All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood

by Jennifer Senior

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.