More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
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
even as both parents clocked in the same number of hours at work.
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.
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.
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 research suggests that the neural circuitry that powers the so-called maternal instinct can be developed by fathers.
Specifically, mothers drove the fathers’ cortisol changes, while, in a dismaying trickle-down effect, fathers drove changes in their kids’ cortisol.
Scientists found stronger neural connectivity in men from front to back and within one hemisphere, suggesting that their brains are built to “ease connectivity between perception and coordinated action”—that is, to perform a single task. In women, meanwhile, the wiring runs between the left and right hemispheres, suggesting it “facilitate[s] communication between the analytical and intuition”—so women have better memory and social cognition skills, making them better equipped for multitasking and creating solutions that can work within a group.
Brené Brown calls this tendency to project a motive onto someone without actually knowing the facts “the story I’m making up.”
People in positive long-term relationships have lower rates of heart disease, live longer, and are less likely to develop cancer.
‘If you’re away from your wife and kids, working, even if it’s wall to wall work and it’s not pleasurable, and you come home and you’re dog tired, too bad. If anything, you have to be super
thoughtful, because it’s really hard to be home with the kids alone.”
“Tom, what you’re not getting, and this is true for most men I see, is that it is in your interest to move beyond your knee-jerk selfishness and entitlement and to take good care of your wife, so she isn’t such a raving lunatic all the time.”
He sighs. “All right, I admit that I don’t like being told what to do. But here’s another thing: what’s the big deal about having to ask? Obviously there’s a mental block with men, so we have to be asked! So just ask! Ask us!” She shakes her head. “But you just said you don’t like being told what to do. You see the bind this puts me in, right? After a while, I don’t feel like asking, because you make it clear that you don’t like being told what to do, and I figure it’s easier to just do things myself.”
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. (As study author Sharon Sassler noted drily, “Perhaps if more men realized that sexual frequency was higher when the domestic load was more equitably shared, they would grab that Swiffer more often.”) Children benefit, too, in surprising ways: 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.
“You both are managers of the household, and should have regular discussions, every two weeks minimum, about how things are going, and brainstorm about what needs to be done, and track and tweak accordingly,”
‘When I take time for myself, I come back and I’m more the mother I want to be. More patient. Less reactive.’”
The fourth and worst behavior, and the Gottmans’ strongest predictor of divorce, is contempt, which they term “sulfuric acid for love”: cynicism, attacking your mate’s character
Start with an “I” statement rather than “you”
describe yourself, and your own feelings about some particular situation that you’re upset about.
describe what is happening without judgment or blaming, focusing on the specific issue rather than the person (“The house is a mess, and the kids are running wild”). Then—once again—state clearly what you need.
find a compromise.
Why is this important to you?
“When we repair,” Julie Gottman tells me, “we apologize, explain what was so difficult or frustrating for us that led us to that behavior, ask for forgiveness, and listen to our partner as they say what impact your behavior had on them.”
One crucial step remains to help stressed new parents avoid divorce court: look for the good. This means voicing what the Gottmans call the “three As”: affection, appreciation, and admiration.
One of John Gottman’s best-known findings is that happily married couples frequently and consistently respond to their partner’s requests for connection, which he terms “bids.”
She tells me that giving your mate affectionate comments daily is beneficial for them, but also helps you by reducing cortisol, lowering blood pressure, boosting your immune system, and even reducing cholesterol levels.
Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen has famously noted the disparity in men’s and women’s conversational styles: women, she says, tend to use “rapport talk,” in which they focus on personal experience and seek to build connections, while men favor “report talk,” giving information about impersonal topics.
Psychologists from Emory University’s Family Narratives Lab found that teens with a solid knowledge of their family history have lower rates of depression and anxiety, greater coping skills, and higher levels of self-esteem. Researchers theorized that this was “perhaps because these stories provide larger narrative frameworks for understanding self and the world, and… a sense of continuity across generations in ways that promote a secure identity.”
“So, if you think of your weekend as seven units of time,” she says, “you can dedicate each unit to various things: quality time where you reconnect, renewal time, and household stuff.”
