This, (‘Now, Dad Feels as Stressed as Mom’) from The New York Times has very similar themes to that piece from the Sydney Morning Herald that I just linked to here a while back about the angry dads – essentially that men are being more squeezed by their work-family balance than ever before and probably dipping out on some acknowledgement for that too – and yet, somehow the NYT piece manages to be far less inflammatory than that SMH one was. Like, just because men are hurting doesn’t mean that it is women’s fault.
Also, I quite like the way the gender division of family responsibilities was unpacked in the NYT piece – their explanation for why the burden feels so lopsided to women – “the psychological responsibility”. A huuuge part of the problem.
Then again, some contributions may be unrecognized by the other partner. For instance, a father may prepare school lunches half the time, so he thinks he’s sharing that chore. But he doesn’t factor in the time his wife spent shopping for the ingredients, planning healthy, appetizing menus and emptying and cleaning the lunchboxes every day.
“Women remain psychologically responsible, and that’s a burden,” said Dr. Galinsky. “That psychological responsibility adds to the sense of feeling like you’re doing more, even though it may be somewhat invisible.”
For his part, a father may spend time fixing a tricycle, playing video games or putting away outdoor toys – time that his wife doesn’t count when she’s mentally keeping tabs.“Women consistently underestimate how much their husbands do,” said Stephanie Coontz, a marriage historian and author of “A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s,” to be published next year.
“Women don’t necessarily give his contribution the same value as theirs,” she added. “They don’t always recognize that what he does with the kids is a form of care, too.”
By the way, speaking of psychological responsibility, if I die can someone I know please check that my partner buys our kids Christmas and birthday presents? Doting though he is as a father he is yet to be the purchaser of a single one of their gifts.
One of my most depressing observations since going back to work has been that sharing the load equally mostly just means that we’re equally exhausted. Which is better than one of us sinking under a mountain of work and resentment, I suppose. But I wonder whether the fabled work-life balance even exists at all.
Rhetoric about ‘balance’ is often a sign that people are suffering under multiple unreasonable demands: it’s a way of shifting the blame from the demanders to the demandees, that they just aren’t handling the demands right.
In the U.S., where I live, things are currently very badly set up for childrearing. The standard model of job calls for workers to be available to stay late, sometimes very late, on little or no notice, but daycare centers charge heavily for late pickup. The shift from large, multigenerational farm households to small nuclear households means a lot more people cooking a lot more separate meals, for a net loss of efficiency. Schools have shorter hours than the workplace, and private schools (including most U.S. preschools) don’t provide bus service. Workers are expected to move where the jobs are, and retirees are expected to move where living is cheap. None of these conditions is inevitable, but all of them make it much harder to be a parent than if we had 24-hour daycare centers (tax-supported!), service flats, all-day schools, private schools that provided their own transportation, or nearby grandparents and aunts and uncles.
Our entire economy is based on the assumption that every home contains an extra able-bodied adult with no job and few responsibilities, whose time is entirely at other people’s convenience. That’s the source of the exhaustion and pressure to create ‘balance’ that Ami is feeling.
“Our entire economy is based on the assumption that every home contains an extra able-bodied adult with no job and few responsibilities, whose time is entirely at other people’s convenience.”
Being a SAHP, I am often percieved to be that person with “few” responsibilities, and I hate it, hate it, hate it–especially the last bit.
Returning to the subject of the psychological responsibility: in some ways it does mean that you are doing more. If you are the one with ultimate responsibility for laundry or lunchboxes or whatever, then even if your partner does it half the time …well, sometimes they forget, or get it wrong. You have to check every time. So you always have that as a to-do list item, even on days when they’re the ones doing it. And if they made a mistake, it’s your responsibility to fix it or tell them to. So really, not all the chore is being split in half; only the doing is split while the remembering and checking is still all one person’s job.
I wonder about Stephanie Coontz’s political philosophy. Human beings do have a tendency to discount other people’s work, so (house)wives might well be forgetting husbands’ (yard)work, but that bit about “They don’t always recognize that what he does with the kids is a form of care, too” covers swamps of conflict. I’ve read mothers complaining about how their husbands hog all the fun activities of playing catch or video games with the child, and leave the wives all the tedious or frustrating work of bathtime and toothbrushing and bed-making.
My partner has been known to say he made dinner, when in fact he reheated a casserole I had cooked the day before.
But he is in fact very good – he does all the baths and dishes as well as other stuff.
But food is pretty much my domain.
The childcare workers locally have all been getting their head around how he has taken responsibility for working out where the kid goes every day and how he’s getting there. We’ve been on several waiting lists and tossing up options, having options withdrawn (why the fuck don’t they know what day they have available!) and then waiting for the music to start going round in circles again, so there have been a lot of phone calls. He talks to me about the progress, but he’s generally the one making the calls.
We get totally competitive about present buying. We are shameless. I know some people wait til they break up to get like that but we have to try very very hard to resist the temptation to tell the kid “No, it wasn’t Santa, it was me! ME! I chose the…”
Hey, can I swap the bathroom cleaning and weeding the garden for video game duty?
I really appreciate Kathmandu’s reminder on how structural problems generate predictable intrafamily problems. So true. However, there is still a HUGE piece in this about the socialization of girls and women to 1) do the relational work, and 2) do the food work, which is also relational work because of the way that most of us were trained that food = love, 3) bear the weight of social judgment on our family members’ appearance and hygiene. None of these things is natural or necessary. All of them are open to reconsideration and negotiation. I find that I’ve needed to do a lot of self-retraining about what my expectations are for how my family looks, eats, and gives — for whom am I making my expectations? For me? For my son’s teachers? For my parents? For my in-laws? For an imaginary judge? Then I can decide what work is really necessary and what I feel like I need to negotiate with the other adult in the house.
That’s a great comment Emily. It reminds me of the banal issue of changing the bed linen. My MIL does hers every week and I do ours every fortnight. At least in our family every fortnight is clean enough for now as far as I am concerned. Plus, it uses less resources! Still, it had me thinking about whether I was doing it wrong, are we clean enough etc etc. Needless to say, not likely that my partner is reviewing every housekeeping decision in this way.
The public responsibility goes with visibly parenting sometimes – my partner does feed the kiddo, but dresses him badly (these pants don’t fit. What? See his ankles? I didn’t notice) and often doesn’t brush his teeth.
But, he does all that in the morning *and* drops kiddo at daycare, so when I pick him up and see he’s in highwater pants and a shirt with stains, I just shrug and say “his dad dressed him” and nobody thinks twice.
Though I suspect they don’t realize we live together.
Kathmandu, your comment about “balance” is a thing of genius. I knew something irked me about being offered “work-life balance seminars” by a demanding employer but had never put my finger on it.
I think it’s fairly true that I don’t appreciate, nor count all the things my man does. I’m glad you had this article because it shows two sides.
My brother pointed out to me that I probably spend 3-4 times the money my husband does on myself with luxuries and items I don’t need. My wedding ring was $9500 and his was $150
lol
When I gave it some thought, if there was a burglar tonight, then I would expect him to be the one down stairs sorting out for better or worse and his mowing of the lawns (1.5 acres) and chopping of the firewood are very physical and tiring (but sexy he he).
SO, I’ve taken on a little man-appreciation in the hopes of getting some back.
I’ve never considered that being a feminist, I can’t love, appreciate and adore men.
Re: the concept that playing catch and fixing trikes is parenting too. Washing clothes, dishes, and even cooking aren’t “parenting”, they’re HOUSEWORK. UNLESS everyone in the house does their own except the child(ren). One parent should not get to do all the parenting while the other has to do all the housework.