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

not that simple. Paid work, both literally and figuratively, is generally assigned a higher value by the world at large, which has all sorts of unquantifiable psychological rewards. Perhaps just as important, not all work is created equal: an hour spent on one kind of task is not necessarily the equivalent of an hour spent on another task.
    Take child care. It creates far more stress in women than housework. (As one woman in an ECFE group put it: “The dishes don’t talk back to you.”) About two-thirds of the way through Alone Together, the researchers actually quantify this distinction, noting that if a married mother believes that child care is unfairly divided in the house, this injustice is more likely to affect her marital happiness than a perceived imbalance in, say, vacuuming, by a full standard deviation. Data also make clear that a larger proportion of a mother’s child care burden is consumed with “routine” tasks (toothbrushing, feeding) than is a father’s, who is more apt to get involved in “interactive” activities, like games of catch. There are differences in the kinds of child care that parents do, in short, even if it’s all labeled “child care” by researchers attempting to quantify it. (Ask any parent which type of child care they prefer.)
    It is, of course, the nature of practically all humans to overestimate how much work they do in any given situation, rather than underestimate it. But when it comes to child care, the women’s estimates do seem more accurate. In Alone Together, the authors note that fathers guessed that they did, on average, about 42 percent of the child care in their families, based on a large national survey conducted in 2000. Mothers, by contrast, put their husbands’ efforts at 32 percent. The actual number that year was 35 percent, and it remains roughly the same today.
    These distinctions may explain why women remain so vexed about the family economy, even if they’re no longer getting gypped in absolute terms. “I’m pretty sure Clint thinks he does 50 percent of the work when we’re home together,” says Angie as we’re driving along in the car, “but not necessarily the child care. And that’s what makes me most stressed.”
    deadlines and divided time
    It’s later in the morning. Eli is still at Little Explorers, and Angie is folding laundry on the landing at the top of the stairs. Zay starts to fuss in his crib. Angie pops up to check on him, then returns. “I never get time to put laundry away,” she says. “I try. But usually we’re just moving it from the clean basket to the dirty basket.” Zay is crying now. “Yes, yes, yessssss, I hear you!” She jumps up and goes into his room. “Shhhhhhhhh.”
    Her efforts to mollify him aren’t successful. A few moments later, she brings him out and puts him next to her. She resumes folding for a third time, integrating her efforts with peek-a-boo games, just as Jessie had done. She tosses a blanket over his head. “Where’s Zay?” Fold. Toss. “Where’s Zay?” Fold. Toss. “Where’s Zay? . . .”
    This is another thing that quantitative studies of American time use cannot show you: for the majority of mothers, time is fractured and subdivided, as if streaming through a prism; for the majority of fathers, it moves in an unbent line. When fathers attend to personal matters, they attend to personal matters, and when they do child care, they do child care. But mothers more often attend to personal matters while not only caring for their children but possibly fielding a call from their boss. In 2000, just 42 percent of married fathers reported multitasking “most of the time”; for married mothers, that number was 67 percent. In 2011, two sociologists provided an even more granular analysis. They found that mothers, on average, spend ten extra hours per week multitasking than fathers, “and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and childcare.” (When