Moms are pretty well known for doing everything for everyone. They take on the bulk of the childcare and housework, even if they work full time outside the home. They also typically handle the mental load and hidden labor that is unrecognized and unpaid.
It’s time for moms to find ways to share the load with their partners and kids.
The sacrifices moms make to do all this caretaking often feels noble, and many of us feel it’s expected of us. It’s even how some of us show our love. But we can gain a lot by doing less:
- Kids do better when dads are more involved.
- By modeling something different, our sons and daughters will grow up in households where moms don’t do everything for everyone, and they will learn not to perpetuate that behavior.
- Moms will gain the time and space to think, work, and create more equally with men, participating more equally in government, in business, in benefiting ‘man’kind, and more. And some of us will just simply be able to get a good night’s sleep for once!
Women belong in all the places decisions are being made.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Sharing the Load With Our Kids
Our job as parents is to raise our kids into adulthood. This includes teaching them the skills they need to take care of themselves when they move out, like how to clean a toilet, scramble an egg, and make a doctor’s appointment.
It’s a good idea for parents to begin teaching kids these lessons at a young age. There’s lots to learn by age 18, and anyone who has raised teenagers will know that kids are more receptive to these lessons when they are little than when they’re 15. Click the picture for more details.
Instead of focusing on assigning chores, my husband and I looked for opportunities to teach our kids skills they need to know, with a focus on having them do things for themselves as soon as they were able. We didn’t want them to grow up thinking that anyone else (mom, dad, roommate, or spouse) should be responsible for washing their socks once they were able to do it themselves. Parents can model for their kids that everyone in the household who eats, wears clothes, and uses a bathroom should participate to the best of their ability in providing that food and cleaning the things they use.
Interestingly, there are some strong ingrained beliefs that we have to fight against here. Women, especially if they are stay at home moms, believe it’s their job (unpaid, but still) to do all of these things for their kids and their husband. Many people also believe a kid’s job is to play, not work. I encourage moms (and dads!) to think of themselves first and foremost as as a teacher rather than a housekeeper, and to see their kids as students always – where play and learning can often be one and the same.
Housework As Play
Kids as young as 1 or 2 can start participating in the work required to run a household. For anyone who thinks we should let kids play and not make them work all through their childhood, I argue that for young kids, this kind of work IS play. I’ve written blog posts about each of these – click any picture to learn more.
Playing the Grocery Shopping Game
Family Contributions
Although many of the early tasks you teach your kids will be focused on self-care (getting dressed on their own, brushing their teeth, putting their dirty clothes in the laundry basket, picking up their toys), as they get older, they can do more to help the family.
It’s important to teach them not to perpetuate the model of mom doing this work for everyone else. Everyone who lives in the house and makes things dirty can help clean them. It’s also important that they learn to do these things well while you’re still available to teach them.
We didn’t make our kids do everything on this list themselves. We periodically introduced new tasks, then shared and rotated responsibilities so they got lots of chances to try each thing. These lists were just a guide for the kind of thing they were ready to try at each age.
We kept in mind, though, that the goal was to make sure they had the skills they’d need to manage on their own once they moved out!
You may also find it helpful to break down these tasks in a way that lets your kids learn all the steps and also know what you mean when you say “clean your room”. My kids responded well to the written list instead of me standing over them with an ‘endless’ list of requests.
At least one person found that her husband could use these lists too!
There are lots of jobs kids can do for themselves that moms don’t have to consider their job. Have them pack their own suitcase for your next trip or make a list of what they need for any activities they do and put them in charge of bringing everything. They can also pack their own lunch for school each morning. And if you really feel guilty making your kids do these things instead of taking care of it for them, I promise you that it will initially be WAY MORE WORK to teach your kids to do these jobs well than it will be to just do it yourself. You won’t be sipping your coffee and flipping through a magazine while they handle everything for a good long while.
Chores for everyone!
Setting up chores for the whole family is an effective way to teach kids that everyone in the household plays a role in caring for the household. Cleaning, providing food, staying on top of maintenance, all of it can and should be shared by everyone who shares the living space.
10 Chore Charts That Grow With Your Kids
Sharing the load with your partner
There are a lot of ways that gender roles are ingrained in all of us. My husband and I have spent years working to be equal partners at home, sometimes with more success than others. I’ve written several blog posts about things we’ve tried and what did and didn’t work. Click any picture below to read more.
The first thing that really surprised me after having kids was discovering how different I was from my almost exclusively male coworkers who also had kids (7 of us had babies that same summer!). Not only did I have physical recovery to get through after labor, and a rigorous breastfeeding and pumping schedule, there was something they had that I didn’t. A wife. Working dads are 5 times more likely to have a spouse at home taking care of things so they can focus on work.
Over the years my husband and I found a bunch of things we could do to help us share the work of parenting and house care while both continuing to work. Here are some of our best tips!
One thing we did that I think is critical to making this work was we both switched to working 4 days/week. This is something that some of our members of congress are starting to discuss, and I think it’s a necessary piece of the puzzle to help women achieve equality in the workforce. If parents (both moms and dads) make room for the work of parenting, supported by their workplaces, moms won’t be scrambling to try to figure out how to do it all on their own and still have big careers.
For anyone who wants to work towards more balance in their own households, I’ve made a workbook you can use to help talk to how to share all the work involved in raising kids and running a household. Click through to read about how you can use this to help share the load at your house.
Stay at home moms can also play an important role in sharing the load with their partners. For many women, the instinct when they become stay at home moms is take on the childcare plus all the rest of the house care, family care, and even husband care. These jobs combined are too big for one person, and the sooner women figure that out and work to make an arrangement that is balanced and allows the whole family to succeed, the better it will be for everyone!
The Trip Clip Blog 