Lisa Belkin has another New York Times magazine cover. This one should attract as much attention as her past ones, but maybe much less bile. She writes about one couple’s efforts to truly split parenting down the middle.
Instead, they would create their own model, one in which they were
parenting partners. Equals and peers. They would work equal hours,
spend equal time with their children, take equal responsibility for
their home. Neither would be the keeper of the mental to-do lists;
neither of their careers would take precedence. Both would be equally
likely to plan a birthday party or know that the car needs oil or miss
work for a sick child or remember (without prompting) to stop at the
store for diapers and milk. They understood that this would mean
recalibrating their career ambitions, and probably their income, but
what they gained, they believed, would be more valuable than what they
lost.
Great video here and Belkin starts a blog about it.
I’ll have more comments later, but just a quick observation.
Sandra Tsing Loh has finally stopped writing militant pro-public school rants and has come back to parenting and feminism. She reviews Hirshman’s book and a book by Neil Gilbert. Some fun snarkiness in the article, and I should come back to that one, too.
Loh’s essay covers both extremes of the work-family balance debate and ends it with a reflection about how great she’s worked it out. She’s home with the kids AND she works. She lets them watch a princess video, while writing an essay about parenting for a top rung magazine. Millions of mommybloggers would kill for that job. She’s managed to combine a successful career and a successful family, because she’s lucky and very talented.
Also, the couple featured in the story have somehow worked it out with their employers that they work only 30 hours a week. That’s not normal.
Steve really, really wants to go a Father’s Day breakfast at Ian’s school tomorrow. Ian has been learning songs all week and making art projects for it. Steve hasn’t attended any school conferences, IEPs, or school shows all year, but he really wants to go to this one. In order to cut down on missed hours at work, I have to wait around for the show to be over and drive him into the city, so he doesn’t waste time on the bus.
I’m a huge fan of equal parenting and flexible work hours. We’ve experimented over the years with creating better balance. It’s just very tough.
Apt. 11d 
“Neither would be the keeper of the mental to-do lists; neither of their careers would take precedence. Both would be equally likely to plan a birthday party or know that the car needs oil or miss work for a sick child or remember (without prompting) to stop at the store for diapers and milk.”
That seems really, really inefficient, as well as impractical for most couples. (I ran it by my husband just now, and he said “That sounds really anarchic. 25% of the time, both will get milk, 25% of the time neither will get milk, and half the time, it will work out fine.”)
I’m at home and my husband is an academic. In his off hours, I think he does more hand-on house and kid work than I do, and on my blog (which is occasionally read by my in-laws), I downplay his domestic inputs because my in-laws think I’m slacking and he ought to be putting in more time on his writing.
A lot of tasks are split very precisely. I do the laundry, clothes mending, grocery shopping, give baths, and get kids ready for school and he does dishes, trash, leaf blowing, and lawn mowing. When we have some spectacular diaper blowout, he runs the carpet cleaner and I do the laundry. I don’t have my license yet, so he does all the driving. I taught our daughter to read, check her math workbooks, and run the financial side of our chore system. Meanwhile, he has been doing library runs and playing checkers, chess, and Chinese checkers with our daughter. We produce a budget together once a month and he does the bills, but I do the daily budgetary record keeping. I buy clothes for everybody, book doctors, dentists, and haircuts, and plan birthday parties. I’m quartermaster and I make sure we always have laundry detergent, milk, bread, peanut butter, etc. Anything at home that involves a calendar and a telephone or email is my job. I also do the administrative stuff, like going through backpacks, filling out forms or reading preschool welcome booklets. I don’t have mental to-do lists–I write everything down. It would drive me crazy to split the administrative stuff 50/50. Specialization is what makes civilization possible and separates us from the chimpanzee.
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Both would be equally likely to plan a birthday party or know that the car needs oil or miss work for a sick child or remember (without prompting) to stop at the store for diapers and milk.
I’m all for “equal parenting” if it is defined as dividing up chores evenly. (You buy it, I cook it. You bathe them and I’ll tuck them in.)
If it is defined (as it appears to be here) as dividing each INDIVIDUAL CHORE evenly, though, that just strikes me as a recipe for regularly running out of diapers and milk.
Marriage is tiny little example of the advantages of “Division of Labor,” and it’s really a waste of brain cells if BOTH parents have to figure out the right way to schedule and throw a party at Little Gym. It’s a necessary skill, but not really a valuable or transferrable one.
Sure, give the husband many more tasks that he is primarily responsible for to create “equality,” but as to each task there has to be a “primary parent,” or else you just have diffusion of responsibility, which always leads to disaster.
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Amy and I are apparently on the same page (or, perhaps, have the same spouse.)
