How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

by Jancee Dunn

now six, and Tom and I still have endless, draining fights. Why do I have the world’s tiniest fuse when it comes to the division of childcare and household labor?

Why do I have the world’s tiniest fuse when it comes to the division of childcare and household labor?

Men, though, are selective about the ones they will do, according to sociologist Scott Coltrane. He has said that of the “big five” household tasks—cooking, meal cleanup, grocery shopping, housework, and laundry—men are more apt to balk at housework and laundry and more likely to go for cooking, meal cleanup, and grocery shopping.

working couples who became first-time parents found that men did a fairly equal share of housework—until, that is, they became dads. By the time their baby had reached nine months, the women had picked up an average of thirty-seven hours of childcare and housework per week, while the men did twenty-four hours—even as both parents clocked in the same number of hours at work.

When it came to childcare, moreover, dads did more of the fun stuff like reading stories, rather than decidedly less festive tasks such as diaper duty (not to mention that they did five fewer hours of housework per week after the baby arrived).

fun stuff like reading stories, rather than decidedly less festive tas...

be clueless that they weren’t keeping up with the burgeoning workload,

“Both parents feel like they are doing a ton more work after the baby is born, but for men, that perception is especially inaccurate.”

The scorekeeping never ends.

Adding to my resentment is that on weekends, Tom somehow manages to float around in a happy single-guy bubble. A

Yet whose fault is that? In my deranged quest to Do It All, I have allowed this pattern to unfold—so is it fair of me to get angry when he ducks (or, as I view it, “skulks”) into the bedroom for a nap?

In my deranged quest to Do It All, I have allowed this pattern to unfold—so

course, I overreacted. And Tom could have gone down to the store without an Edwardian harrumph and purchased a new bottle of wine. Instead, I’ve become this lurking harridan who waits for her husband to screw up (I suppose the legal phrase for this is “entrapment”). But when I explode—making a conscious choice to vent, rather than consider my daughter’s anxiety—is my “victory” worth

Instead, I’ve become this lurking harridan who waits for her husband to screw up (I suppose the legal phrase for this is “entrapment”). But when I explode—making a conscious choice to vent, rather than consider my daughter’s anxiety—is my “victory” worth it? My

They found that 67 percent of couples see their marital satisfaction plummet after having a baby. No

Lack of sleep makes us focus on negative experiences, pick fights, and become irrational.

“The same is true of sleep: when people regularly get less than seven hours, we can measure significant cognitive impairment.”

And when you’ve been picking up nonstop after a two-year-old, your husband’s formerly innocuous habit of shedding his socks into a bounceable ball shape—within view of the hamper—is suddenly deeply irritating.

And when you’ve been picking up nonstop after a two-year-old, your husband’s formerly innocuous habit of shedding his socks

a bounceable ball shape—within view of the hamper—is suddenly...

Then he would follow with the question dreaded by stay-at-home mothers worldwide: What did you do all day? “I did a hundred things, but none of them added up to anything,” Blizzard says. “I vacuumed, I called Poison Control because my son ate a plant, and I think I took a shower. I’d tell him, ‘We have three kids. This is as far as we got.’ He would always be surprised. It was hard not to want to punch him in the face.”

men tend to pitch in more with childcare than with housework—but as with housework, they’re selective about the kind of childcare that they will do.

men tend to pitch in more with childcare than with housework—but as with housework, they’re selective about the kind of childcare that they will do. “What happens in a lot of middle-class families is that Dad becomes the Fun Parent,” Kimmel tells me. “So Dad takes the kids to the park on Saturday mornings to play soccer, and Mom

cleans the breakfast dishes, makes the beds, does the laundry, makes lunch. Then the kids come home at noon and say, ‘Oh my gosh, we had such a great...

“Mom Spends Beach Vacation Assuming All Household Duties in Closer Proximity to Ocean.” As the “mom” puts it, “I just love that I can be scrubbing the bathroom, look out the window, and see the tide coming in. We should do this every year!”

I certainly feel like Tom’s mother when I have to nag him to do a task—especially when he treats it as an option by saying, “In a minute,” or simply ignores me completely.

couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the status quo—which means they also initiate more fights.

couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats.

on top of basic duties such as cooking and cleaning, women do countless invisible tasks. This is the time-gobbling labor that will likely never show up on any sort of time use study. One is “kin work,” which Smock defines to me as “giving emotional support to relatives, buying presents and sending

“giving emotional support to relatives, buying presents and sending cards, handling holiday celebrations, things like that.”

