Gendered Allocation of Childcare Responsibilities

Gendered Allocation of Childcare Responsibilities describes a pattern in which women are treated as the primary caregivers, even when parenting is discussed as a shared choice. In Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, that pattern takes shape through practical routines as much as explicit expectations: Kim Jiyoung worries about combining a career with childcare, while Jung Daehyun offers to help; later, the work of feeding, cleaning, and organizing care fills her days. A second account, told by the psychiatrist, shows a similar imbalance in his own household and in his clinic. Together, these experiences reveal how responsibility can remain gendered even when men express support or regard themselves as fair-minded.

Promises and Unequal Stakes

When Jung Daehyun raises having a child, the decision sounds casual to Kim Jiyoung, although they have not yet discussed family planning. She is less able to treat it lightly. She has little direct experience of pregnancy or newborn care, does not know how her body might change, and fears that childcare will make it impossible to sustain her career. Both she and Jung Daehyun work late and on weekends, and neither set of parents is available to provide regular help. Her concern is not only who will watch the baby: she feels guilty for already imagining that someone else might care for a child they have chosen to have.

Jung Daehyun listens as she explains her anxiety and promises to change diapers, feed the baby, and wash the baby’s clothes. He also tells her not to worry about leaving paid work if care arrangements prove impossible, saying that he will support the family. His reassurance presents parenthood as meaningful and offers a practical fallback, but it does not resolve the unequal stakes Kim Jiyoung has identified. She asks what he would give up. That question places the couple’s decision beside its likely consequences: his offer is framed as support for her, while the possibility of giving up a career has already become hers to contemplate.

The Daily Work of Early Motherhood

After Jung Jiwon is born, care appears not as a single decision but as an unbroken sequence of tasks. Kim Jiyoung feeds her every two hours, tries to sleep in intervals no longer than that, holds her while doing chores, washes the baby’s clothes and fabrics, and prepares food intended to support breastfeeding. The demands leave her crying frequently and in pain. When she leaves Jung Jiwon with Jung Daehyun to visit an orthopedist for her wrists, the doctor recommends rest; Kim Jiyoung explains that she cannot simply stop caring for the baby or doing the washing and cleaning. The episode makes the physical costs visible without separating them from the routine that produces them.

Her mother cannot take over recovery care because the porridge shop is short-staffed and requires her extra hours. The shop must also support Kim Jiyoung’s younger brother, whose education is continuing. Her mother brings leftovers when she can, but this limited assistance shows how care is constrained across generations by work and family obligations. A visit from Kang Hyesu offers another, more immediate form of support: while Kim Jiyoung breastfeeds, feeds Jung Jiwon, changes her diaper, comforts her, and puts her down for a nap, Kang Hyesu warms baby food, fetches diapers, and washes dishes. The visit lets the women talk, but its small acts of practical help also make the ordinary workload legible.

Housework, Time, and Recognition

The orthopedist’s response to Kim Jiyoung’s inability to rest is to compare contemporary housework unfavorably with the harder methods used by women in the past. Kim Jiyoung’s unspoken answer is concrete: a washing machine does not load or hang the laundry, and a vacuum does not clean and maintain itself. The novel uses this contrast to show how appliances may reduce physical effort without removing the labor of managing a household. Technological convenience does not make domestic work disappear; it can make the remaining work easier to overlook.

That erasure persists in the opposing ways people describe housework. Some dismiss it as idleness, while others praise it as life-sustaining labor, but neither response calculates its monetary value. The suggestion that putting a price on the work would require someone to pay connects its invisibility to its economic consequences. Time-use figures sharpen the point: a stay-at-home mother with a child under two is reported to have four hours and ten minutes a day to herself, while a mother whose child attends daycare has four hours and twenty-five minutes. The fifteen-minute difference suggests that daycare does not simply create leisure. For Kim Jiyoung, Jung Jiwon’s schedule—arrival at 9:30 a.m. and return before 1 p.m.—leaves about three hours, much of which goes to laundry, dishes, tidying, and preparing food. The relief she feels comes chiefly from being able to complete chores without the baby beside her.

Careers, Family Decisions, and the Narrator’s Blind Spot

The psychiatrist’s account extends the pattern beyond Kim Jiyoung. His wife had pursued a medical career toward a professorship in ophthalmology, then worked as a contract doctor, and eventually gave up her career. With the couple’s parents living far away, she relied on a succession of nannies, then arranged after-school care and a taekwondo program so she could continue working. When their son’s school reported disruptive behavior and suspected attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the psychiatrist rejected the teacher’s concern despite spending little attentive time with the boy. His wife confronted him with that gap between his professional confidence and his limited knowledge of their son. She then suspended her work, managed the boy’s school day and lessons, and canceled a possible return to a position when she believed he had not improved.

The psychiatrist eventually recognizes that his wife’s experiences have taught him what he might otherwise have missed about being a woman and a mother in Korea. His account does not present that recognition as an abstract insight: it follows her repeated career compromises, his own inattention at home, and the childcare arrangements that had allowed her to work only at considerable logistical cost. His clinic repeats the same assumptions. When Lee Suyeon, a valued counselor with a high-risk pregnancy, resigns after years of trying to conceive, the psychiatrist initially treats her departure as an inconvenience and plans to replace her with an unmarried employee. He acknowledges her skill and the loss of patients who prefer to end therapy rather than transfer, yet interprets the problem as women employees’ childcare responsibilities rather than as a workplace structure that expects uninterrupted availability.

Across these accounts, childcare is not depicted as a private burden that can be solved by goodwill alone. Promises of help, family affection, appliances, daycare, and paid care each provide some support, but none automatically redistributes responsibility or protects women’s careers. By setting intimate routines alongside employment decisions and the psychiatrist’s changing understanding, the novel shows how the unequal allocation is reproduced both in households and in institutions—and how easily the work disappears from view when those who benefit from it do not have to perform it themselves.