Wednesday
May252011
What Difference does Difference Make? An Appreciation and Review of “Equally Shared Parenting”
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Today I'm happy to welcome Andrea Doucet for another guest post on my blog. In this post she is sharing her thoughts on equally shared parenting and the book on that topic by Amy Vachon and Marc Vachon.
Twenty-one years ago, my life was very focused on equally shared parenting.
I was a new doctoral student interviewing British couples who were trying to share housework and childcare (although such couples were notoriously difficult to find back then). And I was a new mother sharing parenting and housework with my husband. While we did not know it at the time, we were in fact practicing what Marc and Amy Vachon describe in their book as “Equally Shared Parenting” (ESP):
We were both students living in a small student apartment at Cambridge University. With our families back in Canada, we had no family support in England; with my scholarship as our only income, we had little money for extra childcare help. We had no car, no TV, no Internet access. We just split our days between work and childcare, housework (not much), and leisure. While breastfeeding introduced some differences in our days, my husband took on other routine domestic tasks. When our daughter started half-time daycare at the age of two, we alternated the dropping off and picking up, and we had mommy days and daddy days.
That was a long time ago.
In the last twenty one years, I have continued to research and write about the lives of couples who challenge traditional gender norms in paid work and care work (e.g. stay-at-home dads, single fathers, breadwinning mothers, fathers who take parental leave, and gay fathers). And my husband and I have raised three daughters (now 21 and 17-year-old twins) and have gone from equal breadwinners to me being the primary breadwinner. I would describe our journey as shared parenting but not equally shared parenting.
I greatly appreciated the book, Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents. It describes an important political and personal approach to achieving gender equality at work and at home. This is a goal I share with the Vachons, although I have a slightly different approach to this issue.
One cannot help but admire the Vachons. Perhaps the best way to give you a quick snapshot of their lives is from this glowing Mother’s Day article about them in the Boston Globe:
Equally Shared Parenting is a wonderful book. It is beautifully written, steeped in some of the latest research, and written with a balance of passion, intelligence and practicality. To their credit, they tried out these ideas in conversation with an audience of enthusiastic followers and critics. They launched their blog as a venue for that exercise.
Marc and Amy Vachon have responded clearly to their critics. For example, after they were featured in a New York Times magazine article by Lisa Belkin, the Vachons were criticised for taking a rigid 50-50 model to parenting as though it meant color coded charts and “keeping score.” As they make clear in their book:
One of the strengths of the book is that it is written by a mother and father about the successes and challenges faced by both mothers and fathers. Their four-part approach - breadwinning, childrearing, housework, and time for self - ingeniously brings together complementary parts of a whole as they consider how these all play into an equal and balanced family life. More researchers should pay heed to this four-fold formulation.
They also astutely point to the many roadblocks that get in the way of shared parenting. For example, they highlight the importance of:
The Vachons’ point about striving for equal breadwinning is also a good reminder to new parents. As my colleague Bonnie Fox depicts so well in her book, When Couples Become Parents, the transition into parenting often marks the beginning of a long slide towards gender inequality. Joan Williams also brilliantly highlights this in her recent book on why men matter in reshaping work-family debates. Meanwhile, a new book just released in the UK, Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, repeats an age-old argument: "The mother feels that she must cut back her paid work in order to look after the children because the father is working long hours; the father feels he should work long hours because the mother has cut back her paid work."
These are not new points; they have have been made many times by many gender and family scholars (including myself) Nevertheless, they’re so important that they’re worth repeating, especially to fathers who want push for flex hours, reduced work hours, or paternity/parental leave.
The Vachons are very explicit in saying that this approach is not for everyone.
Recently one mother publicly agreed with that point. Claire Hodgson wrote in the UK’s The Independent that her experience with ESP was “ a disastrous double act” and the “worst year of marriage.”
What I have learned from being here and from studying this issue is that ESP is only one of a wide range of “sharing” narratives. The Vachons admit that “parents who practice equal sharing fit many different categories.” And they are explicit about not judging other families. Nevertheless, they also sometimes fall into an unfortunate binary between “traditional families” or “more standard parenting styles” and ESP families.
This makes me wonder where I “fit” since I am neither of these. On the other hand, my scholarly side is bothered by trying to hold the messy, dynamic, and constantly changing “stuff of everyday life” into boxes or labels.