Why are we all taking two-minute military showers on the weekends? Think like a man, and shower with impunity, she writes. Feel no guilt! A man doesn’t and wouldn’t. Self-imposed guilt over not putting others’ needs first at all times is a disease carried almost exclusively on the extra X-chromosome. Ladies, just get in there, lock the door, turn those knobs, and don’t look back.
Research shows that doing chores makes children thrive in countless ways, and is a proven predictor of success,
“They develop empathy, because they understand that someone might need their help. They learn about being industrious, and the importance of doing the ‘dirty jobs’ in life. Kids who aren’t willing to do the grunt work are not going to just leap to the top of the heap. This is the recipe for the young adult who will not be entitled—’nuff said.”
“If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day,” he told graduates. “It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another.” Making your bed, McRaven went on, reinforces the fact that the small things in life matter.
When our spouse touches us, we experience a mild high, we feel less frazzled, and we experience a diminution of discomfort and distress.” Similarly, neuroscientist James Coan found that married women with distressed brain activity were immediately calmed when their husbands simply reached for their hands.
Women, by contrast, find intimacy in words. “For millions of years, words have been women’s tools,” she tells me. “Everywhere in the world, women spend much more time holding their baby, literally in front of their face, talking to it. And women, as a result, get intimacy from talking. If you and I are together, we swivel until we’re face to face, do what’s called the ‘anchoring gaze,’ and we talk. And that is intimacy to women.”
People who built couple time into their schedules at least once a week were over three times more likely to report being “very happy” in their marriages, compared to those who had less quality time together.
an analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a UK think tank, found that when men become fathers, they earn up to 19 percent more, most likely because they put pressure on themselves to work harder—especially if their spouse is taking time off.
Britt and an associate uncovered four basic money scripts that negatively impact a person’s financial health: money avoidance (people who don’t want to deal with it, or even think about it), money worship (those who believe their troubles would be over if they just had more dollars), money status (those for whom self-worth equals net worth), and money vigilance (those who are nervous about funds to the point of self-deprivation).
“People think that money is a rational, concrete topic, when really it’s a highly emotional subject that’s hardwired into our sense of survival,” she says. “So if we feel like somebody is threatening our money, we literally feel like it becomes a fight to the death.” (Indeed, research shows that even a quick chat about funds can trigger the neurochemical “fight or flight” reaction.)
Decluttering expert Peter Walsh advises parents to set limits by storing toys in a set number of bins—say, four. When the bins are full, children can add a toy, but they must donate another.
My friend Jason institutes a Family Declutter jamboree every other month or so. Once each family member has filled a large trash bag for tossing or donation, they go to their favorite ice cream place for sundaes. “When your house is decently orderly and you know where everything is,” he says, “it prevents so many of those fights that start with ‘Where the hell did you put the wipes?’ and escalate from there.”
The Family Medical Leave Act allows employees to take twelve weeks of parental leave, but it’s available only to workers in medium and large companies—and it’s unpaid. “It should be a national embarrassment that there are only four countries that offer no paid parental leave to anyone,” says Kimmel. “And they are Lesotho, Swaziland, Papua New Guinea—and the United States.”
She writes that globally, women spend an average of 4.5 hours a day on unpaid work—cooking, cleaning, and caring for children and the elderly. Men spend less than half that amount.
To narrow the unpaid labor gap, she goes on, “the world is making progress by doing three things economists call Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute: Recognize that unpaid work is still work. Reduce the amount of time and energy it takes. And Redistribute it more evenly between women and men.”
A happy, functional family doesn’t happen by accident, but by concerted effort from the different members of the family to do the sometimes-difficult work of getting along with each other. Marriage is an institution with a lot of day-to-day business—and institutions function better when they’re running well.
Fighting fairly is not only good for a child to see, it’s a useful skill for the whole family to have when a kid reaches the ornery teen years.
A simple “thank you” renders you visible and takes away the feeling that you’re a stagehand, silently engineering the props while the others have all the fun.
Know that no matter what you and your spouse tell yourselves, your child is affected by your arguing. Period.
On a daily basis, it is transformative to take just ten or fifteen minutes a day to talk about anything—anything—except scheduling, our child, or the fact that we’re running low on paper towels.
