How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids Quotes

“I keep in mind what Ann Dunnewold told me: when a mother takes care of herself, children absorb important lessons. “Both boys and girls learn that mothers have needs, too, which is also very important if they have children of their own,” she says. If you must conquer guilt, she adds, tell yourself, ‘When I take time for myself, I come back and I’m more the mother I want to be. More patient. Less reactive.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“doing everything ourselves isn’t heroic—it’s toxic.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“all the ways you can say yes, and sprinkle them throughout your daily marital interactions: Yes, that’s a good idea. Yes, I’m totally on board. Yes, that looks fun. Couples who make a practice of doing this, he has said, are much more likely to go the distance.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“Expressions of gratitude were the “most consistent significant predictor of marital quality.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“fathers who regularly do household chores, according to a University of British Columbia study, have daughters who are more likely to aspire to less stereotypically feminine careers, instead voicing an ambition to be an astronaut, professional soccer player, or geologist. When girls see fathers pulling their own weight, they receive a direct message that they are not—and should not be—destined to shoulder all the tedious work by themselves.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“males are socialized to assert their independence. Instead, he advises me to present the tasks in the spirit of negotiation. “Say, ‘Here’s a list of five things that need to get done—you can pick three.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“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.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“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). When study author Darby Saxbe started looking at the data, she says, “We sort of thought it would probably be all the more relaxing to have leisure time if you have a spouse that’s doing that leisure with you,” she tells me. “So it was kind of surprising that we found the opposite effect—that the more leisure time dads had and the less leisure time wives had, the more men’s cortisol levels dropped.” The somewhat dispiriting conclusion: a man’s biological adaptation to stress is healthier when his wife has to suffer the consequences.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“It’s especially important to have boys lend a hand around the house. As mentioned, from an early age, boys in particular tend to assert their independence by refusing to do something they’ve been asked to do. A study by the educational children’s magazine Highlights found that 73 percent of girls reported that they had chores to do, while only 65 percent of boys did. Not only are girls more likely to be asked to help out at home, they are less likely to get paid: the national nonprofit Junior Achievement found that the pay gap between males and females starts squarely at home, with allowance: 67 percent of boys said that they received allowances, while just 59 percent of girls did. Similarly, a British study discovered that boys get paid 15 percent more for the same chores done by girls. Think about the message being given here: that when boys feed the dog or straighten their rooms, they deserve a reward, but girls are just “doing what comes naturally.” And when boys with female siblings see the grunt work being off-loaded onto their sisters, the effects can carry into midlife, according to a paper published in the Journal of Politics.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“If you’re yelling and calling names, your kid thinks, ‘If I get in a disagreement, the way to resolve it is to speak more forcefully, more loudly, and to say harsher things to get my way.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“In a commencement speech at the University of Texas, Admiral William H. McRaven, commander of the US Special Operations Command, said that when he was training to be a Navy SEAL, he was required to make his bed every morning to square-cornered perfection—annoying at the time, but in retrospect one of the most important life lessons he ever learned. “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. “If you can’t do the little things right, you’ll never be able to do the big things right. And if, by chance, you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made—that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better. If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“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.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“I’m so tired of asking Andrew to do things around the house. No one has to ask me. You know why? Because I just get on with it.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“I feel like he’s a guest at the hotel I’m running. I’m constantly taking a silent feminist stand to see if he’ll step up and lend a hand. The scorekeeping never ends.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“Finally, many experts tell me that the best—some say only—way to teach one’s husband to learn the ropes and appreciate the volume of work you do is often the technique that is least used: leave the damn house.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“One of the most insidious and probably profoundly dangerous coping mechanisms that we have absolutely glommed on to as a culture is staying busy,” she tells me. “And the whole unconscious idea behind it is ‘If I stay busy enough, I will never know the truth of how absolutely pissed off I am, how resentful I am, how exhausted I am from juggling everything.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“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.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“I want to fully enjoy the family I have been yearning for all my life, and to take active notice of the many good things that my husband does. Our home should be a place of safety and comfort for all of us.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“your kid has peed into your mouth, there’s a level of connection with that child. Whereas if anybody else in your life did that, you’d probably cut off all contact.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“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.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“As women, we sometimes have trouble asking for help,” says my friend Jenny. “Maybe we really do want to do it all, or don’t want to admit we can’t. Or we think our husbands should intuitively know what help we need, and if they don’t we’re annoyed. But doing everything ourselves isn’t heroic—it’s toxic.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“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.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“Stay-at-home dads even complain about the same things that mothers traditionally do, says Routly. “A lot of the gripes women have about their husbands have more to do with the roles that each is playing in their family, and less to do with gender,” he says. “Stay-at-home dads complain just as much about ‘Why can’t my wife load a dishwasher properly?’ My wife will come home from work and leave her Snapware containers from her lunch on the counter, rather than put them in the dishwasher.” “Tom does the same thing, just leaves everything near the dishwasher,” I say. “Right?” he says. “And it’s like, ‘Why can’t she just put it in the dishwasher?”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“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. 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.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“When men do help around the house, says Pamela Smock, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan (with the very term help, she says, indicating that we have quite a way to go), they often choose chores with a “leisure component.” This would include yard work, driving to the store to pick up something, or busily reordering the family Netflix queue—quasi-discretionary activities that have a more flexible timetable than more urgent jobs such as hustling the kids out the door for school or making dinner (and often, many of those “leisure component” chores involve getting out of the house).”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“it’s not children who extinguish the flame of desire—it’s the adults who fail to keep the spark alive.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“studies have shown that married fathers still spend more time in shared leisure activities with their sons, and children of both genders receive greater attention from their father when there is a son in the family.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“choice increases the likelihood of compliance. It’s not the choice itself that’s important, it’s the feeling that the person has a choice that makes a difference in behavior.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“The cruel paradox of weekends with kids can be boiled down to this: Parents want to relax. Kids do not.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

“Behavioral Change Stairway Model, five steps that include active listening, showing empathy, building rapport, and gaining influence—which leads, finally, to the fifth step: behavioral change.”
― Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids