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 Dad on a LarkA blog by Rand Richards Cooper, on parenting baby Larkin
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August 6, 2008
Families by the Numbers
 I was engrossed by an article, "When Mom and Dad Share It All," last month in the New York Times Magazine. The author, Lisa Belkin, looked at how American families operate these days. Belkin focused on "equally shared parenting" - marriages like Molly's and mine, in which the division of labor has gotten blurry, and both partners share income earning, housework, and parenting. It's a growing phenomenon. There's even a book, by a Mount Holyoke College psychology professor, called Halving it All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works. What should challenge most men is how it doesn't work. Or, rather, how we don't work. Belkin cites research showing a pervasive gap in the effort men and women put into running the family. Of course, in traditional families, where Dad has a full-time job and Mom stays at home with the children, the big gap (53 weekly hours of housework and childcare by the woman, 14 by the man) isn't surprising. What is surprising is that in so-called equal sharing families like ours, where both husband and wife have full-time paid jobs, women still do twice as much as their husbands (39 hrs vs 19 hrs). So, while "equally-shared parenting" sounds good in theory, in reality equal isn't so equal. Apparently, men are genetically incapable of doing more than 1/3 of the work of running a household, no matter what the other circumstances might be. Most humiliating of all, the studies show that even in couples where the wife has a job and the husband doesn't, she still does more housework and child care! Dude, where's your pride? In theory, women are now freer than ever before to balance career and family in their lives. In reality, however, that balancing act looks more like a burden than a freedom. The problem lies in the division of labor and that "blur" effect I mentioned. In the traditional family setup like the one I grew up in, men and women worked equally hard at different tasks; nowadays, we increasingly share the same tasks - but unequally. Recently I caught up with an old college friend who has two kids and a job, and earns substantially more than her husband. Basically, she does two-thirds of the family's earning – plus two-thirds of the housework and two-thirds of the childrearing. When she told me that she feels chronically harried, inadequate, and guilty, I pointed out that she's doing two-thirds of everything — that her family's setup requires her, in effect, to be twice the person her husband is. "But Jack is great," she insisted, "he really helps out a lot." And that's the crux of the problem. When it comes to housework and parenting, we men are judged by the old system and get accolades — after all, anything we do is more than our fathers did. Women with careers and children, on the other hand, don't get praised; they just get overwhelmed. Feminism envisioned the career as a right, a breakthrough, a challenge to the system. But the reality is that a woman's career has become a bulwark of the two-income family, without a corresponding drop in obligations on the homefront. Thus have women been "liberated" into doing even more work than before. They are free to earn the family bread...but still have to bake it, too. It's a terrible crunch. Take Molly's situation these past two years, since Larkin was born. She's an English teacher at a private school that emphasizes writing, which means that in addition to reading lots of novels and preparing lots of classes, there's always a stack of papers to read and grade — not to mention students to advise, a literary magazine to oversee, and on and on. During the school year Molly leaves home at 7:30 a.m. and returns at 4:30. She spends some time with Larkin, feeds and bathes her, puts her to bed at 7. Then it's two hours of school work, collapse into bed...and get up in the morning and crank it up all over again. Weekends are spent doing more schoolwork and endless loads of laundry. I'm pretty good about pulling my weight — but not good enough to save Molly from despair. What the working-mother crunch does is saddle you with the feeling that you're doing everything badly. And with the recognition that aside from work and child, you don't have a life. At all. Zero. This is why Molly decided to scale back — come fall, she's going to work half time. This means we'll lose our health insurance, and we'll have to make some adjustments financially. But she needs to be a person again, and not a machine. Meanwhile, to help you find out how you and your spouse measure up in all of this, I've devised a little test. To do it, first calculate how many hours per week each of you spends doing paycheck work, housework, and child care. (Men, be honest!). Now add the totals and combine them. (For instance, if Husband's numbers are 50 hrs + 5 hrs + 5 hrs = 60 hrs, and Wife's are 40 + 21 + 30 = 91, then the combined total of family work hours is 151.) Now divide this number into 200% (representing two people) to get a coefficient: in this case, 200% ÷ 151 = 1.32. Finally, multiply your individual total hours by this number. What you end up with is the percentage of the full and equal sharing spouse, of a truly full partner, that you in fact represent. For instance, in my hypothetical case, the husband is 79% of a full sharing spouse, while his wife is 121%. If you think that difference isn't so whopping, consider the difference between paying $395,000 for a house...and paying $600,000. Or between driving 79 mph and 121. Actually, that's not a bad metaphor for the way so many women today careen through their lives, pedal pressed to the metal, with little or no letup — while their husbands trail behind, cruising at a relatively sane speed. Men like numbers. Numbers are objective, right? So I'm addressing this to my fellow husbands out there: take out the calculator and see just how much of an equal sharer you are, and how much extra you are making your wife do. Maybe it will help you begin to be a full person, so that she doesn't have to be a person and a half.   Rand Richards Cooper is the travel correspondent for Bon Appétit, and is author of a novel, The Last to Go, and a collection of stories, Big as Life.
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