How to Share Emotional Labor as Parents (AKA, How to Get Your Partner To Care About the Little Stuff That Keeps You Up At Night)
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Are you always the parent who makes sure the kids’ homework is done every night? Schedules/attends/follows up on all the kids’ doctor’s appointments? Referees the sibling rivalries? Buys holiday gifts for teachers? We’ve talked before about being the default parent, sharing parenting duties with your husband, as well as mommying your husband, but we thought we’d have a discussion focused on ways to share emotional labor as parents — AKA, how to get your partner to care about all the little stuff that keeps you up at night (and take on some of it). Do you find yourself performing a lot of emotional labor and noticing that your partner doesn’t do their share? What are you doing about it, if anything? Has anyone set up a family kanban board or some other method?
If you need a good definition of emotional labor, try this one from Everyday Feminism:
Emotional labor is the exertion of energy for the purpose of addressing people’s feelings, making people comfortable, or living up to social expectations. It’s called “emotional labor” because it ends up using — and often draining — our emotional resources.
It’s also helpful to read the now-classic essay by Jess Zimmerman that was published at The Toast: “‘Where’s My Cut?’: On Unpaid Emotional Labor.” Here’s a sample line: “Housework is not work. Sex work is not work. Emotional work is not work. Why? Because they don’t take effort? No, because women are supposed to provide them uncompensated, out of the goodness of our hearts.”
One more bit of media to share with you to start a conversation: Jonathan Mann’s YouTube video, “Marriage and Feminism,” in which he admits that he wasn’t pulling his weight at home when his son was a baby (while his wife was breastfeeding all the time), wasn’t prioritizing his wife’s job, and was generally acting like a “shitty, shitty feminist.” (Just do yourself a favor and do not read the YouTube comments. Sigh.)
Here are the tips for couples that Mann shares in the video:
- Talk about what’s not working, and listen to your partner.
- Divide up household chores together.
- Have a weekly date night.
It’s not groundbreaking, but it worked well for the couple, who set up a kanban board on the wall (Mann calls this method “extreme”) that lists each of their household responsibilities and their to-dos for the week. (Another way to do this would be to use Trello, which, like a kanban board, helps you see everything at once to more easily make a plan to share emotional labor as parents.) You can hear more about how they worked through their issues by listening to their (short-term) podcast. (Or, ooh, an entire blog called KanbanKid about using a kanban board to manage kid/house stuff.)
How do you share emotional labor as parents? How specifically do you divide up chores and kid-related responsibilities? Have you let go of any optional tasks because neither of you have the time to (or want to) do them? Does the issue of emotional labor lead to arguments in your relationship?
Further Reading:
- ‘Where’s My Cut?’: On Unpaid Emotional Labor [The Toast]
- Emotional Labor: The MetaFilter Thread Condensed [Google doc]
- The Default Parent [Huffington Post]
- ‘Women Are Just Better at This Stuff’: Is Emotional Labor Feminism’s Next Frontier? [The Guardian]
- The Year We Wondered If Emotional Labor Should Come with a Price [Slate’s Double X]
- Are You Doing Your Fair Share of the Emotional Labour? [CBC Radio]
- Marriage and Feminism — Jonathan Mann [YouTube]
Social media image credits: Fotolia/liubomirt and Fotolia/iconimage.
Late to this discussion but curious on how anyone handles the division of labor when partner works an odd schedule or travels frequently/erratically for work? It feels like in this case there is no way around being the default parent in terms of scheduling dr appts, birthday parties, stuff like that, even if partner might end up being available to take the child to the appt.
I loved this discussion (and the source articles) because what I struggle with isn’t so much division of regular labor – my husband does more laundry and cooks more meals than I do – but equal share of the emotional labor. I feel like I am the only one thinking about how to keep everyone happy, and when I say everyone – I mean EVERYONE, excluding myself. We have to get the housekeeper a nice Christmas gift so she feels appreciated. Ditto my son’s teacher, chess coach, karate instructor, etc. etc. (And then I have to go get the gifts because if I ask my husband to do it, he will buy gift cards to restaurants people never eat at.) We have to carefully consider how to handle holiday visits and invites so relatives and friends don’t get upset. Did I remember to put the permission form back in the folder the same day we got it? If not, the teacher will email me and my son will be upset because he’s the last kid to turn in the permission slip. Did we donate enough to the school fundraiser? Did I forget to do the donation to my best friend’s kid’s fundraiser? Did my husband remember to write a thank-you note to his boss/uncle/cousin/coworker for the gift they gave our son? And on, and on, and on and on.
My husband is amazing at looking at a dish and knowing it needs to be washed; looking at a pile of laundry and knowing it needs to go into the washer; and looking at the clock, realizing it’s 6 p.m. and dinner needs to be made. He seems clueless when it comes to the equations of “we have to do x or someone will have hurt feelings.” I do all that worrying and it gets very wearing. I have started wondering if all the worrying I do about keeping everyone happy and everything on an even keel is work I don’t need to be doing. Particularly when sometimes it seems like no one cares if I am happy. But I don’t know how to let go of it. Part of it is probably that I grew up in a dysfunctional family and keeping things on an even keel was critical to, say, Mom not throwing dishes across the room at dinner.
I tried. Eventually I stopped pretending I had a real partner, and divorced him. Should have done it decades earlier. We women are trained to think that if we communicate clearly men will step up. That is only true if they want to do so.
