• There's Still A Long Way To Go, Baby

• The Problem With No Name Revisited

• The Tired Superwoman

• A Life Of Balance

• The Way We Whine

• The Glass Ceiling Is In The Nursery

• What Did You Expect?

• Term Limits

The Way We Whine

Ann King's work-life arrangement depicts an increasing phenomenon, but situations like Mary Clayton's and Lauren Martling's still dominate the landscape for American mothers. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard a mother complaining about "him" and how little "he" does compared to her, or how much free time her husband has, and how little she gets. Countless studies documenting who does what in today's households show why mothers seem unable to stop grousing.
In the most famous study on the subject, University of California sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild found that compared to their husbands, employed mothers work an extra month of twenty-four hour days a year at home attending to their child care and household responsibilities. Hochschild calls the extra female workload the "the second shift," a phrase that has gained currency.

My friend Susan provides a good example of a working mother doing too much and talking a lot about it. Before the birth of their son, Susan's husband Bob seemed a fairly "sensitive" husband who often went grocery shopping and did non-traditional chores like making sandwiches for a weekend bike trip. After watching a Sunday night news segment about infant development, Bob turned to Susan, and asked, "Are we doing enough to stimulate William?"
Susan spends more time with their son than Bob does, and would like Bob to do more at home. Deflecting resentment, she said, "I don't know."

"We should look into it," Bob replied, meaning you.

Susan objected to Bob's view of his parenting job description as consultant rather than principal. Without intending to, Susan had taken on the responsibility for childrearing. She vents

"When did I become the brains of this operation? Before William was born, we split everything in the house. Now, even though Bob helps, I'm running the show. I'm the one who has to plan when things happen. What to bring. I make William's lunch and get him ready for daycare. I decide what he has for lunch every day and make sure it's in the house. Bob doesn't even see William in the morning. I pick William up at daycare, give him his dinner, and give him his bath."

It sounds like Susan negotiated a poor situation for herself. But it's pretty darn common. Most women move into the executive ranks of parenting, regardless of whether they join the forty-five percent of new mothers who stay home or the fifty-five percent employed outside the home. More than three-fifths of the men in dual income households Hochschild studied performed between zero and thirty percent of the child care and household duties. Scores of other studies have yielded similar findings: men do more than they used to at home but still far less than women.

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