How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

by Jancee Dunn

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.

67 percent of couples see their marital satisfaction plummet after having a baby.

Working mothers are now the top earners in a record 40 percent of families with kids—yet a University of Maryland study found that married mothers are still doing nearly three and a half times as much housework as married fathers.

Darby Saxbe, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California, explains to me that 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.

Perhaps the least visible but most pervasive job is that of household manager. “That one is constant,” Smock says. “It’s the person who remembers everything: that Joey needs to have a dentist appointment, what foods each child likes, that a babysitter needs to be hired for the weekend. If a mother is handing her husband a grocery list, he is given credit for going shopping, but she has done the work of constructing the list. Giving direction to the husband is labor. It’s in every area in terms of childcare, and it’s always going on in your brain, even if you’re not aware of it.”

Often, men simply feel more entitled to take leisure 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. No surprise there—but the mind-boiling part is that men’s stress levels fell if they kicked back with some sort of leisure activity—but only if their wives kept busy doing household tasks at the same time (an effect I term While You’re Up, I’ll Take Another Cold One).

“Here is exactly what I want you to do during your time-out,” he says. “Go to another part of the house, shut the door, and take out a picture of Sylvie that you’re going to keep nearby. I want you to say this to her picture. Ready?” I nod humbly. “I know that what I’m about to do is going to cause you harm, but right now, my anger is more important to me than you are.”

a Pew Research Center survey found that sharing household chores ranked third in importance on a list of nine items associated with successful marriages.

you can’t be what you can’t see.

A Cornell study found that couples with young kids who split housework more evenly reported better and more frequent sex than when the woman took on most of the chores.

research has shown that when men share housework and childcare, their kids do better in school and are less likely to see a child psychiatrist or be put on behavioral medication.

“What she hears from us is ‘Girls rule,’” I say, driving the point home as Tom flinches, “but in our house, what she sees is ‘Girls clean.’”

James Baldwin once wrote, “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”

A University of New Hampshire study found that only 2.1 percent of commercials featured men doing work around the house.

When you first get married, you have a relationship that’s so important to you, and you’re working on it together. But then you have a kid. And you look at your kid and you go, “Holy shit, this is my child. She has my DNA. She has my name. I would die for her.” And you look at your spouse and go, “Who the fuck are you? You’re a stranger.”