Division of Labor & Mental Load with Allison Daminger

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and nine, which is airing in early August of twenty twenty one. Sarah is doing a great interview for this episode on the topic of mental load, so we're looking forward to that. Can you just tell us really quickly about our guests, Sarah. Yeah, Allison is a PhD candidate, so she's not finished with her research, and she's a sociology PhD. And this is the topic that she decided to delve into. So we had a fascinating conversation and I'm sure you will all enjoy it, and it kind of inspired my idea. I kind of joked with her that like part of her work was doing multiple conversations with different couples, and I was like, I bet you get to a point where you can guess what they're all going to say, and they all think their story is very unique, but like it's like kind of like duh anyway, So then I was like, well, maybe me and Laura can let's see if we have the exact same I don't know division of labor mental loads split on a few key items, because what she did is she asked about many, many, many many items, many far more than we're going to discuss in this episode, to get a greater understanding of kind of who is doing what in different kinds of households. Yeah, so it's really cool interview. Yeah, now I'm looking forward to hearing it. About a year or so ago, Sarah and I decided to do division of labor here with podcast interviews with our guests, so I have not heard this one, so I'm listening with everybody for the first time too, So forward to that. So all right, Sarah, let's do our rapid poll on who does what mental load? All right, who arranges the childcare schedule for the week or like kind of tells your nanny or childcare provider, like what's going on this coming week? That is definitely me. That is one percent the Laura email that comes on Sunday telling everybody where to be when, which I know is a very gendered sort of assumption there too, right, I would say that I'm I'm definitely the one who handles more of the childcare decisions. I'm the one who has hired everybody who has, you know, managed the paperwork of getting them in the schedule, also just the emotional labor, as I guess, so we put it of keeping people happy because that is part of the job of managing people too. Although with the schedule thing, I'd point out it's good that I'm doing the scheduling one of us right about time and schedules one of us does not. So while yes, that is a probably fairly typical gender split, I think in our case it is also a natural abilities split, so and professional interest split as well. How about you, guys, Yes, very similar. Instead of an email, I do a screw, I take a so. I put everything up on our weekly whiteboard in terms of everybody's schedule, including who is driving which days and you know, any activities that we have and then I just take a picture of that with my phone and I send it to both my husband and our nanny. That's pretty much every Sunday. Yeah, although I point out that the person who controls the schedule has a lot of power and so you know, people get assigned to stuff sometimes which maybe they wouldn't have entirely chosen on their own, but you know, that's something that comes with that. How about meal planning, I think that's an interesting one. Yes, I also do that. I've been using Prepped for some weeks, which which kind of helps take the burden off because they plan for you. But then I still have to order all the groceries and stuff, and I include what we're eating on our weekly whiteboard, so that's one of the things that goes under each day. So that's kind of part of the first one. But I communicate that I don't cook it, though at this time I could see a time in the future when the kids are older and our child care news are different when I might cook it, and it probably would be me because my husband just doesn't come home early enough most of the time. But right now I don't, but I do plan it. Yeah, well, we have a lot of ours is pretty automated. We get the meal kits for two days a week. Wednesdays and Fridays are set like breakfast for dinner and make your own pizza. Michael's more likely to think through the weekend meals and he does our grocery shopping. So as part of that, he's managing like inventory and things like that and say, oh, we need to do a costco run now. Sometimes I'll do smaller trips like I'll tend to you know, go to act Me to pick up like we're out of one thing during the week. But he tends to do more of the food inventory acme. That's so regional. It's like the what's that place in Texas like the AGB or something, the way you know if somebody's from there when they're talking about it, or Pigley Wiggly in the South. Oh, do they still exist? I don't know. Maybe they got who knows. All right, we'll have to check on that. We have more mostly publics they have anyway. Okay, So activity sign ups in our case, it depends on who cares about the kid doing the activity, So something like music lessons. I am the one who cares about, so that was all in my purview. Something like swim, which he cares more about, has been in his purview. So he signed Alex up for swim lessons and has been managing the schedule on that. He did the swim team stuff like managing the tryouts for that, and he's been managing tennis because he cares about that, whereas I've been doing karate, because that's more what I think. It's each person owns a sport as more or less how it's been going, although slightly differently with weekend stuff because we have to trade off with the sheer number of kids in the games. I was curious, though, because I think there's some of this goes with the other gender than the child scheduling thing, because I am ninety nine percent sure that I am the one who signed Sam up for little league like that my name was the primary contact in the league thing, and yet the emails, all mysteriously from the coach all went to Michael, and I guess that's just the assumption that who cares about twelve year old little league? It's going to be all the dads, and so he'd be like forwarding me the schedule emails about that, like, oh, they're