“emotion work,” the constant checking on the wellbeing of everyone in the household:

hash out that issue with his boss? Yet another kind of invisible work is called “consumption labor”—buying

And mothers resent it, says New York psychotherapist Jean Fitzpatrick. “What I hear most often from women,” she says, “is ‘I do not want to be the boss here, I do not want him coming to me and asking me. I want him to take ownership.’”

Invisible work stays hidden until it’s illuminated—even Smock wasn’t aware that her own mother did virtually everything in their household until she was in graduate school.

“But if we are going to have equality in parenting, it is going to mean that women are going to be mindful of letting go of that,” says the father of two, who wears a “Dads Don’t Babysit” T-shirt and posts impressive shots of the Ninjago cake he baked for his son’s birthday on Instagram. “We’re all figuring it out as we go along, so I think this idea that women have this built-in superpower where they just know how to take care of children is a lie. We need to do away with it.”

Even when they are asleep, infants as young as six months react negatively to angry, argumentative voices, as University of Oregon researchers discovered by measuring brain activity of babies in the presence of steadily rising voices. Babies raised by unhappily married parents have been shown to have a host of developmental problems, from delayed speech and potty training to a reduced ability to self-soothe.

But even if they’re home, they can use their gizmos as a way to be physically present yet still effectively check out. In the Judd Apatow movie This Is 40, many parents laughed in recognition during the scene

Psychologists have a name for this widespread behavior—maternal gatekeeping—in which mothers can swing open the gate to encourage fatherly participation, or clang it resolutely shut by controlling or limiting Dad’s interactions with the kids.

The result is a self-reinforcing loop: as she criticizes or takes over, he grows more and more uncertain of his abilities.

Schoppe-Sullivan says that a mother’s encouragement makes a big difference in how much fathers participate in childcare. “Fathers have less confidence in their parenting than mothers do at the time of the child’s birth,” she tells me, “and this often sets up an ‘expert-apprentice’ dynamic in which fathers are looking to mothers for validation of their parenting.”

Feminist writer Caitlin Moran says that men who say, “You’re the expert” on childcare and running a load of laundry need to be shamed. “When they say, ‘I’m scared I’m going to shrink the clothes so you must do the washing,’” she tells me, “I recommend you just laugh at them and go, ‘Seriously? You’re a man with a degree, you drive a car, you hold a job, you’ve climbed a mountain, and you tell me you don’t know how to operate a washing machine? Go on! Go do it!’”

“Women tend to be the ones who do the time-associated tasks that involve deadlines all through the day, like preschool pickup or night feeding,” she tells me. “Her entire day is programmed in that way—to respond instantly. So women will get furious when they say to their male partners, ‘Listen, can you fix this thing that broke in the bathroom?’ And he’ll be like, ‘Why are you bugging me?’”

One study of working parents found that women reported greater feelings of inadequacy when describing their family life: 30 percent said they were failing to meet the standards they wanted, as opposed to 17 percent of men.

Tom also tends to do one thing at a time; if I throw more tasks at him, I watch his eyes grow blank as his circuits overload.

Why is it that my husband feels perfectly happy to plop down on the couch while I’m running around after our three kids and cooking dinner at the same time?

A University of Southern California study of married couples found that at the end of a workday, women’s stress levels went down if their husbands pitched in with housework.

“You don’t like being told what to do. You don’t like being controlled and attacked.

with me—I need sleep and R&R so I can fight the dragons for my family.’ But she’s fighting the dragons now, too.” In the old days, he goes on, if a man was a good provider, had a steady hand, and didn’t beat anyone, he was a good husband. “And what most men I work with don’t get is that their relationship job description has changed,” he says. “What I hear over and over again from women is ‘I don’t feel like I have a real partner.’ But what most men really think is if their partners would just simmer down and get off their backs, things would be fine.”

And one of the kids would inevitably wake up in the night, and Belinda, who’s a psychotherapist like me, would have woken up three times already. And she’d say, ‘Go see what he wants.’ And I’d say, “I’ve got this lecture tomorrow—I can’t…” And she’d say, ‘So you’ll give your lecture tired. Go deal with the kid.’ And that was a bit of a revelation.”

take good care of your wife, so she isn’t such a raving lunatic all the time.”