How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

by Jancee Dunn

  Morgenstern advises sleep-deprived clients to stash away all electronics ninety minutes before bed. “Going online before bed is like drinking a Red Bull,” she says bluntly. Studies show that the light from even a small device miscues the brain and promotes alertness—yet a National Sleep Foundation poll found that one in four parents reads or send emails or texts after initially going to sleep (and then they wonder why they’re staring at the ceiling).

  Comedian and mom of three Dena Blizzard tells me that her husband would disappear at night for hours to play video games in the den. “At first I thought it was just his thing to de-stress,” she said. “But after a while it got out of control and he wasn’t coming to bed until two in the morning.” One night, he crawled shakily into bed, covered with sweat. Alarmed, Blizzard asked him what was wrong. “He said, ‘I’ve been playing Call of Duty, all right? I lost a couple of my men and had to go back into the field. My men were down. You do not leave your men down.’ I said, ‘Do you have PTSD from the game? Because I can’t deal with this. You’re done. You’re done saving people.’”

  There are obvious reasons why recharging for parents is crucial—you need energy to run after your children, for starters. But one researcher uncovered another reason that came as a surprise to both her and the parents she was analyzing.

  In the first-ever study of what children think of their working parents, researcher Ellen Galinsky talked to more than one thousand children ages eight to eighteen about their family relationships and their parents’ work lives.

  She found that what parents believe their children think and what their children are actually thinking can be markedly different—the most telling example being what she calls the “one wish” question. She asked the children: If you were granted just one wish that could change the way your mother’s or your father’s work affects your life, what would that wish be?

  She then asked adults to guess how their child would respond. Most parents guessed that their kids would wish for more time together. Not so: their most ardent wish was that their parents would be less stressed and less tired. Only 2 percent of parents got that one correct.

  What surprised Galinsky further was how much those children worried about their parents—and their primary anxiety was that their parents were tired and stressed. One-third of the kids she talked to worried about their parents “often or very often,” while two-thirds worried some of the time. When we are frazzled and racing from one thing to the next—when even weekends have become a strain—kids notice, and become distressed.

  What often compounds working parents’ tension is the pressure they put on themselves to create Memorable Moments on their few days off. But research tells us you do not need to jet to Disney World for the weekend to wow the kids. As Galinsky found, you don’t even need to go to Uncle Stinky’s Unlicensed Fun-Plex off the highway.

  She also asked the children what they would remember the most from their childhoods and had their folks predict what the kids would say. Parents almost always guessed the five-star big event or vacation that took meticulous planning and buckets of cash. But Galinsky says that instead, kids specified the small, everyday rituals and traditions that said, “We’re a family.” One girl mentioned that every morning when she left for school, her father would say, “You go, tiger—you go get them.” This seemingly insignificant, throwaway ritual—which brings a lump to my throat every time I think about it—was singled out as the experience this child would remember most vividly from childhood. As Galinsky discovered, those little things matter so much, more than we think they do.

  Taking Julie Morgenstern’s and Jenny’s advice into consideration, I’ve started creating weekend scenarios that I call Everybody Sort of Wins, based on the principles of Utilitarianism developed by English philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill: everyone’s happiness is of equal value, so we should bring about the greatest amount of good for the greatest number.

  In every instance of weekend family time, I strategize: How can everybody sort of win? These scenarios take planning but have been extremely helpful. When I have to take Sylvie to the park one Saturday, I mitigate the tedium with a “fun” coffee (caffè mocha and, what the hell, extra whipped cream) and a highly entertaining podcast of Keith Richards on Desert Island Discs. Every time he breaks into a phlegmy cackle, I do, too, eliciting quizzical looks from other parents.

  Another example: our daughter’s piano teacher comes to our house every Friday afternoon. While they labor over the Peanuts theme song, I pile magazines and newspapers on the bed, Tom pours wine and brings in a little dish of olives and cheese, and we decompress together. This small ritual kicks off the weekend with a welcome dose of sweetness.

  My friend Sarah, meanwhile, takes her daughter to a kids’ movie every Saturday morning. “She looks forward to it because it’s our special ritual, and we go out for ice cream afterward,” Sarah says. “I look forward to it because I bring earplugs and one of those neck pillows, and get a nice, two-hour nap. I just tell her to wake me up if she has to go to the bathroom.”

  If we go on a car trip, Tom will download a podcast to listen to while he drives, Sylvie watches a movie on the iPad using her special volume-limited headphones, and I read a book (happily, I am able to read in a car). Everyone is doing what he or she likes. No one is held hostage to grating kid music.

  We’ve also started taking our daughter to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Tom and I love its rich history and discovering nineteenth-century names that will probably not make a comeback (Hippolite, Ebenezer, Bertha). Sylvie loves the 478 acres of mostly empty parkland studded with wild violets, and she’s not quite aware yet that there are moldering bodies underneath all the “statues.” (“Daddy, what does ‘Ye know not the hour’ mean?”)

  The three of us used to do most weekend activities in unison, until I thought, why? Why, for instance, were we going to the grocery store en famille, when it made Tom tense and Sylvie antsy? As I mentioned earlier, I happen to love grocery shopping—so now if I need to do it on the weekends, Tom drops me off and takes Sylvie to a nearby park. They kick a soccer ball around while I obsessively inspect every new granola flavor (“Ooh, coffee–dark chocolate–hazelnut? Into the cart it goes!”). Doo-de-doo. I text Tom when I’m done and they help load the car.

  On Saturdays, Tom has started meeting a cycling friend of his with a daughter who is Sylvie’s age. The girls disappear into a bedroom while the men talk about tire width and the size of their bike’s rear cassette (“Did you get a 12-32?”).

  Father-initiated playdates are fairly rare, but they’re important, particularly for daughters. Attitudes may be changing, but studies have shown that married fathers still spend more time in shared leisure activities with their sons, and children of both genders receive greater attention from their father when there is a son in the family. Once Tom found success with his cycling buddy, he began to devise father-friendly outings for other friends with daughters: an athletic editor friend, for instance, joined him at a nearby rock-climbing gym that has supervised programs for kids. The four of them then headed to an ice cream parlor for malted milkshakes. Another time, Tom and a friend took their girls to the park to kick a ball around and then to the car wash (six-year-olds think an automated car wash is big fun). The same father later met him at a social club in our neighborhood that offers hundreds of board games for walk-in play. The four of them spent a happy hour playing Pentago and eating pizza from the club’s little café.

  By far, Tom’s greatest Everybody Wins success was a jaunt to a pinball arcade in Manhattan accompanied by a fellow pinball geek and his son, capped by a visit to a taco truck. Meanwhile, I lounged in bed and read an entire book in one shot, something I hadn’t done since I was pregnant. When they returned from the playdate, I, newly refreshed, played with Sylvie while Tom had a nap.

  Still, I am having difficulty applying my Everybody Wins principle to Heather’s traveling sports time-suck (and I am well aware that with one child, I
have an easier time of it). I ask Morgenstern for advice. “Even with these obligations, you still have the opportunity for renewal time,” she says. Return to the car between games and read a book or listen to music, she suggests. If you have a younger kid, put down your cell phone and toss around a Frisbee with him or her. Bring something festive to eat and treat it as an occasion to catch up with your husband. “Just be mindful about it rather than see it as throwaway time,” she says.

  A friend of mine with two kids in traveling sports says that she turns off the music for long drives to various ball fields and uses the opportunity for a real conversation with her kids. “My oldest is thirteen, and he’s pulling away from me a little,” she says. “It’s so painful to see that I’m no longer in his inner circle. So I’ve just started viewing it as my way of keeping in the loop, and also see how he’s interacting with his friends.”

  Finally, the simplest, easiest Everybody Sort of Wins: Tom now sleeps in on Saturdays, and I sleep in on Sundays. Everybody sort of nearly wins! For the most part!

  After my lunch with Jenny, I receive an email from her entitled Forgot one thing. In it, she issues a clarion call for women: Why are we all taking two-minute military showers on the weekends?

  Think like a man, and shower with impunity, she writes. Feel no guilt! A man doesn’t and wouldn’t. Self-imposed guilt over not putting others’ needs first at all times is a disease carried almost exclusively on the extra X-chromosome. Ladies, just get in there, lock the door, turn those knobs, and don’t look back.

  Guess What? Your Kids Can Fold Their Own Laundry

  Like many children, my daughter does not take going to bed lightly. It is an excruciatingly elaborate drawdown, full of arcane ceremonies, methodical checklists, and lawyerly negotiations. One of these myriad steps involves the exacting arrangement of stuffed animals on her bed, so that when her eyes have finally closed, she resembles a small Egyptian pharaoh surrounded by ritualistic objects.

  So, we tend to get started early. One night, the living room is a debris field of Legos, puzzle pieces, and art supplies.

  “Honey, it’s time to clean up,” I say. “Then go put on your pajamas.”

  “Okay,” she says, as she nestles on the couch, absorbed in a book of amazing animal facts.

  Ten minutes pass and still she has not moved. “Kid, it’s time to clean up,” I say in an I-mean-business tone. I often channel Tommy Lee Jones as an FBI agent, when he sends people scuttling with shouted commands to “secure the perimeter.”

  “Okay,” Sylvie says absently, and remains motionless.

  Oh, to hell with it, I think, sweeping up her Legos and puzzle pieces. I can do this much more quickly. She had a long day at school. Plus, she’s learning that rats don’t burp and houseflies hum in the key of F. To deny her that knowledge may derail her path to a good school. I breeze into her bedroom, fold and restock the clothes on her bedroom floor with Gap precision, and lay out her pajamas. Then I finally rouse her to brush her teeth.

  My six-year-old is not a naturally shiftless person. She is not the problem here. I am.

  It’s an issue that’s rarely addressed in the ongoing “chore wars” conversation: God forbid we ask our kids to pitch in. Numerous studies show that children today are much less likely than previous generations to help out at home. Research conducted by the cleaning products firm Vileda found that a quarter of children ages five to sixteen did not do a single thing around the house to help their parents—including make their own beds. In the UCLA study of Los Angeles households cited earlier, two-thirds of children resisted or ignored completely their parents’ appeals for help.

  As UCLA study director Elinor Ochs tartly noted in the British newspaper the Guardian, while most of the debate about housework focuses on the mother and father, the idea that “school-aged children might relieve some of the burden is off the table as a culturally possible option.”

  It wasn’t always this way. Pioneer children were expected to haul water, make soap, and harvest the crops. In Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, historian Elliott West describes the experience of nine-year-old Marvin Powe, who grew up in nineteenth-century New Mexico. Powe’s father tells him to find and return some runaway horses that have bolted from the family ranch. They had wandered miles away, so the boy spends a week living off the land and camping with cowboys before locating the horses. He heads home just as his father reckons he should probably venture out and look for his son. I, on the other hand, have trouble persuading Sylvie to round up her My Little Pony figurines when they’ve escaped to the bathtub.

  More recently, researchers from Wellesley College pored over eight decades of magazine advice on childcare and found that while earlier generations of kids were required to do tasks such as make the family dinner or mow the lawn, today’s parents are reluctant to ask their children to do the same. (When was the last time you saw a child raking leaves, instead of a beleaguered dad? Or a landscaping crew?)

  These days, a child’s only real responsibility is schoolwork, according to Wellesley study author Markella Rutherford. In the rare cases when kids are asked to attempt something more strenuous, like cleaning out a garage, parents are advised to sweeten the deal with instant cash payments or “points” that can be traded in for toys or outings.

