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Wouldn’t a working mother be less stressed out if her husband or partner assumed an equal share of the financial, household and childcare duties? Isn’t a husband less stressed out if his wife helps to earn money while he is also competent and fully up to speed on running the house? This makes sense, but it’s still kind of radical to say out loud. I do not want to ignite mommy wars here: Your choice is your choice. But if the idea of sharing home and work duties appeals to you, there are resources to help you figure it out.
There is a whole movement afoot to teach parents to be truly equal partners in home, kids and money. One day last year, I was bitching to my friend that I always had to jump up to get the crying infant, never my husband. I was exhausted. I’ll never forget when the friend of mine, Lisa Levey, gently explained that in a shared care house, “both parents jump up when the kid cries.” That sounded good to me.
The first step, for me, was shedding cultural and personally ingrained assumptions. I read lots of Carol Gilligan in my youth: I assume I operate best in relationship to others. I think most women assume they will primary caretaker, we assume our relational selves naturally care for little ones, plus work, plus cook and clean. From day one, we’re primed to run a home and have a career. Sometimes, when your husband knows more about your child than you do, it smarts. It feels weird. Sometimes, I’d rather stay home than have to go to work. When my son was very little, I felt powerful because I was in charge of him. This faded when I began to work more and at that point, I just felt exhausted. I needed help. Since we couldn't outsource more, there was only one solution: more equally shared tasks.
The second step was establishing our “work life anchor.” What role did we want work to play in our life? How hard did we want to work, how ambitious are we? How much childcare did we feel good about paying for? How much childcare could we pay for? How much could we juggle work schedules to cover childcare? Setting the anchor varies with the couple: If one partner can vastly out-earn another, the choice can be harder. But for most of us, I assume we both have to work fairly hard and earn as much money as we can. But we also want to spend time with our children. How can we combine schedules and share duties so we have more time for work and life? Can we alter our schedules so we need less paid childcare?
We’re about four months into trying to share care and honestly, every day is a negotiation. Some days my career is more important; some days it’s his. Some days he drives meals, chores and managing childcare. Some days I do. I don’t want to sugar-coat this: I still often feel like the gatekeeper to hearth and home, but less every day.
If you are interested in learning about some ways to share care, the Third Path Institute, a non-profit that helps people figure out this stuff, is providing three public seminars for parents who want to learn more. The approaches vary slightly -- I’m a huge fan of Sharon Meers’ approach and less familiar with the rest. The Vachons were covered in the New York Times, so click here.
Each of these calls is with a different author who has written a book about shared care -- each providing a unique look at the opportunities and challenges of adopting this work/family solution.
If you are interested in being part of one of these calls, you can comment below, and I will pass your name along.
Read on for a listing of the different calls and quick excerpt from the first book.
The first call, Friday March 26th (12:30 to 1:30ET), is with SHARON MEERS, author of Getting to 50-50:
“The key to how we are perceived by the men in our lives is how we view ourselves. As wives and mothers, do we make an assumption (or allow it to creep up on us) that it’s our job to do most of the work when it comes to taking care of the house and the kids? That we are more biologically equipped or otherwise more capable than our spouses when it comes to these
