The Millennial Parenting Paradox
Volume 3, Issue 17
At the risk of oversimplifying the work that happens in families around the world, there are three distinct categories of labor that parents undertake when they care for kids. Psyched Mommy captured them quite well on her blog once:
Physical Labor: pick-up, drop-off, cooking, laundry, cleaning, etc.
Mental Load/Forward Planning: identifying school(s), finding daycare/early childcare options, scheduling medical appointments, etc.
Emotional Labor: responding as an adult, in the moment, to tantrums; building healthy relationship habits over time; recovering from sadness, etc.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: moms still do the lion’s share of this work in contemporary households, across all three categories. That said, norms are shifting - ever so slightly - and more dads than ever expect to be significant contributors when it comes to childcare. With that shift comes a challenge, which I’ve started to think of as the “Millennial Parenting Paradox.” It goes a little something like this:
On the one hand, because of shifting gender norms, there are now many more traditional two-parent homes where dads do serious childcare labor. In those homes, moms seem to be grateful (even if they admit to grading their own partners “on a curve”).
On the other hand, when both parents hold jobs outside the home AND are doing household labor, figuring out “who’s got what” adds a new, annoying kind of friction. Moms and dads alike wonder aloud to me, “is it worth it?” as they watch the transactional and emotional costs of dividing the labor metastasize … in some cases, even outpacing the complexity of the childcare labor itself. One mom, whose perspective was admittedly extreme, lamented to me that, “I’d rather just do everything, than have to spend yet another day negotiating how to divide and conquer with my husband.”
She’s not alone. As Millennials - the largest generation in history - start to procreate at a rapid clip, this dynamic is poised to become one of the defining social issues of the coming years. Because there is no template for how to do this division of labor, couples are left to negotiate their approach on a case-by-case basis. Some people handle this quite well, but the overwhelming majority of parents I talk to are frustrated by this stuff, literally all the time.
Spoiler alert: I don’t have a neat solution or conclusion here.
That said, it does seem that:
Communication is essential when trying to split the load;
Clarity is preferable to fluidity (ie “I’m picking the kids up from school Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday,” versus “Let’s figure it out in the AM");
Putting things in writing is better than just hoping everyone remembers what they agreed to, the night before, in the weird delirium after the kinds go to bed; and
Expressing gratitude, early and often, goes a long way to smoothing out some of the aforementioned transactional friction.
There’s no playbook for splitting labor in a contemporary two-parent household. For generations the expectation was that dad earned money outside of the home, and that mom did all of the domestic labor (including child-rearing) inside the home. Only the most ardent adherents to a retrograde political cult could possibly still believe that, although most of us are muddling through the new reality without a template.
What about your family? How does this all work for you??