taken for granted that the woman calls relatives with the landline and sends Christmas cards. But in the younger generations, where private mobile phones have replaced shared landlines, we see how men themselves, for example, call their parents and siblings, and support their children in their communication with grandparents, says Lina Eklund.

Newer types of communication technologies have contributed to a shift from group-based communication to individual communication. The new study shows that with the new technologies, men carry out more family communication and in some cases also take more responsibility for it. Older types of communication technology (such as landlines and mailed cards) continue to be female-coded and in some cases seem to be on the verge of being completely abandoned.

But it’s not all about technology. New norms about how we communicate in society at large create different conditions for how men and women divide the unpaid work of being in contact with family members. While in the older generations it is the women who are responsible for the unpaid family work, among the younger generations it is more often a more shared work between men and women.

– We see this pattern in the different generations within the same families, that the younger ones share the unpaid family communication work more equally. It indicates that it may not be that different families do things differently, but that it is a trend we are seeing, says Lina Eklund.

In order to be able to state with certainty that there has been a major change in the area, more studies are needed.

– We would need to see more large-scale studies that look at large parts of the population. There are probably big differences in society depending on, for example, gender equality in the family, use of technology, etc., says Lina Eklund.