supposed to be at the game twenty minutes earlier. I never saw that never came to me, which is interesting, right, Like the assumptions people make that is very interesting. I say, we discussed together what activities are going to happen, but I generally do the signing up. I will say, if there's some sort of like in person sign up required, sometimes he will volunteer to do that. And certainly if there's ever any like negotiation, like let's say COVID canceled something and we want to like ask for like a refund, I'm very bad at that, like I balk at asking for anything, so and he has no problem with it. So generally, generally that kind of a thing would go to him. So we ended up like that story comes from the fact that my kid's ice skating lessons were a trade from the ice rink because we had prepaid for Annibal's birthday party in like April of twenty twenty, and then they had said, like we could use it for a year, but we like never really felt like it was the right time during that time period to have a birthday party at the ice rink. I mean we probably could have done it in the spring, but I don't know. So he was like, can we convert that into credit for skating lessons? And they were like sure. So that's what I would never have wanted to ask that question, because to me, I would have been like, that's too awkward anyway. Okay, so that's activity assignments and sign ups doctor's appointments. Yeah, this is also split. I have been doing more of the taking kids too doctors appointments this year. I mean partly it's with I think the baby because I was just sort of owning the most of the care of the baby, and so I would wind up going with him, although he's gone with him for some at other points and apparently I don't know, it's just something the information that comes back is somewhat a bit different. But he is interestingly, he owns the orthodonist stuff. So, as we've discussed in the past, so I'm probably you often want to split things out. Who cares more about something and I am probably less into the idea of perfectly straight teeth. So he's been taking Sam and Ruth to the Orthodonist and so he has fully owns that aspect of it, right and then you know, we've split stuff like the pediatrician visits, and I've probably been doing a few more of those in our house. I do ninety percent of it. If once in a while I schedule something and then it turns out I can't go, he's stepped up and gone. I think he took camera into his last well child chech, which was great. I definitely own eye doctor, dentist, orthodonist, et cetera. It's just again more to my skill set. I'll make sure it happens. I put it on my planner. I put it in my planner like when to make the appointment because a lot of times their appointments aren't open, and because I can see it from the provider side, and I kind of understand how that works. I'm pretty good at like working the system, Like I knew out of all needed it back to school and I was like, when does your schedule open up? And then they told me the specific day it opened up, and so I called that day so I could have my pick. Like he wouldn't do that, So it's cool. I don't mind doing that. Plus, as somebody who is like a pediatrician, even though I practice in a specialty, I do kind of like to be the one at most of their appointments because I can have that viewpoints. Yeah, yeah, no, And I think it's also I was thinking about it. It It also corresponds with the fact that Michael has been working at home for the past sixteen months, as there's been more availability for things like orthodonist appointments. I think that that would have split quite a bit differently if the work travel had still been going on as it would but as it's been in this it's been easier to sort of share certain things just when you're more physically around, which is hey, an upside of COVID. The next one is we're going I feel like I've claimed ownership to everything that that's about to change, arranging anything related to yard work or landscaping. Yeah, this is kind of Michael's baby. He I also just cares more about it, and I would say there's been I would probably do it differently. I would like fully outsource it where I think he wants to be more involved in the details of it, which he if he were doing this interview, he might say that he doesn't want to be involved, but you have to be if you want it done right or something. I don't know if that's the case, but there is again the thing who cares more. And I care about it, but not enough to be like going to the garden store and looking at different plants and thinking about where they might go. Although we've had this discussion that sometimes I suspect the yard work is a way to claim some me time on weekends. It's like, now now we have to go to the gardens. It's like, really, all right, take a kid with you. Well, we finally hired someone to mow our lawn and trim and stuff, and it's we have such a small amount of landscaping where we live. That's it's like not expensive at all, and it's the most wonderful thing ever, because before it was like I don't know if it was an excuse, but it was definitely like something to do, which always left me with all three children. So yeah, I'm thrilled to say that he takes care of I do nothing having to I mean, I have zero interests, like negative amounts of interest in this facet of life. And so he hired the people and I never think about any of that at all. That's probably you know, your guests would say, that's one of the gendered things, like that's most likely gendered. Yeah, the guy doing the same with car and home maintenance, right, which is your next item on the list? Like who, yes, puts air or even things like air and bike tires right, like that tends to be the sort of daddy thing that people think about, or like I don't even like to put air in my own car tire. Yeah meat either, So home and car maintenance also goes to him. If the air conditioner breaks in the middle of the day and I'm home, I text him and I'm like, what do I do? Who do I call? I don't even know? Like again, I do a lot of other stuff, as we've discussed, so I don't really feel bad about this. I know that