From here, where Marc and Amy Vachon of Equally Shared Parenting discuss the findings of this study:
The news out of Ohio State University last week seems to contradict everything “forward thinking parents” believe. In a study published in the journal Developmental Psychology, researchers reported that couples who share caregiving are more likely to experience “conflict” than couples where the wife does more…
.. The study examined 112 couples with 4-year old children. The fathers completed a survey that rated their involvement in their children’s lives in the previous month, and then both parents were videotaped together as they helped their child with a couple of short projects (e.g., drawing a picture of the family). During the taping period, the parents’ interactions with each other were rated as either supportive or undermining. These steps were then repeated one year later for 93 of the couples. The results: the more involved a father reported himself to be in childraising tasks, the less supportive and more undermining behaviors were seen between the parents on the videotape over time. Sounds pretty depressing, huh?
This makes inherent sense to me – I have likened it before to ‘death by a thousand negotiations’. Re-inventing family roles outside of traditional gender roles requires thought, introspection, negotiation, adjustment, re-evaluation and conflict (lotsa conflict!). Frankly, it is hard work, which isn’t to say that it isn’t also worth it, but doing it differently to how your parents did it, to how your friends are doing it, and to how you might have imagined you would be doing it, all of that reinvention creates plenty of opportunities for uncertainty and conflict…
Task sharing is, in fact, a mere sliver of the greater goal of equality between two parents and a balanced life for each partner – something that must also include a vital but little discussed element: power-sharing. Sharing the vomit-cleaning and toilet-training duties while sticking with a mom-knows-best stance can lead to boss-subordinate dissatisfaction. A kind of purgatory we call ‘pseudoequality’ in our book and in our own work with equally shared parenting couples. But when a couple can come together as a team to share the responsibility and decision-making too, they can get closer to a peer relationship…not necessarily agreeing on everything and certainly not calmly deferring to one parent without discussion (who knows what you’d see on a videotaped drawing session!), but thriving in a relationship that makes them both happy and supportive of each other, and allows them to share the load and the joys just about equally…
….To parent effectively in equal partnership takes a willingness by both partners to completely remake scripted gender roles. Mothers must separate their worth from their parenting prowess; fathers must redefine masculine success as far more than providing.
Personally I felt like it was easier when we could do more shared parenting (because Brett was home). It was nice not having to have an opinion about ever single little thing and being able to rest in the knowledge that a perfectly capable other adult was handling it. We bicker way more now that I’m shouldering most of it (he works A LOT) and always have to catch him up on where the kids are and how I’m handling it.
Yes, I think it’s totally about how you both handle it. And if both parents practise “conscious parenting” rather than doing it on the fly, then it’s likely to work well. It does for us.
It all sounds a bit hopeless doesn’t it? I fell like I am constantly negotiating/nagging to get some equality, and sometimes feel it would be easier to give up. But I don’t…
Of course you fight less when you just suck it up, no gold stars there. It took a study to find that? A nice bit of mother blaming going on there too. How about Dad gets off his ‘I’m always right’ horse and learns to listen and accept that sometimes his partner might know best? [I swear 'one day you'll believe me' is going to be on my headstone]. I wonder what they will find if they do a follow up study 2,3, or 5 years down the track? The parents have gone through the storming and norming stage and are now in the happily pootling along stage until another change comes into the family?
I wonder if in same sex parenting the same things apply?
I think a lot of the arguing can be put down to values in the form of actual valuation of everything within a relationship.
It’s nigh on impossible to get to couples to agree that the values they bring to the partnership are equal.
Is an hour of lawn mowing worth 3 hours of easier housework if your lawn is on a hill and exhausts you to the very core?
Is cooking dinner worth 6 nappy changes?
What is those nappies are cloth and you have to wash them, but it saves $30 a week on diapers?
Putting a value on something and then finding agreeance with your partner is so hard, some of us give up, some of us fight tooth and nail because we “know” we are right.
Drinking is a short term solution
It’s been interesting to read the recent comments. My first comment was in the context of how we actively parent. This is something we keep separate from our negotiations about our roles in the relationship. We definitely experience some tension in the areas AJ has described but not enough (yet) to impact on how we jointly parent our children.
This is really interesting. Sometimes I think I might be the biggest obstacle to truly shared parenting. If one of my kids bumps his head or falls down and starts to cry really hard, my instinct is to grab them away from their father and to go into another room to comfort them by myself. It’s so strange. I’ve done it many times. It will take a lot of work to adjust that instinct.
Separating my worth from my parenting prowess is my challenge at the moment. I spent the last four years as the stay at home parent, taking most of the responsibility for the day-to-day parenting of our children and running the house – although my husband was very involved with the kids it was still unbalanced. Now we’re four months or so in to more of a shared parenting gig and I’m back at work, I find it’s my inability to let go of that role that causes a lot of conflict. Not all, the husband definitely has his own adjustments to make, but that reinvention and negotiation is a lot harder than we ever thought it would be.
That said, we both like where we are now (and where we’re headed) much more than the previous set up.
I am surprised by the results of this research. I have observed that a lot of female friends have partners that ‘help’ with parenting or domestic life. This model seems to create a lot of conflict, ongoing discussion about the how and when the ‘help’ is needed and sometimes resentment. However in relationships where both parents just parent and undertake domestic necessity because they are a parent and live in the house there seems to be to be less conflict.
[...] Does Shared Parenting Lead to More Arguments? – Blue Milk – I wonder what our family life would look like if we made more of an effort to ensure that our parenting/income earning work was more evenly balanced. As it is, we are very much in the gender-stereotypical camp in which I am the parenting expert and my husband is the earning expert, and we generally defer to the other’s expertise. [...]
[...] This post at A Bee of a Certain Age explains why childcare and work hours are not simple equations for mothers and families and, on the topic of work/life balance, blue milk asks whether shared parenting leads to more arguments. [...]