  For the most part, Generation Z children (yes, that’s a term, and no, I don’t know what comes after that, although “Generation Alpha” is gaining traction) are responsible for only the mildest of jobs, such as feeding the dog or setting the table. Contemporary parents tend not to push it for a variety of reasons: topping the list are guilt over long working hours and reluctance to add one more item to their kids’ already-crowded schedules. Some want their children to spend more time “pursuing their passions” (such as the Baby DJ School in my Brooklyn neighborhood, which promises to “introduce your little one to records, digital DJing, and funky beats!”). Others would rather outsource unpleasant household tasks (and if you pay someone to mow your lawn, why would your kids want to do what their parents won’t?).

  Finally, as my mother frequently reminds me, contemporary parents are less authoritarian and more egalitarian with their children. “Parents your age like to reason with their kids, like they’re little adults with rational minds,” my mother says, rolling her eyes. “No one wants to be the bad guy.” As a kid, I had daily, weekly, and monthly chores, and if I didn’t do them, I was grounded.

  I fully admit that I’m less strict than my mother was. What’s wrong with a little spoiling? When I leap up to get a bowl of sliced apples when my daughter requests a snack, or lay out her shoes for school, I’m showing her affection. It would be bliss if someone laid out my shoes for me. I once brought my daughter to a playdate, and her friend’s mom asked me to stay for lunch. She apologized, unnecessarily, that the only clean plates she had left were some compartmentalized kids’ trays with dinosaurs on them. When the mother plunked down my lunch—a turkey sandwich, a banana she had sliced into toddler-friendly chunks out of habit, and some yogurt, all portioned neatly into sections—I was so unexpectedly moved that I had to compose myself for a second. We all like to feel cared for.

  But there is a difference between “cared for” and “coddled to the point of helplessness.” I may not bribe my daughter to do household jobs with cash or outings, but the duties I give her are few, and sporadically enforced. She sets and clears the table when I remember to ask, and puts away her laundry when she’s not happily tunneling under the warm piles of just-cleaned clothes that I’ve dumped on the bed.

  And I’m not proud to say that the main reason I haven’t had her do anything more arduous is that I haven’t had the patience to teach her how to do chores, nor to remind her to do them.

  This does not benefit either of us. Research shows that doing chores makes children thrive in countless ways, and is a proven predictor of success, says Richard Rende, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown Medical School. “It’s about raisin
g kids who will be successful in life and work, not just in their college application process,” he says. “They develop empathy, because they understand that someone might need their help. They learn about being industrious, and the importance of doing the ‘dirty jobs’ in life. Kids who aren’t willing to do the grunt work are not going to just leap to the top of the heap. This is the recipe for the young adult who will not be entitled—’nuff said.”

  Nor does our child’s lack of participation benefit our marriage. A relationship that caters to children and treats them as beyond the reach of chores and other daily responsibilities creates a setting in which resentments between parents gain a good, solid foothold.

  Chores teach children that their contributions to the family are necessary and important, and—life lesson alert!—that people, even small ones who wear light-up shoes, need to get things done whether they feel like it or not.

  Austin child psychologist Carl Pickhardt advises me to think of chores as household membership requirements. “So you explain to the child, ‘Look, it takes a lot of work to run this family, and Daddy works at it, and I work at it, and you can work at it, too, and make a really important contribution,’” he says. “And when they help, you immediately say, ‘Thank you! This makes a big difference.’”

  Pickhardt often hears from parents, Oh, I’m going to wait until my kid is eight or nine, when they’re old enough to really help. “Uh, nope,” he says. By the time your kid is in preadolescence, he says, being asked to help is an imposition—so you want to instill the habit of chores by the age of three. “At that age, a child sees helping the parents as an act of power, as in ‘I’m doing what my parents can do, and that feels good,’” he says. “It’s like when the kindergarten teacher asks who wants to help erase the chalkboard, and hands fly up all over the room.”