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The described marriage parallels my own in some ways. There are some things she does (she negotiates a lot of the school issues; balances the checkbook; thinks about the kids’ activities and somehow got roped into managing one of the kids soccer teams) and some things I do (I am the front person for school issues, write the first draft of important letters, manage the money, usually do a lot of the chauffeuring, negotiating of playdates, etc), but most things are shared. This is inefficient in one way — for example, because we are both monitoring the laundry and the quartermastering, more time and effort goes into it than if just one of us were doing it all (this is how you avoid things falling through the cracks). But household management and childcaring are shared activity for us. There are two bits of luck underlying this, though. One is that I have a job which allows me a great deal of flexibility, so I have not had to go part-time in order to do this. By contrast she has had to be part time, and in the 12 years we’ve had children, there have been 3 or 4 when she was full-time working and then a lot more fell to me (and there was one year when a lot more fell to her — that was the most miserable year of our marriage, I’d say). The other is that she would hate, really hate, to be doing the lions share of it, whereas I would hate not to be doing a good amount of it. We did not know this about each other when we married, nor did we ever talk about it — by the time we had our first kid we just established the pattern I’ve described without any real discussion.
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There’s suddenly been some good stuff in the newspapers and journals about family, feminism, and work. I’ll come back to Loh’s review and the discussion of race/class/feminism on Monday. Today, I just feel like talking about workplace flexibility and tomorrow I’m going to be busy shuttling my husband around. (Linda, if you want to rebut Loh’s review on Monday, please feel free to comment. We won’t bite this time.)
As I wrote on Belkin’s blog, Steve and I had a pretty even split of parenting and home duties when we were in grad school, but the division of responsibilities is completely out of whack right now. Steve’s increasing responsibilities at work combined with a slightly longer commute time are to blame. When he’s asked to leave earlier, there have been subtle threats of demotion or worse. Because of the crappy economy, several of his underlings were fired and now he has to do their work, too. Even if I had a tenured job, we couldn’t live on my income alone in this area of the country. So, I’m left with all homework activities, the to-do list, the grocery shopping, the after school activities, the school meetings, the sick days, the snow/heat days, dinner, cleaning, doctor’s appointments. He has lawn mowing, dry cleaning, bills, bed time stories, coffee making. During the school year, he does the laundry and the evening dishes, though he promises to resume these duties soon.
I would love to have a more equal division of labor, even if meant some inefficiency and redundancy, because it’s a good thing for him to be involved. It’s good for him to know how much time it all takes. It’s good for the kids to see that men can do this stuff, too. It’s good for him to take part in the fun parts of this work.
I actually got a few hours of my own writing in this morning, but now I have to run to the store to find some special cleaning solution for wood kitchen floors. We haven’t cleaned the floors in our new kitchen in two months, because I guess you need special stuff for it. How I would love to pass dumb jobs like this onto Steve.
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Talking about division of labor within marriage as always being maximally efficient is taking too short of a view.
I run into this at work, too. People see productivity issues and they immediately jump to the conclusion: we must divide the labor, everyone must specialize! Give everyone their tasks and remove overlap! And short-term it does feel more efficient. But then we screw up an entire product release because the various specialists don’t know all the facts. Or someone takes vacation or gives notice and an entire function is thrown into disarray. Retention problems, long-term productivity problems. On and on it goes.
Modern economies are built on specialization to some extent. But let’s face it, an individual family is not comparable to the entire economy. A family typically only has two adults. With two people, the benefits of equal parenting are big: improved communications, both parents having perspective on everything going on within the household, the flexibility you get with either person being able to take on most tasks. I’m not saying one person is not more gifted at some things, or enjoys them more. I am saying that both parents are involved, aware of what’s happening, and could handle the task if they needed to. This means, then, that for example both parents are able to work for money if they need to. Just like both parents could cook, mow the lawn, or do bedtime routines if needed. This puts everyone in a much better position to respond to change (such as unemployment or sudden illness).
Another thing that’s not being discussed much here is the fact that, when parenting is not shared, marriages can run into trouble. People fight about work load, the wives are resentful. You’ll note in Belkin’s article she mentions two women who specifically balked at having families because they were afraid they would have to pick up all the work. I believe the long-term viability of marriage as an institution relies somewhat on getting this worked out.
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“Another thing that’s not being discussed much here is the fact that, when parenting is not shared, marriages can run into trouble. People fight about work load, the wives are resentful.”
Equal parenting is fantastic, but equal admits of a lot of different definitions. I’d likewise point out that when both spouses do all the jobs, there’s going to be a lot more day-to-day friction, if there are literally hundreds of things to do at home every day, and every task requires a “discussion”. At least to me, that sounds like the road to stress, conflict, nagging, shirking, resentment, finger-pointing, high-blood pressure and eventually D-I-V-O-R-C-E. I agree that when there is a significant life change things have to be retooled, but that’s not the same as saying that a couple has to be inventing the wheel every evening.
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“Although child rearing, unlike housework, is important and can be difficult, it does not take well-developed political skills to rule over creatures smaller than you are, weaker than you are, and completely dependent upon you for survival or thriving.”
Judging from this Hirshman quote from the Loh piece think it’s been a while since she has spent much time with small children.
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sorry–“I think it’s…”
Contra Hirshman, there are whole walls of books at Borders devoted to the proposition that it does indeed take well-developed political skills to rule over creatures smaller than you are.
