All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood (6 page)

Why not Clint?

“I felt bad!” she says. “He didn’t wake up, and the baby was screaming. But then I had a back spasm, and
I
started crying. . . .” So Clint climbed out of bed and got Angie an ice pack. “Tonight,” she declares, “he’s going to get up with that kid the entire time.”

All this haggling, of course, makes one wonder: did she and Clint discuss how they were going to divide up their responsibilities before the children were born?

“Yeah!” she exclaims, without hesitation. “And he was like, ‘Fifty-fifty! I want to do everything!’ ” I hear no bitterness in her voice. Just frustration. “It’s just that he’s still very selfish with his time. Whereas I’m like, ‘Kids first.’ ”

WHEN ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD’S
The Second Shift
was published in 1989, it made a startling argument: if one combined their paid and unpaid labor, employed women of the 1960s and ’70s worked a full month extra—
of twenty-four-hour days
—over the course of a year. That’s not true today. Women are doing far less housework than they used to, and men are doing more; fathers also do more child care; and mothers put more hours into the workforce, in greater numbers. (In 2010, 50 percent of mothers of three- to five-year-olds worked full-time.) As Hochschild noted in an updated introduction to her book—and as Hanna Rosin’s 2012
The End of Men
made persuasively clear—men’s economic fortunes have fallen relative to those of women during the last few decades, based on declines in manufacturing jobs. Ideas about who ought to do what in the marital economy have also evolved. In 2000, nearly one-third of all married women reported that their husbands did more than half the housework, versus 22 percent in 1980. Over the same twenty-year span, the number of husbands who did no housework at all dropped by nearly half.

In fact, according to the American Time Use Survey—the gold standard in time measurement—men and women today work roughly the same number of hours per week, though men work more paid hours and women more unpaid hours. This updated calculation led
Time
magazine to wonder, in a 2011 cover story called “Chore Wars,” if women were protesting too much about their load.

The reason Hochschild’s book became famous, however, probably had little to do with a mathematical equation. Above all else, her book was a series of novelistic portraits of marriages and the tensions embedded in them, as each couple struggled to find a new equilibrium in a culture that offered few guides. Certainly there were examples of egregiously lopsided labor divisions (like that of Nancy Holt, who consoled herself with the declaration, “I do the upstairs, Evan does the downstairs,” when “the downstairs” meant the garage, the car, and the dog while “the upstairs” meant everything else). But what made
The Second Shift
so powerful was its analysis of the myths and delusions that couples needed to keep their marriages together. Hochschild could see that repeated—and often touchy, and sometimes failed—attempts to recalibrate the workload had terribly messy emotional consequences. “When couples struggle,” she writes, “it is seldom simply over who does what. Far more often, it is over the giving and receiving of gratitude.” Toward the end of the book, she elaborates:

The deeper problem such women face is that they cannot afford the luxury of unambivalent love for their husbands. Like Nancy Holt, many women carry into their marriage the distasteful and unwieldy burden of resenting their husbands. Like some hazardous waste produced by a harmful system, this powerful resentment is hard to dispose of.

And this resentment still persists in marriages to this day, albeit in subtler and different forms. The Cowans, who have been studying the effects of children on marriage for over thirty-five years, say their research shows that the division of family labor is the largest source of postpartum conflict. In
Alone Together,
a 2007 compendium of all sorts of intriguing marriage data, Paul Amato and his colleagues cite a study that shows “household division of labor being a key source of contention between spouses.” (Mothers of children ages zero to four, they add, report the most acute feelings of unfairness.)

But perhaps the most intriguing tidbit about domestic fairness comes from a massive UCLA project in which researchers spent more than a week inside the homes of thirty-two middle-class, dual-earner families, collecting 1,540 hours of video footage. The result was a mother lode of data about families and their habits, and it generated dozens of studies. In one of them, the researchers took saliva samples from almost all of the participating parents, hoping to measure their levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The researchers found that the more time fathers spent in leisure activities while they were at home, the greater their drop in cortisol at the end of the day, which came as no surprise; what did come as a surprise was that this effect wasn’t nearly as pronounced in mothers.