not only do I not really care about it, but I'm probably not going to do a great job because I've never invested any Like when the repair people come and they're like, where's the panel, I'm like, I don't know. Again, doing other things, So I think I'm okay with it. The way that split is. I do hate that it's so stereotyped, but yeah, that's how we have it in our household. What about you? We I mean, well, we each have our own cars that we are more responsible for. Like, so if there's something wrong with my car, I'm obviously going to go to be the one taking it in, yes, or getting the annual Pennsylvania inspection. And obviously he does his car. The van, it tends to be either him or our nannies have taken it in sometimes, like if we've been in a stage where the kids are in preschool, for instance, that has been often under their purview to go take it in for oil changes or for the Pennsylvania State inspection. But again, since he's been home, he could do that one. Just go take the Toyota in, sit in the parking lot for an hour while they're doing whatever, and then get the get it and take it home. So yeah, that's that's kind of the split on that one. Okay, and last night parenting, But again this is just you know, the difference of COVID versus not COVID because I was doing far more of it when there was more traps. There hasn't been as much over the last year and a half, and so it's been slightly more split. He's kind of taken on. I think he would never like make the kids go to bed, like the fact of remembering it's bedtime is kind of all me, like taking the phones away, making sure they've showered or whatever. But then he's been doing the book reading, like longer book reading with a lot of the kids, So he and Ruth do Nancy Drew. They've been reading through a lot of the classic Nancy Drew books. Just started Encyclopedia Brown with Alex, so a lot of series going on there. So it's it's just a different kind of split than it has been in the past. I would say in our house, he does the like if at nine pm everyone's still running around, I often just like give up, like I cannot take it anymore. And if he's there, I'm like, it's your turn. Because sometimes he's not there, so I feel very like validated. If he's there, then great, it's your turn. If somebody wakes up, usually Genevieve, in the middle of the night and is like, oh, you need water, I feel like I'm more likely to hear it. But if he hears it, he'll do it, So maybe fifty to fifty. Yeah, we've actually started some nights because I think I'm more likely to hear Henry. I don't know it's this weird mommy thing or something, but maybe you are more likely to hear your kid. I've will sleep some nights in the guest room and he can sleep in the room that's by Henry, and then he's less likely to hear him. So if it's a minor interruption, like a less than five minutes he's up, it just doesn't even register, whereas I would probably hear it. So that's been nice, you know, I like those nights. I'm like, especially if it's been a rough early morning or something. I would say I'm definitely the early morning parent at the moment that if somebody's up with the baby from five forty five to six forty five, that's ninety percent of the time me and then hand them over and try to get another forty five minutes of sleep or something like that. You'll like, knock on some selves surface right now, because thankfully there has not been early morning parenting in our home for a while, so let's hope it doesn't come back. All right, Well, that was a long mental load discussion. I think we'll take our break and go to our interview. Welcome to best of both worlds. The interview segment I have Alison Daminger here. She is a PhD candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard, and she sent us an email that intrigued me very much. We have had a few other speakers on this podcast before that have expertise in the realm of mental load and division of labor within households, but that is the kind of up and coming topic that Allison is actually studying. So I was so excited to have her on the show. Welcome Allison, I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Sarah, you are welcome. So the first thing I wanted to know was how did you find this field. You told me previously you don't have kids yet, so it wasn't for real life experience. So tell me how you got interested in this area and kind of where the journey has taken you thus far. Yeah. So, I have always been interested in families and parent child relationships, and so when I started grad school, I initially thought I would do research on school choice and how parents pick schools for their kids, what factor to go into it. And I was starting on that project. In one of my first year graduate school classes, we had to do interviews and I was talking with several couples about the school choice process, and in the course of those conversations, it kind of struck me a bit. Wow, there's a lot of work that goes into making this decision. There's almost research that has to be done. There's all this coordinating visits and open houses, and they had spreadsheets, and it struck me that, you know, in the small number of couples that I was talking with for that particular class, it was very gendered. Right. Both parents were definitely signed off on the decision that was made. They both often did the tours together, but a lot of the logistical work of figuring out what the options were and trying to understand the various pros and cons and meet with officials that tended to be more on the female partner in the different sex couples that I was talking with. So that experience kind of turned on something in my head like, oh, this decision making is kind of like work. And it coincided with a couple other things that I had done previously. So I have a background in behavioral science. I worked in a company that takes insights from the realm behavioral economics and tries to apply it to solving real world problems. And one of the big concepts that I was working with was this idea of scarcity and the bandwidth tax. So we have limited cognitive capacity if we're depleted in terms of calories