I want to make four brief points here:
To Claire Hodson’s reflections on her failure with ESP, the Vachons provide a thoughtful and respectful response on their blog. Nevertheless, they also seem to posit only two possibilities for her - ESP or “a traditional arrangement”:
My response to Claire Hodgson and her partner is to say that there is something in between ESP and “traditional”. I would say to her: You do not have to choose between a traditional style of parenting or ESP. You can succeed by working out your own version of sharing. And just know that it will shift across time.
This is a point that I share with Annie here at PhD in Parenting who wrote a few months ago that “we’ve been practicing own brand of equally shared parenting.”
While some couples like the Vachons and the ESP couples in their book are able to hold onto an approach that balances their lives in equal ways, I have also seen couples move in and out of differing positions on this continuum. There are couples who reverse roles and yet still balance “traditional” and “egalitarian approaches” in their parenting. There are couples where one person is the breadwinner for a few years and then things switch, either forced or by choice. There are feminist stay-at-home moms and pro-feminist primary breadwinning dads. There are households with stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms where childrearing is still shared while other aspects of paid and unpaid work are divided differently, and unequally.
I also think that many of the readers’ comments here at PhD in Parenting demonstrate this flexibility and diversity really well.
For the Vachons, the heart of their approach is on equality and balance. For me, it is about equality, differences, and balance.
In my relationship with my husband, I actually do not ask questions about equality. When I have focused too much on equality, we start heading into conflict because we have, at varied points, taken very different approaches to childrearing, breadwinning, housework, and time for self. The question “equal to whom” is important here. Sometimes when I have pushed for “equality”, this can translate into me asking him to take on my priorities and my approaches. So instead of focusing on being “equal”, I tend to ask the questions which matter to us, such as: Are the kids OK? Am I getting what I need? Is he getting what he needs? Are we both meeting our goals? Are our family relationships strong?
My scholarly approach also informs the way I make sense of this in my everyday life - and the questions that I ask. Specifically, from a wide body of feminist work, including that of feminist legal scholar Deborah Rhode, I take the crucial point which is: “The critical issue should not be difference, but the difference difference makes”. The key question is thus: “What difference does difference make?”
Moreover, Rhode draws attention to an important distinction between "difference per se" and "the disadvantages that follow from it". It is this distinction that begs us to ask: Which differences turn into disadvantages? And this is where I focus my attention when it comes to assessing how fairly and equally my husband and I are sharing the work of raising our family.
Looking back on twenty-one years of parenting and that same amount of time of scholarly work in four countries, my view is that equally shared parenting is just one way to achieve balance and equality in domestic life and in gender relations more widely. It is an excellent one. And I wholeheartedly commend the Vachons for providing real life examples of how this works in practice through their book and web site, as well as ample support and encouragement for couples who are motivated to adopt this model.
But this is just one of many ways to share the important work of breadwinning and caregiving and to achieve a balanced life that leads to wider relations of gender equality.
In response to their point that “you’ll want the overall division of labour in each domain” - breadwinning, childrearing, housework and time for self - “to be about equal between you,” I would add the rejoinder: Do not be afraid to embrace your differences within and between all four domains across time. While striving for “equality’, do also think about “the difference that difference makes.”
What do you think? Does - or would - Equally Shared Parenting work for you? And what differences make (or do not make) a difference?
Guest author Andrea Doucet is a Professor of Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. For the last twenty years, most of her work has hovered around, and landed on, two central puzzles; the first relates to enduring gender differences in the ‘response-ability’ for care work, domestic life, and community work while the second is about how we come to know and represent ordinary and extraordinary stories. Visit Andrea’s website to learn more about her work.
Twenty-one years ago, my life was very focused on equally shared parenting.
I was a new doctoral student interviewing British couples who were trying to share housework and childcare (although such couples were notoriously difficult to find back then). And I was a new mother sharing parenting and housework with my husband. While we did not know it at the time, we were in fact practicing what Marc and Amy Vachon describe in their book as “Equally Shared Parenting” (ESP):
“Equally shared parenting is the purposeful practice of two parents sharing equally in the four domains of childrearing, breadwinning, housework and time for self.”
We were both students living in a small student apartment at Cambridge University. With our families back in Canada, we had no family support in England; with my scholarship as our only income, we had little money for extra childcare help. We had no car, no TV, no Internet access. We just split our days between work and childcare, housework (not much), and leisure. While breastfeeding introduced some differences in our days, my husband took on other routine domestic tasks. When our daughter started half-time daycare at the age of two, we alternated the dropping off and picking up, and we had mommy days and daddy days.
