Free All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior

division of labor being a key source of contention between spouses.” (Mothers of children ages zero to four, they add, report the most acute feelings of unfairness.)
    But perhaps the most intriguing tidbit about domestic fairness comes from a massive UCLA project in which researchers spent more than a week inside the homes of thirty-two middle-class, dual-earner families, collecting 1,540 hours of video footage. The result was a mother lode of data about families and their habits, and it generated dozens of studies. In one of them, the researchers took saliva samples from almost all of the participating parents, hoping to measure their levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The researchers found that the more time fathers spent in leisure activities while they were at home, the greater their drop in cortisol at the end of the day, which came as no surprise; what did come as a surprise was that this effect wasn’t nearly as pronounced in mothers.
    So what, you might ask, did have a pronounced effect in mothers? Simple: Seeing their husbands do work around the house.
     
    OUR CONTEMPORARY DIVISION OF labor may be getting more equal overall, but it’s still unequal for plenty of mothers. As the Time story noted, mothers of children under six still work five more hours per week than fathers of children under six. That’s not a small difference. In many cases, that time is devoted to nocturnal caregiving, which, as we saw in chapter 1, can be devastating to the body and mind. In 2011, Sarah A. Burgard, a sociologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, analyzed data collected from tens of thousands of parents. In dual-earner couples, she found, women were three times more likely than men to report interrupted sleep if they had a child at home under the age of one, and stay-at-home mothers were six times as likely to get up with their children as stay-at-home dads.
    Funny: I once sat on a panel with Adam Mansbach, author of Go the F**k to Sleep. About halfway through the discussion, he freely conceded that it was his partner who put his child to bed most nights. That said so much, this casual admission: he may have written a best-selling book about the tyranny of toddlers at bedtime, but in his house it was mainly Mom’s problem.
    But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that a husband and wife do work the same number of hours. That is not, in and of itself, an indicator of fairness. In the context of marriage, fairness is not just about absolute equality. It’s about the perception of equality. “Parents’ satisfaction with the division of the child-care tasks,” note the Cowans in When Partners Become Parents, “was even more highly correlated with their own and their spouses’ well-being than was the fathers’ actual amount of involvement [emphasis mine].” What a couple deems a fair compromise in any situation is not necessarily how an outsider would adjudicate it. They determine fairness based on a combination of what they need, what they think is reasonable, and what they think is possible.
    But that’s also where things can get awfully complicated. Men and women may, on average, work roughly the same number of hours each day, once all kinds of labor are taken into account. But women, on average, still devote nearly twice as much time to “family care”—housework, child care, shopping, chauffeuring—as men. So during the weekends, say, when both mothers and fathers are home together, it doesn’t look to the mothers like their husbands are evenly sharing the load. It looks like their husbands are doing a lot less. (Indeed, in another analysis of those 1,540 hours of video data, researchers found that a father in a room by himself was the “person-space configuration observed most frequently.”)
    There are some women who’ll cheerfully say that if their partners are working more paid hours during the week, they’ve earned their extra rest over the weekend. But for many mothers, it’s