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Amy, you don’t have to discuss everything every day, or reinvent anything. At our house for example we simply trade off based on the day of the week; sometimes he cooks, sometimes I do. Some days I take the kids to school, some days he does. We typically set a quarterly schedule around my husband’s graduate school calendar and only discuss the exceptions. We also keep a set of lists: menu for the week (to coordinate the shopping with what gets used from the fridge each night), shopping list left on top of the fridge, any paperwork needed for the kids for school the next day left in a certain spot. It’s really not that difficult. The only thing both of us continually shirk on is the catbox.
I do sense some reluctance on your part, Amy, to share tasks. You may feel like I did initially, where I had to get over my disinclination to (potentially) have my decisions questioned. Sometimes I just didn’t want to explain my reasoning. In reality it turned out that my DH is totally not the type to ever question my decisions, or even notice them half the time. Truth be told *I* had to get over my tendency to criticize *his* decisions. I have had to lower my standards on some things, like what constitutes a vegetable with dinner. (Tater tots do *not* count.)
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Jen,
I’ve just listed the items where we have a clear division at the moment. There’s a lot of territory that that doesn’t cover, and there’ve been a lot of changes. I used to cook a lot from scratch, but at some point I just couldn’t face the work. Miraculously, my husband has started making pecan pies, muffins, and doing all the from-scratch cooking that happens around here. I expect I’ll do a lot more cooking this fall when my oldest will be in first grade all week and my youngest will be in preschool two days. Likewise, my husband got his driver’s license last year after we moved to Texas he drove our daughter to and from school the whole year. This summer, I’m supposed to study and get my driver’s license, and then I’ll be doing the school driving. Likewise, for quite a while when we lived in a dorm and did all our huge laundry late at night, he was the primary laundry guy. I stopped doing dishes during my second pregnancy, due to odors and not being able to reach the sink with my tummy in the way. In DC my husband used to do all our grocery orders on Peapod, but nowadays he takes the kids to the park and I do the grocery shopping in blessed solitude and then he picks me up. There have been a lot of changes, but it’s never been a Monday-you-do-this, Tuesday-I’ll-do-that thing.
You’ve got me on the administrative and planning stuff. I don’t want to share, and I know I do a better job.
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All I have to say on this is: read Cecilia Deutsch’s book “Halving it All” because it is a great read and a really well-done qualitative research project. It’s probably hard to find except in an academic library. It deserves a wider audience. It gives tremendous insights because she included both “professional types” (academics, lawyers, doctors) as well as more “working class types” (people who work in childcare, contracting, retail). She also included people who qualified as implementing equal parenting, as well as those who believe in it firmly but don’t quite impliment it. I’m glad that Lisa Belkin finally interviewed her … something she should have done years ago before writing some of her earlier more controversial (and imho, unimpressive) articles.
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Amy, this is OT, but I always wonder how you’ve managed this long in the States without driving. And today I find that your husband *also* did not drive before you landed in Texas? How did you do it? I thought only Manhattanites survived without driving in this country.
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jen,
My mom had cancer when I was 15 and then I started college the following year, so I never had a shot at school-based driver’s ed. My husband started college full-time at 15. I don’t recall his story, but personally I’ve always been very phobic at the prospect of driving thousands of pounds of metal at high speeds, right next to other people doing the same thing. There’s no way around it now, though. Also, for a long time we didn’t have the money for a car, or the time and energy to buckle down and learn what to do with it.(We’ve really enjoyed our local road trips in Texas–the roadside wildflowers are spectacular in the spring time, and right now there are whole fields full of bushy wild sunflowers in bloom.)
After college, I served with the Peace Corps in Russia. Peace Corps didn’t want us operating motor vehicles in country. Then I was a graduate student in Pittsburgh, which has a decent bus system. In any case, we lived mostly in a very nice walkable neighborhood about a half-hour walk from our school. Later on, I took the bus or walked to my Pittsburgh jobs. When my husband took a job in DC, we lived a fifteen minute walk from the metro in a New Urbanist neighborhood with grocery store, etc. When our daughter was one, we moved onto campus in DC for four years. It wasn’t nearly close enough to the metro, but the neighborhood itself was walkable. Even here in Texas, we live across the street from campus, my husband has a five minute walk to his office, it’s about nine blocks to the grocery store, and there’s a very fine children’s museum about a 30 minute walk away.
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That’s not quite into “paging Dr. Howser” territory, but you both started college young.
Anyway, I’m with you on having sort of separate spheres for each spouse. Maybe it has to do with our personalities, but generally speaking, there are things I do and things my wife does. Of course, there is a continuing shifting of tasks as circumstances change, and, there are also exceptions when something just has to get done. So, it may not be that different in the end.
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separate spheres of influence, yes, that’s the central part of our household’s smooth function. well, medium-smooth. kitchen is mine, home repair is mine, tracking the playdates is mine, bill paying is hers, computer repair is hers, laundry is hers. And we pay a maid to come once a week. (Insert Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere joke here)
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