https://www.fairplaylife.com/the-book
The central idea is a set of 100 cards representing various tasks that are necessary for running a household, that you split up between the two partners. Supposedly women tend to hold ~80 of the cards in most relationships.
The online discourse around this book can be kinda vitriolic (lots of examples of it starting arguments) but I do think that it’s a good starting point if you want to genuinely try to contribute equally.
But the idea of having physical cards that you split up and assign does sound really helpful. I might look into that. I would say in my experience breaking out household chores even amongst roommates, some tasks that seem even aren't remotely so once you get into it (I have been the advantaged and disadvantaged party in different apartments) and some are simply different such that some are trivial for one person and not so for another person. But that's a part of dealing the cards, even when splitting evenly. (now I'm wondering if I can see where people are getting into arguments.... ^_^')
Yeah, no wonder given that it starts with an unrealistic view that the average man is a lazy slob that sits around playing video games while his wife has to handle everything with children and the household. You keep waiting for her to mention that anything else might be possible throughout the book, but that never happens. I think gay couples were mentioned maybe once.
The way that I’ve tried to handle this is to focus on equalizing “total time per week spent on managing cards”, which requires time-tracking but is more fair, and also negotiating a modified set of cards.
The book kinda suggests both of those but I think that in practice most people don’t implement them.
And, as you said, the tone of the book can be off-putting at times. I still feel like it’s the best available resource for this problem.
Further, many cultures, past in particular, seem to be very different in terms of parent involvement. To take an example from fiction, Harry Potter goes to Hogwarts at 11 years old. Yes, that's fiction but it's based on current and past cultures. It's still a thing in the UK for "elite" kids as young as 7 or 8 to go to boarding school, away from their parents. Kids in places too far for a public school are often sent to other cities, to boarding schools. East Asia & India also have famous boarding schools.
The point being, this idea that parents must be with their kids many hours a day until they kids move out of the house at 18 or 21 is not a fact of life, it's a cultural choice. I am from that culture and wish to spend as much time as possible with my kids. But I can also see it's a cultural choice, not some universal way things must be or else bad stuff happens.
I have heard similar stories from many you wouldn't know, they say the same thing about their partner or parents. The desire to have it all ends up trading one thing over the other.
Two things I've heard from different ambitious women: "To really achieve, you need a wife" is something I've heard a lot- that it takes one parent sacrificing some of their career priority; traditionally that was the woman but it in theory could be the man (2), it just rarely is.
The other thing an ambitious woman told me once is that her mom told her "husband, career, kids, pick two." Basically, there is just only enough energy for a given person per day to invest in two of them. I've seen some women who managed, from the outside, to at least look successful at all three, but it's rare indeed.
1: When my kid was born the software company I worked for (I'm an American at an American company, but this was an area of competition for software devs at the time) offered a 14 week paid parental leave, even for men. Most men took a four week ("secondary caregiver" leave) and overlapped it with their wives 12 week unpaid FMLA. I took mine (14 week "primary caregiver") after my wife's leave expired, such that our kid had one of us caring for him every moment of his first six months. I remain convinced that was absolutely vital as the basis for both my relationship with my son and with my wife- she had to rely on me, trust me to care for the kid, and I couldn't hand him off, it was all on me every day. And so we both developed the parental muscles, could trust that the other one understood the reality of the situation, in a way that many father's don't get a chance. And that experience convinced me that the US needs maternal leave, obviously, but it also needs paternity leave- and the policies need to be designed such that the woman has to be back at work for at least some of the paternity leave, it can't all be used concurrently.
2: In a recent survey of American households https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-gr... about 55% of American heterosexual marriages the man makes 60% or more of the household income, about 30% both halves of the couple were between 40-60%, and just 16% saw the woman make more than 60% of the household income. In the majority of the 16% the woman still spent more time on unpaid household chores and carework than the man they were out-earning. Only in the 6% of heterosexual marriages where the woman earned 100% of the income did the number of hours per week in unpaid labor of men even equal that of their female partner.
Not sure how to apply a legal framework, but in my area this is often enforced by the lack of daycare options for <2yos (the threshold might be lower, but about that much).
Very rare to see parents around me take their parental leave at the same time bc they'd be risking still being on a waitlist when they're done.
As for how you end up with just those two, I think the answer is divorce: you don't spend the energy to maintain your relationship with your spouse. Before you had kids you could invest your time and energy in your spouse and your career, then the kids come along and your relationship with your spouse weakens, either all the way to divorce or to just a degraded state.
Does that solve the problem? Now you're trying to prioritise kids and career while also being a single parent for half the week.
This situation is in development for me so we will see. 0 and 3 year old
And I do wonder if this is about the engineer mindset ('I've reduced this to a previously solved problem, I just let the subroutine handle it') or about the way that men are socialized in my culture (just take her out to dinner twice a year- Mother's Day and Valentine's- and remember her birthday and you're meeting social expectations) or what. But it's the biggest threat to my (and I'd hazard a guess most other) marriages.
Being self-aware and self-critical is one of those changes that instantly improves everyone's life around us, including our own.