That was a long time ago.
In the last twenty one years, I have continued to research and write about the lives of couples who challenge traditional gender norms in paid work and care work (e.g. stay-at-home dads, single fathers, breadwinning mothers, fathers who take parental leave, and gay fathers). And my husband and I have raised three daughters (now 21 and 17-year-old twins) and have gone from equal breadwinners to me being the primary breadwinner. I would describe our journey as shared parenting but not equally shared parenting.
I greatly appreciated the book, Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents. It describes an important political and personal approach to achieving gender equality at work and at home. This is a goal I share with the Vachons, although I have a slightly different approach to this issue.
An Appreciation
One cannot help but admire the Vachons. Perhaps the best way to give you a quick snapshot of their lives is from this glowing Mother’s Day article about them in the Boston Globe:
“Amy Vachon has the life most working mothers only dream of. Vachon, 48, works 32 hours a week at a job she loves. Her husband does the same, and they switch off picking up their two kids. She makes dinner on Mondays and Fridays, he cooks on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and they eat out on Tuesdays. In Amy Vachon’s world, “doing laundry” means whites only – Marc, also 48, handles the family’s dark loads. He schedules their kids’ dental checkups; she handles doctors’ appointments.”
Equally Shared Parenting is a wonderful book. It is beautifully written, steeped in some of the latest research, and written with a balance of passion, intelligence and practicality. To their credit, they tried out these ideas in conversation with an audience of enthusiastic followers and critics. They launched their blog as a venue for that exercise.Marc and Amy Vachon have responded clearly to their critics. For example, after they were featured in a New York Times magazine article by Lisa Belkin, the Vachons were criticised for taking a rigid 50-50 model to parenting as though it meant color coded charts and “keeping score.” As they make clear in their book:
“One of the biggest misconceptions about ESP is the idea that it involves a perfect 50-50 split of every task and if this is so, it leads to onerous charting to reach an even division of socks washed, kids tucked in bed and overtime hours worked each week... Sharing the work of running a family is not about exact division by chore. The name for his lifestyle is not equally divided parenting but equally shared parenting; the point is not put a hatchet into the middle of every activity.”
One of the strengths of the book is that it is written by a mother and father about the successes and challenges faced by both mothers and fathers. Their four-part approach - breadwinning, childrearing, housework, and time for self - ingeniously brings together complementary parts of a whole as they consider how these all play into an equal and balanced family life. More researchers should pay heed to this four-fold formulation.
They also astutely point to the many roadblocks that get in the way of shared parenting. For example, they highlight the importance of:
- dad being on his own with the kids so that he can develop his own competence;
- challenging the assumption that only mom will take sick days to be with the kids;
- fathers being involved with infants, either through parental leave, paternity leave, or time off from work;
- the constant negotiation around housework;
- and the constant societal pressures on mothers and fathers, both in community spaces and in work spaces.
The Vachons’ point about striving for equal breadwinning is also a good reminder to new parents. As my colleague Bonnie Fox depicts so well in her book, When Couples Become Parents, the transition into parenting often marks the beginning of a long slide towards gender inequality. Joan Williams also brilliantly highlights this in her recent book on why men matter in reshaping work-family debates. Meanwhile, a new book just released in the UK, Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality, repeats an age-old argument: "The mother feels that she must cut back her paid work in order to look after the children because the father is working long hours; the father feels he should work long hours because the mother has cut back her paid work."
These are not new points; they have have been made many times by many gender and family scholars (including myself) Nevertheless, they’re so important that they’re worth repeating, especially to fathers who want push for flex hours, reduced work hours, or paternity/parental leave.
ESP is One of Many Narratives of Shared Parenting
The Vachons are very explicit in saying that this approach is not for everyone.
Recently one mother publicly agreed with that point. Claire Hodgson wrote in the UK’s The Independent that her experience with ESP was “ a disastrous double act” and the “worst year of marriage.”
What I have learned from being here and from studying this issue is that ESP is only one of a wide range of “sharing” narratives. The Vachons admit that “parents who practice equal sharing fit many different categories.” And they are explicit about not judging other families. Nevertheless, they also sometimes fall into an unfortunate binary between “traditional families” or “more standard parenting styles” and ESP families.
This makes me wonder where I “fit” since I am neither of these. On the other hand, my scholarly side is bothered by trying to hold the messy, dynamic, and constantly changing “stuff of everyday life” into boxes or labels.