or time or money. That leads us to kind of tunnel in on a particular pressing problem. Right. So I sort of combined these two ideas and said, what if there was this sort of bandwidth tax of parenthood, right, which might explain some of the different ways that it affects men and women not just in their time, but also in where their mental energy goes. And I'm sure those of you who are parents that you're like, yes, this is very obvious, of course, right, but it hadn't been studied in this particular way before. I want to take a step back and talk more delve into this bandwidth tax, and I want to hear a little, I guess, a few examples of how you see that applied parents versus non parents. I feel like, instinctively, I think I know what you're talking about, but maybe you can kind of, I don't know, put it in more concrete terms for myself and our audience. Sure, So I'll start with the you know, non parenting related example, and then we can talk about how it applies to parenting. So the class of example I often give when I'm talking about this is if you think back to your school days, your college days, when you probably had some stressful exam periods, right, and during that time, you know you have a scarcity of time and attention because it's all going toward, Okay, what's this paper I have to write, what's this final I have to study for your tunneling on whatever day your exams are done, And if you're anything like me and I think most people, a lot of other things get neglected during that time, right, Like your socks are all over the floor, You forget to call your mom. You're not necessarily exercising because this like pressing thing is sort of taking up front and center of your brain space. So that's kind of an example of how scarcity shapes the way that we make in the long run. Right, it's probably important that we maintain our family relationships and our health. Right, even during this exam period. We don't always make the best decisions when we're really tunneled in. So in the context of parenting, right, you can imagine two different versions. One is you are, you know, kind of along for the ride and you know that your partner has it covered and they'll bring whatever you need to your attention and it'll cross your mental brain space, you know, when you need to deal with it and talk about it. Right. That's that's one option. Then the other is that you have this constant swirl of Okay, this is coming up next week, I need to remember the cleats for soccer on Tuesday. What is it the deal with this person's you know, teacher, All these sorts of things that are swirling, and it sort of forces you to kind of feel like you're in this state of urgency at all times, right, which has opportunity costs. Or you can't just like turn that off when you're not in the home in the same way that you can sort of say, okay, dirty dishes out of sight, out of mind. These thoughts and worries and things that you notice and plan for are not going to be able to be shut off, and that's an opportunity cost for the mental energy, the bandwidth that you could devote to other things you're interested in. So to combine your two examples, I think you're suggesting that in many cases, women end up feeling end up going through life kind of like they're always in final exam period. I guess with limited bandwidth because it's being kind of sucked up by other things. That's so interesting. It actually made me think personally to how when I'm on call, and because we take call from home and it's like twenty four to seven call when we take it, I can't do anything else effectively. And I know that's because my bandwidth is being sucked up by thinking about who's in the hospital, who's going to call me. I had to be nice when they call me, like what are they going to call me about? Like, so I actually have a very hard time like parentsing effective we be nice to people outside of that side of things, it's like I don't have enough. So that's that's so interesting. Okay, so that's what got you enticed? And how have you gone about studying this? As you said earlier, I think it's increasingly being talked about. I started this project in twenty sixteen. It's come a long way even in those five years in terms of the national consciousness. But back then it was sort of like, Okay, there's this invisible stuff. I'm pretty sure, it's there, and it's a big part of household life and of parenting, but I wasn't sure how aware people would be and sort of how able they would be to kind of talk about what they were doing for the household. Because we're used to thinking about cleaning and cooking as chores as work, we can probably say who does them in our household, but for many people, it's more of a stretch to say, well, who does the noticing in your household? Who remembers when you're running low on toilet paper and things like that. So what I did was I created these I call them decision diaries, and they're basically like time logs, so Laura will appreciate this. Where I asked people for about twenty four hours prior to our interview to just jot down any decision that they'd made or thought about related to their household. So it was things like, you know, what should I feed my daughter for breakfast? Or oh, I should probably get new shoes because you know, little Johnny's complaining that his feet hurt in these boots. And I had slots columns for the time where they were whether they involved anyone else in it, And I used the results from those decision logs to structure our interview. So I would get to the interview and let's say someone put down, you know, my first decision was what to feed my daughter for breakfast, and so I would kind of ask them to walk me through how they made that decision, and in the process, I would say, well, tell me what your options were. What were you choosing between the serial versus eggs versus yogurt? And then you know, they give me the options and then we talk about, well, how did those options, you know, get into your cabinets. Tell me about how you knew what was on hand, you know, is it usually you who's stocking the pantry or things like that, and how do you decide what