So what, you might ask,
did
have a pronounced effect in mothers? Simple: Seeing their husbands do work around the house.

OUR CONTEMPORARY DIVISION OF
labor may be getting more equal overall, but it’s still unequal for plenty of mothers. As the
Time
story noted, mothers of children under six still work five more hours per week than fathers of children under six. That’s not a small difference. In many cases, that time is devoted to nocturnal caregiving, which, as we saw in chapter 1, can be devastating to the body and mind. In 2011, Sarah A. Burgard, a sociologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, analyzed data collected from tens of thousands of parents. In dual-earner couples, she found, women were three times more likely than men to report interrupted sleep if they had a child at home under the age of one, and stay-at-home mothers were
six
times as likely to get up with their children as stay-at-home dads.

Funny: I once sat on a panel with Adam Mansbach, author of
Go the F**k to Sleep.
About halfway through the discussion, he freely conceded that it was his partner who put his child to bed most nights. That said so much, this casual admission: he may have written a best-selling book about the tyranny of toddlers at bedtime, but in his house it was mainly Mom’s problem.

But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a husband and wife
do
work the same number of hours. That is not, in and of itself, an indicator of fairness. In the context of marriage, fairness is not just about absolute equality. It’s about the
perception
of equality. “Parents’ satisfaction with the division of the child-care tasks,” note the Cowans in
When Partners Become Parents,
“was even more highly correlated with their own and their spouses’ well-being than was the fathers’
actual
amount of involvement [emphasis mine].” What a couple deems a fair compromise in any situation is not necessarily how an outsider would adjudicate it. They determine fairness based on a combination of what they need, what they think is reasonable, and what they think is possible.

But that’s also where things can get awfully complicated. Men and women may, on average, work roughly the same number of hours each day, once all kinds of labor are taken into account. But women, on average, still devote nearly twice as much time to “family care”—housework, child care, shopping, chauffeuring—as men. So during the weekends, say, when both mothers and fathers are home together, it doesn’t look to the mothers like their husbands are evenly sharing the load. It looks like their husbands are doing a lot less. (Indeed, in another analysis of those 1,540 hours of video data, researchers found that a father in a room by himself was the “person-space configuration observed most frequently.”)

There are some women who’ll cheerfully say that if their partners are working more paid hours during the week, they’ve earned their extra rest over the weekend. But for many mothers, it’s not that simple. Paid work, both literally and figuratively, is generally assigned a higher value by the world at large, which has all sorts of unquantifiable psychological rewards. Perhaps just as important, not all work is created equal: an hour spent on one kind of task is not necessarily the equivalent of an hour spent on another task.

Take child care. It creates far more stress in women than housework. (As one woman in an ECFE group put it: “The dishes don’t talk back to you.”) About two-thirds of the way through
Alone Together,
the researchers actually quantify this distinction, noting that if a married mother believes that child care is unfairly divided in the house, this injustice is more likely to affect her marital happiness than a perceived imbalance in, say, vacuuming,
by a full standard deviation.
Data also make clear that a larger proportion of a mother’s child care burden is consumed with “routine” tasks (toothbrushing, feeding) than is a father’s, who is more apt to get involved in “interactive” activities, like games of catch. There are differences in the
kinds
of child care that parents do, in short, even if it’s all labeled “child care” by researchers attempting to quantify it. (Ask any parent which type of child care they prefer.)

It is, of course, the nature of practically all humans to overestimate how much work they do in any given situation, rather than underestimate it. But when it comes to child care, the women’s estimates do seem more accurate. In
Alone Together,
the authors note that fathers guessed that they did, on average, about 42 percent of the child care in their families, based on a large national survey conducted in 2000. Mothers, by contrast, put their husbands’ efforts at 32 percent. The actual number that year was 35 percent, and it remains roughly the same today.

These distinctions may explain why women remain so vexed about the family economy, even if they’re no longer getting gypped in absolute terms. “I’m pretty sure Clint
thinks
he does 50 percent of the work when we’re home together,” says Angie as we’re driving along in the car, “but not necessarily the child care. And that’s what makes me most stressed.”

deadlines and divided time

It’s later in the morning. Eli is still at Little Explorers, and Angie is folding laundry on the landing at the top of the stairs. Zay starts to fuss in his crib. Angie pops up to check on him, then returns. “I never get time to put laundry away,” she says. “I try. But usually we’re just moving it from the clean basket to the dirty basket.” Zay is crying now. “Yes, yes,
yessssss,
I hear you!” She jumps up and goes into his room. “Shhhhhhhhh.”

Her efforts to mollify him aren’t successful. A few moments later, she brings him out and puts him next to her. She resumes folding for a third time, integrating her efforts with peek-a-boo games, just as Jessie had done. She tosses a blanket over his head. “Where’s Zay?” Fold. Toss. “Where’s Zay?” Fold. Toss. “Where’s Zay? . . .”

This is another thing that quantitative studies of American time use cannot show you: for the majority of mothers, time is fractured and subdivided, as if streaming through a prism; for the majority of fathers, it moves in an unbent line. When fathers attend to personal matters, they attend to personal matters, and when they do child care, they do child care. But mothers more often attend to personal matters while not only caring for their children but possibly fielding a call from their boss. In 2000, just 42 percent of married fathers reported multitasking “most of the time”; for married mothers, that number was 67 percent. In 2011, two sociologists provided an even more granular analysis. They found that mothers, on average, spend ten extra hours per week multitasking than fathers, “and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and childcare.” (When fathers spend time at home, on the other hand, they
reduce
their odds of multitasking by over 30 percent.) The upshot, the authors write, is that “multitasking likely takes a heavier toll on mothers’ well-being than on fathers’ well-being.”

Being compelled to divide and subdivide your time doesn’t just compromise your productivity (as we saw in the last chapter) and lead to garden-variety discombobulation. It also creates a feeling of urgency—a sense that no matter how tranquil the moment, no matter how unpressured the circumstances, there’s always a pot somewhere that’s about to boil over. As it is, most mothers assume a disproportionate number of deadline-oriented, time-pressured domestic tasks (
Dress kids, brush their teeth, drop them off at school; pick them up, take them to piano lessons at 3:00, soccer practice at 4:00, and get dinner on the table by 6:00.)
In 2006, the sociologists Marybeth Mattingly and Liana Sayer published a paper noting that women are more likely than men to feel “always rushed,” and that married mothers are 2.2 times more likely to feel “sometimes or always rushed” than single women without children. (Free time does nothing to ease mothers’ feelings of enervation either—it in fact makes things worse.) Fathers, meanwhile, feel no more rushed than men without children. Here’s Kenya again, from ECFE:

I feel a
huge
pressure around five o’clock. I’ve got to finish what I didn’t do. I’ve got to plan dinner. I’ve got to keep my daughter happy, I’ve got to put her to bed. . . . I thought, without working, I’d be like,
Oh, I’ll have all this time.
But I feel all this pressure around five. Whereas when my husband comes home, there’s nothing he
has
to do.

But perhaps the hardest and most elusive quantity for a time-use survey to measure is the psychic energy that mothers pour into parenting—the internal soundtrack of anxieties that hums in their heads all day long, whether they’re with their children or not. That’s one of Mattingly and Sayer’s more subtle hypotheses: perhaps mothers feel rushed because the sensitive and logistically intensive parts of raising kids—making child care arrangements, scheduling doctor’s visits, dealing with teachers, organizing family leisure hours, coordinating play dates and summer plans—fall disproportionately to them. Angie certainly says as much. “When I’m at work,” she tells me, “I’m still only 50 percent nurse, probably. You know? Even if I’m dressing a wound or whatever it may be, I’m always thinking, ‘
Is Clint going to remember to put sunscreen on ’em?
”