I want to make four brief points here:
- First, there are many approaches to sharing the joys and burdens of breadwinning and caregiving (while also getting the housework done and having time for self).
To Claire Hodson’s reflections on her failure with ESP, the Vachons provide a thoughtful and respectful response on their blog. Nevertheless, they also seem to posit only two possibilities for her - ESP or “a traditional arrangement”:
“We would like to offer that ESP itself - the true equal sharing of breadwinning, housework, childraising, and time for self - is not the core of the problem that this article describes. And that when two parents want the same deep connection with their kids, the bravery of addressing this head on might actually be more satisfying than the lives that a traditional arrangement might have provided” (my emphasis).
My response to Claire Hodgson and her partner is to say that there is something in between ESP and “traditional”. I would say to her: You do not have to choose between a traditional style of parenting or ESP. You can succeed by working out your own version of sharing. And just know that it will shift across time.
This is a point that I share with Annie here at PhD in Parenting who wrote a few months ago that “we’ve been practicing own brand of equally shared parenting.”
- My second point: I believe that couples have evolving and continually changing stories. I am more apt to think about these dynamic and fluid stories rather than trying to categorize the people or couples by giving them labels.
- Third, I think that there is a continuum of approaches to shared parenting that combine gender equality and gender differences in breadwinning and caring.
While some couples like the Vachons and the ESP couples in their book are able to hold onto an approach that balances their lives in equal ways, I have also seen couples move in and out of differing positions on this continuum. There are couples who reverse roles and yet still balance “traditional” and “egalitarian approaches” in their parenting. There are couples where one person is the breadwinner for a few years and then things switch, either forced or by choice. There are feminist stay-at-home moms and pro-feminist primary breadwinning dads. There are households with stay-at-home dads and breadwinning moms where childrearing is still shared while other aspects of paid and unpaid work are divided differently, and unequally.
I also think that many of the readers’ comments here at PhD in Parenting demonstrate this flexibility and diversity really well.
- Building on my third point above, my fourth and final one is about the interplay between gender equality and gender differences.
Equality, Differences, and Balance
For the Vachons, the heart of their approach is on equality and balance. For me, it is about equality, differences, and balance.
In my relationship with my husband, I actually do not ask questions about equality. When I have focused too much on equality, we start heading into conflict because we have, at varied points, taken very different approaches to childrearing, breadwinning, housework, and time for self. The question “equal to whom” is important here. Sometimes when I have pushed for “equality”, this can translate into me asking him to take on my priorities and my approaches. So instead of focusing on being “equal”, I tend to ask the questions which matter to us, such as: Are the kids OK? Am I getting what I need? Is he getting what he needs? Are we both meeting our goals? Are our family relationships strong?
My scholarly approach also informs the way I make sense of this in my everyday life - and the questions that I ask. Specifically, from a wide body of feminist work, including that of feminist legal scholar Deborah Rhode, I take the crucial point which is: “The critical issue should not be difference, but the difference difference makes”. The key question is thus: “What difference does difference make?”
Moreover, Rhode draws attention to an important distinction between "difference per se" and "the disadvantages that follow from it". It is this distinction that begs us to ask: Which differences turn into disadvantages? And this is where I focus my attention when it comes to assessing how fairly and equally my husband and I are sharing the work of raising our family.
Looking back on twenty-one years of parenting and that same amount of time of scholarly work in four countries, my view is that equally shared parenting is just one way to achieve balance and equality in domestic life and in gender relations more widely. It is an excellent one. And I wholeheartedly commend the Vachons for providing real life examples of how this works in practice through their book and web site, as well as ample support and encouragement for couples who are motivated to adopt this model.
But this is just one of many ways to share the important work of breadwinning and caregiving and to achieve a balanced life that leads to wider relations of gender equality.
In response to their point that “you’ll want the overall division of labour in each domain” - breadwinning, childrearing, housework and time for self - “to be about equal between you,” I would add the rejoinder: Do not be afraid to embrace your differences within and between all four domains across time. While striving for “equality’, do also think about “the difference that difference makes.”
What do you think? Does - or would - Equally Shared Parenting work for you? And what differences make (or do not make) a difference?
Guest author Andrea Doucet is a Professor of Sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. For the last twenty years, most of her work has hovered around, and landed on, two central puzzles; the first relates to enduring gender differences in the ‘response-ability’ for care work, domestic life, and community work while the second is about how we come to know and represent ordinary and extraordinary stories. Visit Andrea’s website to learn more about her work.