counts as an acceptable breakfast, right, because if you at some point someone had to say, like, these are the three things we feed our kids, right, and now you're choosing among them. Right. So that's, you know, one example, but we would do something similar for each entry in their log, and I talked to spouse's separately, so I would often interview them back to back on the same day. They would trade off childcare or whatever. And because they had both corted a log on the same day. There was often a lot of overlap, right. They'd both talk about, you know, oh, we were facing this tricky decision with school, and it would be really informative to juxtapose their two versions of events, right, Because one of the things I found is that contrary to the stereotypical nineteen fifties dad, most of the men I spoke with were like they knew their kids, they weren't very involved in their kids' lives. But when it got down to the nitty gritty of how did we figure out, how did this particular problem come to our attention, or who gathered the information, who made the spreadsheet? A lot of that was where moms just had more detail and they could really clearly articulate the rationale for why certain choices had been made and not made, whereas dads were aware but a little bit more it was vague about it. So that's one example. But I kind of teased apart their daily logs and used that to talk about broader patterns in the household. So interesting, did you look at any like same gender couples to maybe compare and contrast if the division was handled differently. I had a handful of same gender couples, not enough to draw really extensive conclusions. I will say that the ones that I spoke with, it wasn't perfectly fifty to fifty, but they did seem to be a lot more aware and cognizant of the dynamics right, Whereas the different sex couples that I talked to, you could kind of hear them having like aha moments as we were speaking and sort of saying, oh, you know, my wife really does a lot like I hadn't really thought about these aspects of fronting the household, whereas I talked to a few lesbian couples where they were very clear that, you know, yes, my partner tends to be the one who was doing this stuff. We've talked about it. I try and do what I can. You know, there's still issues about fairness, but it was much less taken for granted, and it sounds like it was more out in the open for that reason. It's interesting. How about other patterns in the data, like did things depend on how the level of education or the types of jobs people had? Did you look at stay at home people who didn't go to a job outside of the home. I'm super interested in some of the like variables and how that might affect the broader picture. Yeah, so these are these are great questions. So I've done two like relative studies on the same topic. In one, I just looked at couples who both had college degrees, and then in a more recent study, I've looked at a wider range of educational backgrounds. And I had all these hypotheses about how education might shape cognitive labor patterns, and I thought, you know, maybe the highly educated folks might be more equitable, because in general gender galitarian beliefs are higher among those of the college degree. I'm still looking through that data, but so far I haven't found a ton of nuance. It seems to be that whether or not you have a bachelor's degree, the gendered patterns where women do more of this work seems to hold. There are some nuances and differences when it comes to things like physical chores. There's also I found that folks who didn't have a college degree, it seemed to be a little bit more okay calling certain things men's work versus women's work, whereas those who were college educated were a little bit more careful not to use those sort of gender stereotypes. But the actual patterns didn't seem all that different by class or by educational grouping. It's kind of amusing. Actually, that's very interesting. Well, I know this is not necessarily the focus of your research, but is there any sort of like so then what I mean, are women just going to be limited by bandwidth forever? Is that? Were there any people that did your study and then came back to you later and said, oh my goodness, like, wow, we didn't realize it until we lined up those twenty four hour time logs and now it's so much better. Yeah, there were a handful of people. I always sent like a thank you email after the interviews, and a handful of people wrote back and said, no, thank you, We had these the best conversation after you left, like we should have done this years ago. So I in that points to kind of the first step is to name it and acknowledge the dynamic in your relationship, whatever it is. If one person is doing more, if you think you're doing it well. But I think what a lot of couples do is fall into a pattern and then you know, at some point later on they might decide this isn't really working for me, right, But at that point, you didn't necessarily like set out to do it, but you've established these patterns and routines that are then going to be really hard to break, right. So I think talking about the different contributions that each partner makes to the household, whether that be parenting or like managing and organizing or earning money, all sorts of ways that you each contribute, I think it's important to lay them into account and talk about where you are and are not living up to your ideals. Right. Like I, personally in my relationships, strive for fifty to fifty in the cognitive labor but I know a lot of people who tell me they prefer something different, that it works for them to be the one to maintain more of the organizational role, right. So I think as long as you're in communication with your partner about what the goal is and can think about what is keeping you from achieving that goal, then that's all to the good. And then from there, I think a big issue that I often hear from people when they're trying to allocate the mental load more equitably is that it's really hard to delegate, right because you have all this knowledge in your head and carving out one little piece of