We share the “emotional” and logistics. We both share appointments (depending on what we have on the go that day).
I do mornings, he does afterschool care.
We split laundry, cleaning, etc.
It used to stress me out that I was doing everything. When it blew up and I started yelling at him that he never helped out, he said “you didn’t ask, you just did the chores”. So I asked, and he does. Honestly he can so oblivious that he doesn’t notice what needs to be done. He also tends to the outside chores, & vacumming. I do the cleaning. We split laundry, and tidying up . Also get the kids involved. The kids need to learn to help mom and dad with chores (at age 2 & 5 they put clothes in the laundry, bring their dishes to the sink, and tidy up the play room.
After one failed marriage where I lacked the insight to voice the importance of sharing labour- particularly mental/emotional labour, I sought it out in my second marriage and it has been wonderful. We don’t have an official “list” but we did discuss household chores before getting married, I did make sure it wasn’t a relationship where we “kept score”, and the rest of the stuff worked itself out based on what makes the most sense (with commutes, work schedules, etc.)
Not all-inclusive, but larger areas I can think of at the moment:
Husband:
-Mornings (breakfast, lunch packed or remembering if it’s a lunch buying day, getting kid dressed, daycare drop off)
-Garbage, mail sorting, recycling, arranging curb pickup for larger items
-“clean outs” of rooms/closets/attic/basement etc.
-Dishes (loading/unloading dishwasher, putting away)
-Cooking for self if I haven’t made family dinner plans
-Child’s dental appointment planning, taking to appointment
-Covering routine medical appointments for child (he has way more leave)
-Child’s laundry, towel laundry, changing/laundering bedding
-Grocery shopping
Me:
-Straightening up (minus dishes)
-Mopping, vaccuuming, dusting, cleaning windows, cleaning floorboards, etc.
-Cleaning the bathrooms/toilets
-Daycare pickup, child’s homework, making child’s dinner
-Picking out and procuring things that are decor-related (new blinds, new drapes, etc.)
-Social things (ours as well as child’s)
-enrolling child in activities
-finding childcare (before/after school care, summer camp, etc.)
-purchasing clothes for child
-Remembering if child needs purple shirt/superhero costume/whatever for school, when school projects are due, signing up and buying stuff to contribute to the class party
-Groceries from trader joe’s (it’s closer to where I work than it is from home)
A lot of things vary more based on the day and how the other is clearly feeling or what they have going on at work.. such as who takes the “lead” for bedtime routine, who covers an unanticipated child sick day, etc. These responsibilities also evolve based on different factors. He used to handle the morning and afternoon drop off/pickup when my commute was much longer than his.
Can I just give a shoutout to the fact this is a stepdad doing all of this?? I’m so lucky to have found a partner who jumped in 110% to this parenting thing!
I’d start by picking apart some of that list. Kid doctor appointments? Actually have to happen. Gifts for teachers? not actually a requirement. I think the priorities on some of these things are going to be different unless or until expectations change. If a mom forgets a teacher gift, I feel like she’d be judged more harshly than a dad who does. I feel anxiety about a messy house because I feel like I’m going to be judged for it (by other women) while my husband literally cannot imagine being judged for messiness (dirtiness, yes, at some level, but not just toys strewn around the living room). So on one level, yes, male partners should recognize that their female partners feel anxiety about some of these things — and that while a woman might overestimate how much she’ll be judged for something, it would be unrealistic to think she won’t be judged at all — and should help to alleviate that. But I also think that women should be realistic about how much these things matter to their male partners (i.e., often not at all). And then take them on only because they want to.
This may be controversial, but marrying the right man is the one single thing that helps the most in ensuring my household has a fair division of emotional and household labor. My husband works very hard, he is a feminist, he believes in equal responsibility in running the household, he respects my desire for a career, and he genuinely loves being a father and participating in the care of our child. If there isn’t some baseline to work with so that the couple can share a goal for fair household responsibility (e.g., you are married to a sexist guy that doesn’t mind a messy house, is lazy, doesn’t want to do childcare, and has no recognition or respect for invisible/emotional labor), then all the tips in the world will not help on this issue.
I don’t think housework, family organization, etc. really fall into the category of emotional labor. As defined above, emotional labor consists primarily of making people feel good–for example, maintaining a cheerful persona when confronted with rude customers, demanding clients, or cranky patients. Making dental appointments, creating menus, paying bills, and keeping track of kids’ shoe sizes is different. These tasks are logistical, not emotional. Many women get saddled with emotional labor at home as well as at work, especially those whose husbands struggle with mental illness, but emotional labor is separate from household management.
We just set up a family Google calendar. Setting it to remind both of us about upcoming social engagements and appointments, goes a long way towards taking the burden of emotional labor off me!
I’d be curious as to how this dynamic plays out in same-sex couples.
This is an interesting topic in the context of having a stay at home husband. I’m not sure what exactly to say about it – it’s both harder and easier, I think. There’s a lot that I would probably feel obligated to do if I were the primary parent that he would see as unnecessary (if he even thought of it at all). And there are some things that I think we both agree should be done, but he doesn’t get to and I can’t (or I guess I could, but don’t, but really think that he should) and I sometimes have to sort of make myself not to worry about. But, at the same time, things that really need to get done get done, the kids are happy and healthy, and I’m free to do a more demanding job with less stress.