Reader Comments (20)
Thank you for this thoughtful article.
I was a bit discouraged during the first 18 months of my son's life at how unequally the parenting tasks were divided between my partner and me. I found it particularly hard after I went back to full time work when my son was 12 months. We found ourselves in a (temporary) situation where I was both the primary childrearer and the primary breadwinner. It was frustrating. At the same time, I wasn't willing to let go of either.
In retrospect, I see things in a different light. It took about 20 months for my son to accept his father as a primary caregiver. (I partly blame breastfeeding for that but weaning was/is not an option in my view.) But what are 20 months in a life?
Focussed as I was on my own tasks, I was not giving my partner the credit he deserved for his: he was the main housekeeper, took care of basic organisation (from grocery shopping to daycare pickups and dropoffs). Our respective tasks have advantages and inconvenients. (Mine were both more demanding and more rewarding.)
Now I am learning that the way they are divided changes according to both circumstances and my son's development. We are improving over time. Thanks for reminding me of this flux.
It's interesting to read how you differentiate between the exactness of "equally shared parenting" and "equality, differences, and balances." I tend to think that we share parenting equivalently in our relationship. However, we have struggled with both working and trying to minimize outside childcare for our son, and my partner will be leaving his job as of next week to be a SAHP. So we'll have a very different dynamic soon, and I worry that we'll struggle to remain equivalent. What we've learned in the first year correlates to a point you've made about how aiming for "equal" can lead to insisting that parenting from one parent be the "same" as from another. We have VERY different parenting styles, and I have to work hard to keep my nose out of their relationship. And our housekeeping division is pretty fluid, too. Where we've struggled is with the "time for self" factor. I feel guilty whenever I take time for myself, and my partner tends to not need to socialize the way I do, so we end up in a dynamic where I'm dragging all three of us out for social interaction, and yet I never feel like I got enough "me" time (and my partner feels like he got more than he wanted).
In summary: I love the idea of equally shared parenting, as long as one is careful not to assume that each partner needs the same things. Different things can be equivalent. And yes, fluidity in the arrangement (especially as rookies learning what we need in our new parenting lives) is really key.
Andrea,
What a wonderful, thought-provoking essay! Thanks so much for recognizing our mission to bring the practicality, joys and challenges of equally shared parenting to the public discussion and to private decisions that couples must make to create and maintain the lives they desire. It is but one of many options, and one that has not previously been given enough play and direction. Our goal is to change that.
Your ideas are a fantastic follow-on. There are many different ways a family can be structured to provide satisfying, rich lives for both partners. I'm so happy to see you refer to ESP as a model. We've seen many mistake it for our actual lives, or the actual lives of any particular couple, but it is (in our case) the model that we aspire to instead - the one that we feel brings us our best chance at sustainable, here-and-now happiness.
Thank you so much for adding to the evolution. Marc and I greatly respect your work and are honored to have you weigh in with such an important message about also including the differences between partners in the equation. We had not fleshed that idea out ourselves, perhaps because we worry that not clearly presenting a specific model can lead couples to deceive themselves into unsatisfying inequality for the sake of their supposed differences. BUT, true and valued differences are a whole 'different' thing!
Best,
Amy (and Marc)
Nope, equally shared parenting would not work for us. No way. Both because of our different personalities - I would have no discipline to work long hours at work, he has little interest in long hours of quality time with the kids, etc - but even more because of the society we live in, which is not, last I checked, full of interesting, well-paying 32 hour a week jobs with opportunities for advancement, or jobs that allow men to take off time when their kids are sick (right now I can call in and say my child is sick, but if my husband stays home with our child he has to lie and say he's sick) or for children's appointments.
Personally I hate the notion of equality - sets up way too many unrealistic expectations on all sides - and prefer to strive for fairness. For us that means that while housework, childcare, and breadwinning may each be balanced unevenly, time for self is equally divided between us. Because that's what is fair.
Equally shared parenting is working pretty well for us. However, the way we implement it is not to look at it on a day to day, or even week to week basis. We see in a big picture way, that will slide along a continuum during the course of our lives. After our daughter was born, my husband did more of the child care, doctor's appts, etc for the first 1.5 yrs because he was a student and could be home most days while I worked. Six months ago he began student teaching while he's still working on a master's so, even though I still work, much of the childcare (outside of daycare) and taking care of her when she's sick has fallen to me. He simply doesn't have the time or flexibility right now. But, we've already talked about how that will change once he begins working full time and that I will work part-time or not at all the first year after our next child is born.