it. To tell your spouse to sign up for baseball, Well, if you know, like all the different baseball leagues that are available in the area, and you kind of know the schedule for the family and what would work, and it's going to be hard for your spouse to just carve out that piece without all of the contextual information. The one thing I tell people is, you know, when you're assigning responsibility, try and do it not for a particular task, but almost like you know, vertically, if right, like if your spouse is in charge of extracurriculars, like let them be in charge of all extracurriculars and then they learn to you know, build the relationships, get the information, the systems, et cetera that will help them to do it better. I think if you've been in a sort of more unequal pattern for a while, there's going to be a steep learning curve probably and it will be tempting to sort of say like, oh, I should probably just do this anyway because you're not doing it. Well. If that works for you, great, But if your goal is sort of long term more equality than trusting that if you and your spouse are you know, both committed to it that he or she will learn over time and build the skills that you have built over months, year's, decades that you've been doing that particular job. So name it, be clear about who's doing what, divide up that responsibility not just by task but by overall area, and and be patient and sort of give it time to develop. So did you also look into that bandwidth question in terms of do people who are taking on a much greater share of these household details find themselves floundering in other areas? Is there a way of assessing that? Yeah, with the data that I have, I was only able to get at sort of the suggestion of you know what people told me. So I'm hoping and I know of some people other researchers who are developing quantitative skills for measuring the sort of thing and correlating it at the population level. So stay tuned, hopefully we'll have more on that. The thing that I did see often was that a lot of people, mostly women in my sample, were just feeling like stressed and run down and anxious, and yet they felt like their partners were contributing, and it was sort of hard for them to articulate exactly why they felt like it was so burdensome, and so I think what happens is a lot of this work is invisible, and so you don't necessarily get credit for doing it in the same way that you get credit for driving your kid to soccer practice or cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. I think there was some relationship tension, some just like feelings of stress and anxiety that people were having a hard time justifying. Those were the things that came up in my interviews. I studied a range of couples in terms of their employment patterns, so a lot of most of the men and most of the women were employed. I did find some stay at home dads, some stay at home moms, and I don't have any way of saying like what caused them to do that versus trying to the dual career thing. But I know that for the working moms, like figuring out how to be present for their kids, you know, not just physically but mentally, was something that they worried a lot about. I think this speaks to my normal sunday. I guess my husband and I sometimes both get stressed, but I feel like I'm so much more stressed and he's like, why are you stressed? And it's like, I don't know. I just feel like there's so many pieces in the air and like I'm in charge, but really, I mean he's in charge too. But I'm sure this is like, oh, yes, this is like every interview I've ever had. So we're normal. That's you're very normal. Yes, that sounds super familiar. And you know. One thing that that I think really speaks to is that women, you know, and moms in particular, often get a reputation for being anxious and tight and worriers. And I think there's a complicated issue, but one piece of that is that they often have a lot more to worry about because they're the ones many cases, will be on the hook if something goes wrong. If you know, you you forget to schedule a babysitter, right, it might be your work that gets sacrificed. Or if your kid shows up to daycare with the wrong you know, or without the swimsuit, then the daycare people will probably judge you rather than your partner. Right. So there's a lot of it is like the context of what women have to worry about in many cases. That's so interesting. I don't want to use the term gas lighting lightly, but I think that if I think the trope of the anxious woman, if the woman is the one that is worrying about many of the details, that's almost appropriate. I'm not applying that to my own situation, but just in general. Yeah, yeah, And I think it's true because one of the things that people couples talk about is like, well is this really necessary? You know, they will disagree over whether it's important that you send out a holiday card to your relatives or whether it matters that your kid has particular fular item of clothing. Right, And it's tricky, right because I think both parties end up benefiting, right, because you know, you don't get labeled by your older relatives as not keeping up the family or exactly exactly, but you know you might individually prioritize different tasks. So I think figuring out like is this really just something that's all in my head? Like is this or is this something that will benefit our children or our family or et cetera. I love it. Well, if you were going to offer one piece of advice to families, maybe just starting out and laying things out, I mean you kind of said some of it. But if you were going to write a roadmap, and I don't know if that's part of your plans, you can tell us if it is, how would you suggest going about things? Yeah? I think the first thing you can do is keep that decision log exercise that I talked about it for a day or two, whatever you and your partner decide on. Just reflect on what decisions you're making for your family, your kids, et cetera. If you want, you can, you know, write down some more details about where you were and what time it was and then sit down with your spouse and compare