Holy moly! So you got through the initial outbreak of the Pandemic. Now you’re working your way through the unstructured summer months. And it’s looking like the fall won’t be offering much relief, with most schools reopening on a part-time/flex basis, if at all. One way to make the job of full-time parenting/entertaining/educating more manageable is to add a little structure to your days.
Parents are constantly juggling responsibilities: work, household logistics, personal and professional relationships, loving and raising the kids, all while trying to find time for self-care, exercise, hobbies, and a little shut eye. On a good day, managing this juggling act is a delicate balance. What happens when life throws you a massive curveball?
Raising kids is all about the unpredictable: juggling responsibilities at work and in your personal life with constant shifts in your child’s mood, interests, abilities, and needs. If you leave the predictable activities — like cleaning, laundry, meal prep, and cooking — to the burden of daily decision-making, you won’t have the energy and time to deal with the true surprises, like the post-dinner temper-tantrum. When it comes to logistics — the stuff that has to get done to keep yourself, the kids, and the household running — the goal is to automate the predictable, while shrinking each system to its smallest footprint.
Many of us enter this whole cohabitating thing with a lot of love, but without a clue. We get blindsided by the amount of joint-decision making there is to do — like dividing the logistics, in a way that is transparent, fair, and manageable. Because it’s so uncomfortable to talk about, people tend to just gravitate toward the things they notice — which is not the same as aligning on the workload as partners. Operating independently means work is done without recognition and resentments build over the tedious day-to-day stuff. In the absence of direct conversation, one party ends up taking on the lion’s share of the work. Studies show that this is often the woman, who ends up feeling burdened by both the physical and emotional labor involved. The workload becomes so exhausting, there’s not enough energy left to cultivate the relationship.
Whether you were organized or not before you had kids, arranging logistics for family life is different and more complex than organizing for a single person. Engaging every member of the household in arranging tasks, including kids from an early age, is a good thing. It promotes a sense of responsibility and belonging; imparts the value of caring for others in relationships; and teaches critical life skills that will benefit your children into adulthood. A simple conversation with your family may be just the thing you need to hit reset on your household’s division of labor.
