Married women spend three times more time than their husband on unpaid care every day, according to a study by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) of marriage and childbearing.
At a time when the declining birthrate is widely debated, the government must consider what it can do for married women, such as me, rather than simply stating that “women have to work too hard.”
The unpaid time spent on care measured in the study includes time spent caring for children, older people and other family members, providing daycare and long-term care, as well as doing household chores.
The traditional attitude is that men take care of external matters and women take care of the home. The main burden always falls on women, even if they also have a job.
One of the reasons for Taiwan’s low birthrate is the high cost of childcare and another reason is the uneven distribution of household duties.
From the perspective of a physiotherapist, in addition to discussing that women spend more time caring for children, it is also necessary to discuss the heavy physical work that this involves.
A study from 2005 shows that the most common skeletal muscle system pain developed by parents caring for children is lower back pain and headaches.
Professional childcarers most commonly develop pain in the lower back (34 percent), lower limbs (20 percent) and upper limbs (13 percent), the study showed.
The main reason women are more likely to suffer from skeletal muscle system pain could be that they naturally differ from men hormonally and physically — in combination with a lack of exercise.
The reason that it is easy to experience back pain when caring for children is excessive torque.
When caring for children, people use strength to hold their children, and this requires strong upper limbs and back muscles.
Childcare also means leaning forward when feeding, playing play with and bathing the children, and this requires more torque over a longer time, which results in cumulative injury.
This is why it is so easy to sprain the back and develop lower back pain with a careless twist of the body, or if a child is strong or heavy.
As for skeletal muscle system pain as a result of childcare, health education should provide new parents information about ergonomics — for example, how to hold a child in ways that are less strenuous, and how to choose items used to take care of children.
Choosing a higher diaper changing table and sitting the child in a bath chair when washing their hair are ways to reduce strain.
It is also important to change the environment and create an environment where it is not necessary to lean forward too often or too deeply, which is another way to reduce the risk of back pain.
Exercise is important and there are studies that show that one hour or more every week of the form of exercise that you find most enjoyable can reduce the risk of skeletal muscle system pain.
Still, the premise must be that both parents must be willing to cooperate: If we are to improve the birth rate, men must realize that if they participate in the care of their children and do their part of household duties, that would make for happier women — and children might grow up both happier and healthier.
Cho Chiung-yu is an associate professor in National Cheng Kung University’s physical therapy department.
Translated by Perry Svensson
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past