Without any scientific data to back me up, I believe kids push parents into traditional gender norms (at least in same-sex couples) because of legitimate (though frustrating) biological reasons during that first year with a baby. Because of that, kid (and home) labor gets unevenly distributed to women, and this pattern of the labor division gets established. And then, because of the new crazy pace of life with a kid, the pattern persists beyond the first year and beyond any legitimate rationale for it.
Let’s talk about this and how we can get intentional around it to at least prevent the pattern from persisting beyond any rationale for it.
This is also obviously informed by my own experience. I would love to hear your thoughts – positive or negative – around this. Email me at ke***@********an.com.
And please feel free to send this episode to a friend, too! Thank you!
Other resources that might be relevant:
Time Management Tips for New Moms (Majka)
13 Strategies to Plan Maternity Leave
What Do Working Moms Do During The Summer
Below is a transcript of the episode. Enjoy!
Other links you might enjoy:
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📱 Follow me on Instagram: Get bite-sized, real-life time management tips for working women—like reminders to set mail holds before travel, anonymous day-in-the-life calendars from other professional women, and behind-the-scenes looks at how I manage my own time.
Full Transcript
[Upbeat Intro Music]
Kelly Nolan: Welcome to The Bright Method Podcast where we’ll discuss practical time management strategies designed for the professional working woman. I’m Kelly Nolan, a former patent litigator who now works with women to set up The Bright Method in their lives. The Bright Method is a realistic time management system that helps you manage it all, personally and professionally. Let’s get you falling asleep proud of what you got done today and calm about what’s on tap tomorrow. All right, let’s dig in!
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Hey hey! All right, so today’s episode is geared more for parents. If you’d rather skip because that’s not you, totally go for it. But today what we’re gonna talk about is something that I think about a lot on a broader scale is not even the power dynamics but the divvy of labor at home and how uneven it can become. And what I want to talk about today more specifically is kind of what I think of, without any scientific data backing me up, is how it happens and therefore what we can do about it.
Traditional Gender Norm Imbalance – 1:05
And what I think about in the shorthand of is I think of this as the one-year shakeup, that the root cause of a lot of this imbalance tends to become established, I believe, in the first year of having a kid. The first year of a kid’s life shoves us into gender norms in such a way that establishes a pattern that is hard to break out of, and so, let’s talk about more of what I mean by that today and then practical things that we can do to help avoid it entirely to the extent we can and address/remedy some of it if it’s happened to you already.
So just for the context, I am married to a wonderful person and a wonderful partner, and before we had kids, truly, our relationship felt very equitable. If anything, I was the breadwinner in our relationship for I think the first four or five years of our relationship before I left law, and I felt like our home life was very evenly shared. If anything, he cooks; I don’t. He keeps the house neater than I do. He wants to get rid of stuff more than I do and have it be neat. And so, there was a very even feeling in our relationship.
That shifted a lot when I had kids, and just to be very fair to my wonderful husband, I think it shifted a lot more in my head than in reality because my experience becoming a mom coincided with me leaving law. We found out we were pregnant five days after my last day of being a lawyer. So my experience might be more exaggerated than most. But my guess is that many can relate.
So I went from literally being the breadwinner attorney in our relationship while my husband was in residency to my husband still being in his last year of residency, being a chief resident, moonlighting to make more money, and I was literally barefoot and pregnant at home and trying to get this weird business (that no one really knew what it was, including me) off the ground and add into that raging hormones and exhaustion, and it just really threw me for a loop. I think I internalized this change in our relationship probably more than what was happening in reality, but there was enough happening in reality to fuel it.
And then we get this baby who arrives, and she’s wonderful but tricky, a tricky baby, and the biological differences between me and my husband and what the baby wanted forced us into what I felt like was traditional gender norms in a way I had not experienced before and in a very unwelcome way, again, in a way that was probably very exaggerated in my head more than reality. But my husband was in residency (as I said, chief resident, moonlighting). He was completely wiped and really had to put his energy into residency. But I also had never been a parent before and didn’t know what it meant for us. Is this how he’s going to be in our relationship? Is this what parenting is all the time? Is it always gonna fall on me?
Our daughter wouldn’t take a bottle for the first year, so I really was stuck to the house every two hours, essentially, for a year. I couldn’t really leave her longer than that because every time we tried, and my husband tried so hard to get her to take a bottle without me there — we tried everything. We were desperate. I was desperate, and we tried everything, and it just didn’t work. She is a stubborn little lady. That will serve her very well in life, but it was tricky back then, and all of that really forced me into a place — probably there were a lot of undiagnosed postpartum anxiety things going on. I don’t know if there was PPD, but it was a heavy load to be carrying, and I read into it a lot from a gender-norm perspective.
And the reality is we were pushed into very traditional gender norms by virtue of him being in residency, me having a flexible job, the baby not taking a bottle, and all this kind of stuff. Suddenly, I’m very much in that gendered role in a way that I didn’t love being in without the clarity that it would end, and that’s really what I want to focus on today is that, for medically-typical babies and very generally speaking but I think in a pretty solid general perspective, I wish I had known that around that one-year mark things would let up significantly — not perfectly but significantly.
Our daughter would eat more solid foods, which even though she wasn’t taking a bottle very well, she could rely on other foods and water more sustainably to help her be away from me for longer periods of time. She was candidly more interactive and interested in doing other things around the one-year mark. So my husband could take her places, like little adventures together. And even though she was only one, it was more interesting for her and for him to do those types of things and, again, logistically possible because she could go eat with him somewhere else. Her sleep became more normal so that it wasn’t, again, amazing yet but she didn’t really sleep very well for that first year, which you can only imagine added to that fun experience of my life. [Laughs] But also then I was getting to sleep more reliably so my own emotional needs felt better. We could rely on her sleep better and make plans better and things like that.
As a side note here, I just want to say for any new mom or mom to a new kid (even if it’s not your first kid) who’s trickier on the sleep department than your past kids, I do, looking back, wish that I’d hired someone to help earlier on that sleep training front. I tried sleep training on my own in a variety of ways. It failed miserably. But for my second child, I had more clarity of thought and executive functioning skills intact because I wasn’t quite so exhausted, and I did hire someone at four-and-a-half months, and shoutout to Margot, who is also a friend, at Littlest Learners. A huge, huge thank you. That was one of the best things I’ve ever done. So I wish I had done that with my first. I wish I had done that a lot earlier, and I just throw that out there not to give unsolicited advice so much as to help nudge someone else who’s not thinking as clearly, as I definitely was not thinking very clearly during that phase of life just from the pure exhaustion and probably PPA and some other things that I wish I had done that.
Around the One-Year Mark, Things Get Better – 7:45
But going back on track, what I wish I had known is that, again, for medically-typical children in a lot of ways around that one-year mark, things just become a bit easier. I would also say that it obviously continues. I would say that my youngest is two-and-a-half, and every month I feel like I’m still getting more energy and more breathing space, but that one-year mark was a massive shift for me with my first child, in particular. So I wanted to talk about that because why does that matter? And there are a few reasons.
The biggest one in this scenario that I wanted to talk about that I alluded to at the beginning of this episode is that from a broader perspective, many couples with kids struggle with an imbalance in the home responsibilities. That’s not news to anybody. And from what I can tell, a good portion of those people really struggle with it because they didn’t experience it before kids. It’s something that — your whole world changes when you have kids, and suddenly you’re in almost a different relationship than you had a couple months or a couple years before, and it’s really confusing and aggravating.
Again, without any evidence or data, based on my own opinions and observations, I think that this imbalance gets set up in that first year when the biological differences, at least with different-sex couples and probably to some extent within same-sex couples, these patterns we establish in that first year because of biological needs, because of natural strengths within different people perhaps, because of these things, these patterns in how we divvy up labor around the child and around the home get created but they perpetuate beyond when that need really exists because life happens. You know, you have a one-year-old and life still feels crazy. So life keeps happening, and you don’t intentionally readjust the balance when it could be readjusted because the things that forced you into these somewhat traditional gender roles don’t exist in the same ways to the same degree anymore.
I think that after that year mark (again, generally speaking), the divvy of labor around the child and around the home could resume being more equitable, and hopefully for you it was earlier. This is just my experience, so I’m talking from that. But to some extent for any of us there’s a period of time, whether it’s a couple of months or a full year, that there is an imbalance that partly reflects reality, but that reality shifts to allow for equitable divvy-up of labor, but we don’t fully acknowledge it. We don’t even notice it, and so, we keep going in these patterns we established when the baby was so little. And I really think we could prevent that perpetuation beyond any necessity by bringing awareness to this, by thinking intentionally about this and communicating about it so that at least some of this stuff could be avoided. And so, that’s what I want to talk about today.
The first point I want to make, along these lines from a practical perspective (it might sound less practical but I think it really matters) is just from a sanctity perspective, if you are really going through it in a first year as a new mom, I just want you to know, remind yourself if you’ve had other kids or trust maybe more experienced parents, that it does tend to get better, at least if you child is medically-typical. I share that because the difference that I had in my first child and my second child during those years is night and day. There are a lot of reasons for that. It’s not just about this.
But one of them is that I truly understood that it was a short-term issue. I also could truly understand that my husband is an incredible dad when he can be, from a biological perspective. And that year mark showed me like, “Oh, after this, he’s an incredible dad,” and also, by the way, when he’s not moonlighting and chief residencying and being a resident and all of that. That also has a contribution to this. But knowing that he could take more of the load and would happily take more of the load when he could really helped just chill my own resentment and feelings around that. It also helped me play through those trickier months and years with a little one that’s so demanding on, particularly, moms and know that the light at the end of the tunnel was coming. I just think from a sanity perspective, it was just game changing for me to understand that with my second kid and allowed me to just lose a lot of that resentment and frustration and kind of floundering feeling because I knew that it was just a season in a real way.
Calendar In Your One-Year Shakeup – 12:41
Turning to more of a time-management perspective, I want you to kind of think about this in like kind of a — it probably sounds weird or maybe nerdy, but I think that it’s really valuable is particularly when you’re in the throes of being a new mom — and this is directed at the new moms. We’ll kind of broaden this up to any parents at any stage in a minute. But for the new parents, if you’re going into having your first kid, you’re going into having the next kid, you’re already in those early stages, you know at some point that it’s really hard to remember things, especially when you’re in it. One, I just didn’t trust my brain for anything. I already don’t. I definitely didn’t when I was not getting sleep and all that kind of stuff.
So what I would encourage you to do is embrace your calendar on this front. Think about roughly when the baby will be, let’s say, a year old and calendar, roughly at that time, “Hey, we want to have a big shift in the divvy of labor around now. If it hasn’t happened already, we want it to have happened around now.” Remind future you that this is coming, just so that current you can really see that light at the end of the tunnel to a degree. But also so future you doesn’t go blow right by it and keep patterns as normal, like status quo, because you haven’t fully appreciated that this is coming.
I also would remind yourself that it’s coming. So don’t just put that one calendar entry in but maybe three months before you can say, “Start thinking about this transition. What do we want that to look like now that we’ve been in it longer?” The tricky part with parenting is you can’t, sitting here today, plot out perfectly how things will be divvied out down the road because you don’t know exactly how life’s gonna be then, what you’re gonna enjoy, what you’re not gonna enjoy, what your partner’s gonna enjoy, what they might not enjoy. It’s hard to divvy that up so far before it happens. But reminding yourself, “Hey, this is coming,” so that you can just state thinking about that transition, that intentional transition ahead of time can be really valuable.
I’d also calendar a few reminders. So you calendar that year-mark one where you’re like, “Roughly around now, we want to start the transition.” I might even do a monthly one from then on out until you feel like you’ve hit your stride for a period of time. Know that this is a constant recalibration in a relationship. But I think that that year mark, I just wish more people talked about it somewhere around here. And maybe for you it’s six months. I have no idea. If you have a bottle-fed baby who takes its bottle religiously, I hope you can do it earlier. But I think it’s relatively safe to say around the year mark you could do it. It’s such a game-changing moment to readjust patterns that have been established.
In addition, I would start looping your partner in now about that. Again, if you’re a new mom or you’re pregnant listening to this or you’re thinking about having children, really acknowledging and talking about with your partner, “In the beginning, this might happen. But this isn’t the status quo we’re going to engrave in our relationship for while we have kids for the next 18 years. The first year might require this, but around that mark, then I want it to shift to look more equitable, and I want you to know it’s coming.”
I really think — and this is just me maybe idealistically thinking about it, but I think it makes sense from a practical perspective, that having these conversations and setting expectations about what the first few months might look like, then what the next few months might look like, then when we might shift to be a more equitable partnership, you could really set the stage for sharing the load early and also allowing patterns to be shaped in that first year that don’t mean that’s how it’s gonna be shaped forever. You don’t surprise your partner. You don’t create anxiety about you of like, “Is this what it’s gonna be like forever?” You could really avoid some of that.
My hope is that knowing that in the beginning it might be a certain way but that you could shift it intentionally over time and intentionally managing your time and expectations in light of that knowledge might really help you enjoy that first year more than I did with my first in a way that I really did with my second. I hope that it helps you feel less resentment towards a partner, and I really hope that it allows you to have a more equitable partnership over time.
Ideas of How to Divvy Up Labor – 17:04
And so, just some ideas that — you know, this is my personal experience, so I would love to hear (other people listening to this) what they think. Around that year mark — and again, earlier if you can, if you can do bottle feeding and that kind of stuff. For me, around that year mark, we were really able to split weekend days. So when my husband was home or when my daughter was home and my husband was not working, even if it wasn’t a weekend, we would really split days.
So our default arrangement was I would take mornings until even when we were doing two naps, that would include each of us would get a nap, but when we dropped to one nap, eventually, I would take the mornings and then he would take the afternoons, and then around five we would meet up for family time and have dinner and all that kind of stuff before bedtime. That could change. It was totally flexible. But having that clarity around who’s in charge of our daughter at each time of day really helped give us both breathing space, individual time. We both like doing our own thing a lot. I think we’re pretty independent people, and it gave us each some sort of rhythm in our life that gave us that alone time, time we could do with what we wanted more frequently because that was a really big game changer for us.
And again, we’ve shifted it. Like if he had something fun come up in the morning he could take our daughter to, we’d flip. Vice versa, if I had a morning activity come up that I wanted to go do alone, we would flip. But just having those defaults was really, really nice.
In terms of dividing the household labor and some of the child-related labor as much as you can, I think that there is a whole other topic of conversation. It’s a massive topic in and of itself. Today I really wanted to just talk about how we kind of established patterns early that perpetuate beyond their utility but for those interested in divvying up labor, this is something that I think is very nuanced by couples. I know that a lot of people really find a lot of value in the fair play method. So that is something to check out for sure if you are interested in doing that.
I have — and I need to read the book still, candidly, so it’s not like I’m talking about this from a full working knowledge of what the method is. I suspect that it would work less well for me just because every single week looks different. My husband’s not home a lot. So even if we divvied up who puts the trash out, as an example, we can’t clearly divvy that up because I have to do it if he’s working. So things like that, our rhythms are not consistent enough to allow for a real divvy of labor in that way, but we do think about and divvy up our labor based on what’s realistic for my husband to take on.
So, for example, he pays all daycare-related bills. He pays all of our health-related bills and tracks those expenses and things like that because they’re obviously time sensitive but they’re not like, “This needs to happen today.” Like, he could do it within the next week and it’s fine. So I break those off. Anything that comes in on those fronts, I just put it on his desk, and I don’t even worry about it anymore. Same thing for if we can break off medical things, like if one of our daughters has to see an allergist, if that’s something that he can schedule and he knows his schedule that far enough in advance, then that’s something that he can break off. It is tricky. He doesn’t get his schedule sometimes beyond a month or two in advance, and he can’t just take time off once the schedule is out. So sometimes with a specialist that you have to book out four months in advance, it doesn’t work perfectly. But that’s something we try to do.
That said, candidly, my own control issues around wanting to know my kids’ medical situations kind of prevents me from letting that one go entirely. But I can’t have the resentment towards him when it’s my own drive to want to be in the know around their medical conditions. So just being up front about that one, that that break off doesn’t always work well for us. But when it comes to bill paying or things like that, anything that’s kind of flexible I really try to hand off to him. Same with — and this one I don’t like because it’s so traditionally gender normed — but doing things around the house like lightbulbs or things like that, I really just punt that to him because I just have to realize I have so much on my plate that whatever I can break off for him, I’m going to.
And then on smaller-scaled things, we really try and — and this is something we have to keep communicating about. When he is home in the evenings, when I’m doing the oldest’s bedtime, which takes a lot longer, then we just have things where he cleans up the kitchen in the house while I do that, and that is amazing to me when I can come down when he’s actually at home in the evenings and can clean up the house and do all that and save me from having to do it after bedtime, that is massive, and I just always appreciate it not in the sense that he’s healing me. He’s just being my partner, but I just soak it in because it’s incredible.
The Beauty of Calendaring Your Divvy of Labor – 22:02
The big thing I also just want to just point out is that beyond fair play and divvying up tasks in a conceptual way, I’m a massive fan of that element of The Bright Method. The communication we can have within the calendar and just bringing awareness to what’s going on with our kids but also the massive load that I am carrying at home, I can show him my calendar, and he can see how much I’m doing on the home front. There’s a beauty in that ability to get on the same page, like what is everything that needs to be done, and just even having appreciation for who’s carrying the amount of load that sometimes we have to goes very far just to help people get on the same page.
So if that’s something you’ve struggled with in terms of the divvy of labor, and you feel like you’re not on the same page about understanding how much needs to go into the kids and the house, I do find that a system like The Bright Method where we’re making all of these typically-invisible to-dos visual in a calendar and just being able to see it altogether really helps people get on the same page and understand why so-and-so taking on X, Y, Z would help the other person and give them the breathing space that they need so much more. It’s just invaluable in a way that just talking about it and arguing about it just doesn’t really do that in the same way.
All right. I feel like this episode got a little rambly. I hope I was clear. Sometimes I’m not. But what I really want to emphasize is I think it’s very natural for certain patterns to be established when it comes to childcare and home care in that first year, unfortunately. And it is what it is. As you know, I’m all about embracing reality. If you can find a more equitable distribution of that in that first year, please go for it. Please do it. Jump on it. But if you have fallen into a pattern during that first year that has lasted beyond the first year in a way that you’re like, “The need for that, I understand why that happened back then, but we’re still in that divvy-up of labor, and there’s no need for this anymore,” I think there can be a lot of conversations about, “Hey, we need a reset. These things that required this divvy of labor back then don’t exist anymore, and now we can pull weight more equitably like we did in our pre-kids, and I’d like to get back to that, and let’s figure out ways to do that.” If you need a methodology to do that, I’ve heard Fair Play is incredible. If you just want to use The Bright Method, I’ve had a lot of clients find success with that, and I think there can be a major reset there.
If you’re on the frontend of this and you want to avoid some of this lasting-pattern-beyond-utility element that we’ve been talking about, I really encourage you to use that calendar to help future you to remember to create that shift, to set expectations as early on as you can, like right now. “Hey, we might fall into patterns during this period of time, but around the year mark, I really want to reset and figure this out so that we can have an equitable relationship going forward.” I think there’s a lot of value in that that I hope people run with, and I’d love to hear how it goes.
I also have a fair amount of resources that I’ve created in the past about time management as a new mom and going on maternity leave and things like that that relate to people at least in the new mom scenario, so I’ll share those in the show notes if you’d like to check those out. And I hope this helps. I hope it helps, whether you’re a new mom listening or one trying to reshift the dynamic at home, I hope you got something that can help you run with it going forward to get you that equitable division of labor, whether it’s not or down the road.
If you have any questions or comments or you disagree with anything I said, please feel free to reach out. I love having discussions around this. I think this is so informed by my own experience, and while I work with a lot of clients around this and I’m trying to generalize it to some extent, obviously it’s influenced by my own experience. And so, I would love to help represent all perspectives more if I can. So please feel free to reach out. Feel free to shoot me an email at ke***@********an.com.
All right, and the last thing I’ll say is share this with a friend. If a friend could use this, if a friend is pregnant for the first time or pregnant for the second or third time or thinking about having kids or really in it with a kid and struggling with what it does to a relationship, please feel free to share this episode. It’s a topic that you could feel pretty alone in when you’re in it, and I think that it’s actually a very common experience that would benefit from more discussion and intentionality. So I hope that it helps, and thank you for being here, and I’ll catch you in the next episode!
[Upbeat Outro Music]
