The best gift a husband can — and should — give his spouse on Mother’s Day
Several years ago, Laura Segal’s husband read a quote that claimed the best gift you could give a working mom is time. He took the advice to heart.
There have been concessions. They have simple dinners, with plenty of takeout and prepared meals, and “definitely don’t keep the house as clean as we would like all the time ... Some things just have got to give, I think, or I don’t know how we would stay afloat,” she said. Quadlin enjoys cooking, while her husband tends to care more about cleaning. They outsource yard work at their Columbus home and subscribe to a meal-delivery service — assistance, she admits, that they are privileged to have. She tries to cut down on the time she spends doing chores or thinking about the gender dynamics at play in her everyday interactions. After all, she said, thinking about those issues for a living can weigh on a person.
For example, U.S. women spend an average of 244 minutes per day on unpaid work, compared to men’s 145.8 minutes, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Moms in 2016 continued to spend more hours per week than dads on child care and housework , and fewer hours per week on paid work , according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
While same-sex couples tend to have a more equal division of household labor, that balance shifts after they have kids, as one performs more of the domestic labor while the other earns more money. Salaries and promotions also begin to diverge after heterosexual couples have kids.
Shattering the status quo could pay off in spades. An alternate reality in which women achieved identical paid participation to men in the economy would add up to $28 trillion to the global gross domestic product by 2025, according to a 2015 report by the consulting firm McKinsey. And research has linked more balanced housework arrangements with less depression and greater marital satisfaction among women.
‘Both of us had to feed children, both of us had to put children to bed, both had to dress and play with children.’ —Soraya Chemaly, author of ‘Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger’ They later had two sons and a daughter — aged 1, 4 and 6 — who brought with them a whole new set of adjustments. But while certain child-care tasks fell to Huang, like breastfeeding, she says her husband would take on a greater share of non-child-care tasks.
And writer and activist Soraya Chemaly, the author of the 2018 book “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger” and mother of three daughters in their late teens and early 20s, says having her younger twin girls helped pull her and her husband away from traditional gender norms. Part of striking a balance means being OK with how the other person handles their share. Segal admits, for example, that she might shop for birthday presents or figure out camp schedules “with probably a different level of intensity” than her husband might. “If you want somebody else to do the activity or take on that responsibility, you also have to be willing and able to understand they’re going to do it the way they will do it,” she said.
“I really do believe that even the most progressive families have to deal with these very traditional environments, once children enter institutions,” she said, citing sports, schools and religious institutions as examples. 2. Keep it “caring and lighthearted and loving,” Barker said. “Otherwise, we just become co-administrators, and we don’t really want to hang out as much anymore — at least not in intimate, loving ways.” Chemaly agreed. “I don’t know how people do it if they’re constantly fighting with their spouse, but we didn’t have that situation because we really were just tied at the hip,” she said.
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