I once heard a wonderful speaker say about his 50+ year marriage that it was never a 50/50 partnership. It was at times 80/20 or 25/75 depending on what was going on in their lives and which partner needed more support at the time. I think as long as a couple keeps communicating and respects one another, this is perfectly acceptable.
Not sure how to describe our parenting. I'm a stay-at-home mom and my husband works full time, so technically it's not equal in that sense. He considers being a mother to be equal to a full-time job, and I try and keep the house at least reasonably clean, and when he's off we share housework and child care. On weekends, we take turns getting up with our early-rising daughter so we each get a day to sleep in. As infants, he could fold prefolds and change them as competently as I could. I do most of the night-time parenting, but we cosleep so it's a lot easier for me to just roll over and nurse a baby than it would be for him to try and comfort some other way. He does, however, regularly put our younger daughter in the Beco when she won't nurse down for a nap and she'll sleep on him quite happily. (He did the same with our older one.) I do most of the cooking, mostly because I can start the prep while he's at work and I enjoy the time when he gets home to have some time by myself while he plays with the girls. He is a great cook though and used to cook way more than I did when we both worked.
I guess we're lucky, because he has an awesome job. He took some parental leave when my second daughter was born, and he can take sick days if I or one of the girls is sick, no questions asked.
It's not equal, if you consider equal only to mean identical, but it's fair. We're both happy with it and he has an amazing relationship with our daughters.
My wife and I believe in "shared parenting," but not necessarily "equally shared." The goal isn't an equal distribution of work, but one that works for us.
She's still on parental leave, and I'm a stay-at-home dad, so things are pretty equally split. Once she heads back to work, she'll handle much of the breadwinning, while I'll do more of the childrearing and housework, as well as running my monetized blog as a business. I'm not sure if it's going to be equal, but we're certain it'll work for us.
Great post, by the way!
It's so important to get people thinking critically about the way they structure their relationships. I think this is especially true for fathers, who can more easily fall into traditional roles thanks to the influence of a largely still-patriarchal society.
I read this book one day when I saw it on the new books shelf at the library. It's a great concept, except for one thing. It's unrealistic to think that the majority of parents would have jobs that allow them to work less hours or take leave when needed. My husband could only take 3 days off after the baby was born and that was all of his sick leave for the year! Unfortunately for most of lower and middle class America it's quite unrealistic. I would love for my husband to be more present, but that's not possible if we want to pay bills and have health insurance. You have to work 40 hours/full time in order to get any benefits.
Sorry for typos, wrote this while arguing with my four year old. I promise I sounded more intelligent before becoming a tired mother. ;)
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I have also had many moments where "I wasn't willing to let go of either (breadwinning or childrearing). I am glad to hear you like the 'flux' metaphor. (I actually addressed this in an earlier piece http://www.breadandrosesproject.ca/2011/02/25/workaholic-women”-and-“slow-moving-men”/ .... as a way of responding to another debate which was quite critical of men (something the Vachons would certainly not do!). And like you, there have been times where "I was not giving my partner the credit he deserved". Thanks for extending the conversation.
Melissa - Many thanks for adding your excellent thoughts to this conversation. I share your point about "different parenting styles" and also the struggle around "time for self".
We have different approaches to that too. I appreciate how the Vachons highlight that the latter does not have to be the same: “we don’t advocate trying too hard to tease this domain apart as a separate entity. And that means you might as well settle for “good enough” when you try to keep your personal time equal as a spouse”.
In my particular case, my husband and I have “good enough”, complementary, and unequal approaches to both breadwinning and “time for self.” In our twenty five years of marriage and twenty one years of childrearing, I have greatly appreciated his different approach. He brings balance to my life.
I think ESP will only work for people with quite specific lifestyles. For the rest of us, sharing parenting and household duties in a practical way is the best bet.
My husband have I have always balanced things out as evenly as possible, but it has changed over time. He's a student and I'm working to support us (supplemented by his part-time work). So when our daughter was a baby and he was pre-med, he looked after her while I was at work (he took her to class once a week) for as long as was practical. Now he's studying medicine and couldn't take days off, so that wasn't possible with my son. It's a balancing act, and we're lucky to both cherish the time with the kids, and be career-driven.
Amy (and Marc),
Thank you for your generous comment! Your gracious and open response does not surprise me because it marks all of your thoughtful writing.