them, you know, and the findings might surprise you, right, You might find, as many of the couples that I talked to did that one person's list looks a whole lot longer than the other person's list, And that is I think starting from that piece of concrete evidence, rather than like, I feel like you're not doing your part right, is often a more constructive way to start moving forward. Right, So start there, see what is happening, talk about whether you like what is happening or not, and then think about, Okay, I saw on your decision long you're handling all these decisions about food like that, is that what we want, right or would it be better for this other person to handle the food decisions far from the facts, keep the lug and then go from there to figure out what works for your particular situation. I love that and thinking about the vertical owner, I think that's a great term. I hadn't heard that one used before, but it does remind me of how I think Laura's husband. You still always do all the dentist stuff, and it's like, well, if you never touched that stuff, and you're probably never going to worry about it, and that's great if everyone's decided that that's what's going to happen exactly. Well, you may have heard this show before or you may not. I'm not sure, but if you have, then I would you know that we always do a love of the week in every episode, so I would love to hear do you have a love of the week for us? I do? Yeah. So I just finished a really great novel called Olympus Texas. It's by Stacy Swan. I think I heard about this on Modern Missus Darcy, so those of you who listened to that might recognize it. It's this novel loosely based on the Metaphorphoses by Ovid, but it takes a Texas family. The opening is that one of the brothers has just come back into town from two years in exile, so to speak, because he was caught sleeping with his brother's wife, and that's that's the opener. It gets even more dramatic from there. But the characters are so well drawn. They're not necessarily super sympathetic. I think they're all likable but deeply flawed, and it's just a riveting, like family saga. So if you're into that sort of thing, I highly recommend Olympus Texas by Stacy Swan excellent. Well mine will be a series that's not even out yet, but maybe will be by the time this episode airs. But that's the fact that the Netflix show Never Have I Ever is coming out with their second season. That is a Mindy Kayaling created series about an Indian American teenager whose father had passed away. I loved like every episode of the last season, so I'm so excited. I just found out they're going into season two, so that will be coming up soon. Awesome. Maybe I'll have to watch the first season to catch up before that happens. Oh, it's so much fun. Well, thank you so much for being on our show. We loved having you, and we always love discussing this topic. It is a relevant one for many of the listeners of this show, so we truly appreciate it. Tell our listeners if there's anywhere they can find you or where your research is going to be coming out. Yeah, So the best way to keep up with me right now is via my newsletter. So it's Alisondamenger dot substock dot com, and there I write a lot about, you know, the sociology of parenting and family and marriage, and it's meant to be for non academics, so I try and do my best to translate these sorts of findings to folks who do not have an interest in pouring through the academic literature. So that's the best way to find me for now. I'm totally going to subscribe. Also, we'll have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you you too. All right, well, that was great. Now we are into our listener question, which is about the hamster wheel of work, shuttling kids, dinner, clean, packing up for the next day. Again, so this listener writes in that she loves her job and career and is facing the decision of returning full time post baby number three, but is dreading this endless hamster wheel cycle of it all. She said that you have recommended a nanny, but how do you find a quality one? I will go ahead and say that this is probably the most common question we get on best of both worlds. We probably need to just like write up a guide or something. But she says, we've lived in our area, had a two career household for four years now. In that time period, we've gone through eight nanni's. Two of them they loved, but one moved away, the other had some health issues. I think we pay well, give annual raises into your bonuses. Interview processes similar to what you guys have talked about. I've yet to you know, She's saying post COVID has been really bad. We've gone through a lot of people even trying using an agency, and some candidates from the agency never showed up. She says she'd love to have more help in the home, but some people have said that they won't do any sort of housework. Do you have any advice on this on hiring? Is this just normal post COVID that it's really hard to find people. So what advice do we have? All right, Sarah, what do you have? So we went back and forth a couple times because the first thing I wanted to know, and this is completely anonymous, we haven't mentioned the ra or anything. So I think we can actually give some numbers here. I ask what are you paying? Because the truth is, like, you have to make this job be a job that someone would want, and you have to compare it to other available jobs. You know, I think about jobs that might be available at my hospital, like a medical assistant, or that really don't require a lot of years of training or education, that could be a comparable option, like I try to get in the head of like somebody, or maybe they might work for a school, like or a daycare or at a preschool or something like that. So you've got to pay comparable to that, I think, And you have to have perks, have things, because it really is an incredibly hard job caring for somebody else's children. So I think figuring out ways that you can make that desirable. And when she told me what she was paying, she said anywhere from fourteen dollars an hour, but that was for like a high school student, which I mean hiring a high school student. I mean, I guess that's I don't think that's really what she meant, and the people that were turning over, but like, that's probably not going to be a real long term solution for most people. Up to twenty two dollars an hour for a seasoned provider who was also bringing her own child to the job, So you know, in some ways, I could see how that could be a negotiating factor. If someone was allowed to bring their own baby, you might be able to pay a little bit less, which that doesn't seem unreasonable. And in fact, that person did stay with her for more than a year and only left because of a family situation. So I think that this is a big part of it. What you offer. In our household, we do pay completely on the books, and the way it works is, I mean, we hire ar nanny for more than full time hours and then pay time and a half for all overtime hours. And so the total salary I'm not going to give numbers because that does violate privacy, but it's significantly more than our medical assistants make. It's significantly more than most preschooler daycare teachers make and that position comes with, at least at this juncture, having she's attained a lot of seniority, having been with us for a long time, a good amount of downtime and free time. Our children are in school for all day unless there's a quarantine or something like that, and we even do things like we always pay her a minimum of like fifty some hours every single week, no matter how many hours she works. And on a day like today, when I had a flexible morning, I said, you don't have to come in until whenever you feel like it, Like I don't care if you come at noon or two or pick up the kids because I was doing the drop off and the kids all had camps, So like I don't feel a reason to have her. I can make her job appealing in those kind of ways when it works for me. Is it a very significant investment of funds, Yes, it absolutely is. And I one hundred percent get that that's not feasible for everyone. My poor sister. I mean, I don't mean poor isn't impoverished, but you know, she is a single parent, and she doesn't have the resources we do, and she's not able to do this. So I also understand that people listening to this might be very frustrated thinking, well, okay, that's the only time way we can do it is to pay like a lot of money. But that said, probably at least half of the listeners do have the ability to pay a lot of money. And if they need that and they have two big careers in their household, then I think there are people that I know could pay a lot that don't and then they complain about why it doesn't work, and I think that's probably like item number one. And then I just also mentioned like other things that make the job good, like what I said, like, you know, increase flexibility when it's available. Maybe it's some sort of promised salary ladder, like you say, I promise that five or ten percent raise after the first year, you know, something significant or a PCO increased that you give you know, we increase the number of days our nanny head off after she worked for us for a few years. And also the final thing, I will say, this is going to be a long episode, but that's okay. If somebody doesn't show up for an interview, that's the best favor they ever did you because you didn't waste your time hiring that person and having them be flaky later on. So honestly, I mean, i'd say, you know, invite as many as you want for interviews, know that some are not going to show up, but honestly, that's the best gift you can get instant feedback. Yeah, this time around. So we've mentioned we hired a new nanny in April who started in May, and we went through an agency this time, and I know some agencies are better than others. We used one that a former nanny of ours. So I actually asked this lady she would listed me as a reference because she was looking in a different city and it was a national chain but or agency or whatever that she I said, well, which agencies have you worked with that you felt were the best? And so she told me that she had a positive experience with this one. So I just called them up and went through it that way. It definitely call references, have a conversation and ask about your pain points, like if you want people to be doing lighthouse work and like looking for ways to make the household better, ask if they did that in their last job, because if they didn't, they're not going to want to start. Like I mean, unless you've like really spelled it out like that. That is part of the job, and these are the exact expectations, or if you have something that's particularly your thing, like I, you know, as people might imagine, I like people to be on time, and I think most people do. But if it's really going to tick you off, if people are like consistently ten minutes late, like, you want to know that, right, because that's something that is going to probably not a new habit they'll develop from you. I mean, it probably happened in the past, so you want to ask about that too. So make sure you are asking about the things that you know would bug you and getting honest answers from people like that. I'm echoing what Sarah said, pay in the professional range and then you will get professional people. Obviously, I hope anyone listening to this is paying on the books, which involves also then paying time and a half for over time, and then give a lot of feedback. Like once people are in the job, you want to make sure it's a good working relationship, a constructive working relationship. And nobody can read your mind, like your spouse can't read your mind, your colleagues at work can't lead you read your mind. Kids can't read your mind, and neither can anyone who works in your house. So make sure that you are saying whatever it is that you need to say, and hopefully that will make everything work better. So we hope this person who wrote in is able to find someone. Maybe she'll do some soul searching about what she can offer or think about. This has been best of both worlds. We've been talking mental load. We'll be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together. Other