It took me a long time to write this review, because I fully support what you are trying to achieve and appreciate the challenges that remain in trying to get there. As a "non-academic" book, I was so impressed with how thoroughly you understood so many of the issues that academics have addressed over the past twenty years. The underpinning of the book is just really well done. I can see the influence of Francine Deutsch, whose work I admire, although I would add that you have also taken that work so much further. Your book is one of those "classic" works whose influence will stay because of its carefully built foundation (and your commitment to this issue).
The issue of “difference” is one of the thorniest ones in feminist theory and practice. There are just so many ways to navigate through it and around it. (I started writing about "it" many years ago, and it still poses so many questions and puzzles for me). Nevertheless, I still think that your approach is important because, as you state here and on your blog, the slide from difference to inequality is a slippery one.
I agree that we share similar goals on a shared journey, while taking slightly different paths to get there. I am looking forward to remaining in conversation with you!
P.S. By the way, I met Carl (one of the ESP couples in your book) at a recent lecture I gave in Saskatoon; it was wonderful to have an ESP ‘ambassador’ in the audience!
Andrea:
Thank you for the thoughtful post and review of Amy and Marc's book.
In our home, I think the focus has mostly been on balance and looking at balance over time, not necessarily every day. My partner and I have both been the stay-at-home parent while the other one was working 9 to 5. If we count it in months or years, then he spent more time as a stay-at-home parent than I did. However, if we were to start counting hours of parenting it might end up being more balanced. Parenting is important to both of us. So, as I mentioned in my post, Share the Important Things, we do ensure that we are sharing that fairly equally.
Time for self is important and I would say we do a good job of splitting that equally as well.
However, in the domain of paid work versus housework, I look at it all as work. It all needs to get done in order to keep our household running and to allow us to have the type of lifestyle that we want to have. So in our family, we share the work equally, but certainly he does more housework and I do more paid work. I think that as long as we both value both types of work, then we can still achieve equality in our home despite this difference.
We also recognize that no one model is carved in stone forever. We both have career and personal aspirations and our roles will shift over time.
I read Francine Deutsch's book, "Halving it All," shortly after we adopted our first child (picked it up during Babytime at the library, actually!) and I'm so glad that I was introduced to the basic ideas of equally shared parenting so early on. I was particularly taken with the possibility that both parents could work and care for children an equal amount of time, and we made it happen after our second child joined the family: we each work four days a week and have a weekday home with the children. I'm self-employed, and my husband arranged for reduced hours at his job. Yes, he got a little push-back from his employers, but he's proven just as productive in four days as five, and he's much happier with his long weekends. And we've sacrificed some income but gained better relationships with our kids and less stress overall.
I think more people might be able to create that kind of schedule for themselves if they knew about equally shared parenting as a concept and could see role models around who make it work. I talk about it with my creativity coaching clients because artists and writers often have a more flexible schedule and need a variety of activities to keep them grounded.
Adoption did make it easier for my husband and I to be equal care-givers from Day 1. We were off to a good start with splitting parental leave down the middle (six months for both of us), which was a tremendous help in fostering attachment with our kids and creating awareness and empathy for what it was like to work full-time and parent full-time. Many tensions over the division of household labour got resolved when we learned first-hand the other partner's experience!
My thanks to everyone who's bringing more attention to this terrific integrated approach to raising a family and growing a career at the same time.
Thank you, Andrea! Wonderful to know you met Carl - a true-blue ESP father with a great story. We hope to meet you someday too, and definitely to stay connected. Your analysis of our message is so clear and spot-on; it is refreshing to know that it comes across to a careful reader and honored to know that it rings true with your research and that of others in the academic world (personally, I've often called myself a sociologist-wanna-be stuck in the body of a pharmacist).
As we know you know, we wrote our book and speak out about the model of ESP because that story needs to be told as clearly and cleanly as possible. As such we are guilty as charged of lumping non-ESP lifestyles into the 'traditional' or 'semi-traditional' label for simplicity sake sometimes. But life is not clear and clean - ever - and we love all of your ideas. Finally, a big thank you to Annie for bringing your words to her blog and broadening the discussion and practical definition of equally shared parenting.
-Amy (and Marc...really, he's right here watching me type)
Andrea, thank you so much for this overview of Equally Shared Parenting. I would say that my husband and I practice shared parenting, but probably not equally shared parenting — but really I have no idea. As a work-at-home mom, I am responsible for more hours of solo child care than my husband, but he does more housework than I. How much more, though — who knows? What makes our balancing act especially tricky is that both of us are artists (he a painter, I a poet), and so a great deal of our "time for self" is actually given to more work — creative work, but work nevertheless. And so your questions ("Are the kids OK? Am I getting what I need? Is he getting what he needs? Are we both meeting our goals? Are our family relationships strong?") are particularly helpful. Sending a link to this post to my husband now ...
Channa, Thanks for your honest and frank reply. You have clearly thought about these issues and how this works best in your family situation. It is great that you are balancing your 'time for self' and that your notions of fairness are being met.
Great article.
I am concerned that we are in a time where young people are being told they have infinite choices in this arena of paid work/parenting trade-off. I think that this may be true, but also that these choices have ramifications, sometimes very serious ones over time. This is the "difference that difference makes" on which Doucet quotes Rhode. I'd like to see us do a better job of illustrating these consequences so that the choices, manifold though they may be, are informed choices.
I am in my 40s - an early Gen-Xer and among my age cohort - and older - these "differences that difference makes" are really starting to loom large. Women (and sometimes men) without enough track record in the paid work world to compete in the marketplace after divorce and living in poverty or on welfare. Men who do parenting with their children that has been focused primarily on competitive things, like sports, or on playtime, and who have not developed relational skills so that their children actually know them personally and can feel really secure around them. The insecurity and resentment these children feel which shows up in emotional disturbances, learning disabilities, poor school performance or other types of acting out. Girls who are still being objectified and boys who are being pressured to perform and both sexes still being shamed out of their full range of feelings (especially sadness being shamed out of boys and anger being shamed out of girls). Breadwinner parents (usually, but not always, men) acting out lack of connection with their family in affairs. Stay-at-home parents (usually, but not always, women) acting out lack of connection and common ground with husbands by leaning on children for companionship, or even nurturing or monetary support.
Divorced - and sometimes even married - parents who are leaning on their children to be their primary relationships in life rather than getting the marriage on common and good quality footing.
Yes, the choices are there - but are they really choices in the end? Do the needs of children eventually make clear that you cannot raise a well-rounded, well-adjusted, emotionally and physically healthy, financially and interpersonally responsible, autonomous, capable and accomplished child of either sex without two parents who are in good relationship with each other and who each possess these qualities themselves?
Thank you PhDinparenting readers for your thoughtful comments and to Amy and Marc Vachon for adding their voices to this conversation on their book.
In addition to the individual replies to comments that I posted last week, I wanted to briefly acknowledge the wonderful thoughts that people have offered here. In particular, I wanted to thank:
Olivia…. for sharing this idea of how equality (its forms and it definitions) shift over time.
Lindsay… for bringing attention to the importance of dads taking parental leave and also the equivalent relation between caregiving and breadwinning as both valuable forms of work.
Dave (and Folkabout Baby)… for bringing a dad’s perspective on this. Your point is something that I know the Vachons also support: “It’s so important to get people thinking critically about the way they structure their relationships. I think this is especially true for fathers, who can more easily fall into traditional roles thanks to the influence of a largely still-patriarchal society”.
Amy (of the web site halfheardinthestillness)… for introducing the all important issues of social class which I completely agree with. This is something that also impacts men’s ability to take their entitlement to parental leave in Canada; my recent research on dads and parental leave reveals that fathers in precarious work or in jobs outside of the public sector can and sometimes do face setbacks (including being fired) for taking leave from work.
Rivqa … for your attention to differences in lifestyle and trying to bring that into the balancing equation. I think you demonstrate really well this point about change over time and moving along a continuum where you balance a range of differences in work, home, and studying commitments.
Annie… for sharing more about how you divide your family life fairly equally, while also attending to how both paid work and housework are both valuable forms of work.
Alison... for recounting your very positive experience with ESP as a “ terrific integrated approach to raising a family and growing a career at the same time”… and for giving the perspective of an adoptive parent. I loved your ESP-like statement that “we’ve sacrificed some income but gained better relationships with our kids and less stress overall”.
Nancy – for fleshing out some of the meanings within this issue of difference and disadvantage – and its multiple configurations at both the micro and macro levels.
Rachael… for this vantage point of working for passion and not only for a pay cheque and how this can impede any clear lines around “time for self.” The same thing happens in my household, especially as my work has expanded into so many areas that I am passionate about; for example, when I travel to conferences or throughout the country to interview people, I view this as both time for self and work. And as my girls grew into teens, my time with them became less childrearing and more like treasured time (for self and others).