When mom works, relationship gets a boost?

An article in the WSJ’s The Juggle column tipped me off to a recent study in the Journal of Family Psychology about how marital satisfaction is related to the workload that husbands and wives take on.

The study of 169 couples in the first four years of marriage found that when either partner works a lot, satisfaction with the marriage goes up — as long as that partner likes his or her job. When there’s no child in the picture, a husband’s workload going up correlated to higher happiness in the marriage, but when there were kids, a husband working more was linked to a downtick in marriage satisfaction for both husband and wife.

More surprising was what happened when there were kids and mom worked more:

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Mom needs dad to clean, dad needs the opposite

One night a week, I work late. I get home long after dinner, PJ’s, stories, bed and all the other pieces of the end-of-day family routine. I’m exhausted from a marathon of writing and seeing psychotherapy clients.

I can go down two mental paths at this point: one, I imagine myself arriving home to disheveled chaos — crusty dinner plates and a war path of discarded clothes, wet face clothes, and toys. This makes me incredibly stressed, since I’m someone (and I know I’m not alone here) who can’t relax and probably wouldn’t go to bed when the house looks like a tornado came through.

Luckily, my husband knows this and after he washes, reads to, and tucks in my son, he also usually cleans and makes me one of his famous grilled cheese sandwiches timed to my arrival home.

My mood changes completely when I walk through the door. But it turns out what I’m experiencing is something common to couples who both work and have young kids. A recent study in the Journal of Family Psychology found that when the husband does housework at the end of the day, a mom’s cortisol levels (stress hormones that are supposed to naturally decline in the evening) go down. If he doesn’t, they stay up.

But there’s an unfortunate flip side to this: Continue reading »

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Self-care? That sounds familiar.

If you knew me before I had my son, you’d describe me as a physically active person. I’ve been a dancer my whole life and since moving west, a regular frequenter of yoga too. I jumped (or mostly lumbered) around the dance studio well into my third trimester — much to the chagrin of my husband, who would rather have seen me napping and packing away ice cream on the couch.

So when a friend warned me to get back in the habit of being active quickly after I had my son — “It’s been two years and I rarely work out” she told me — I brushed it off. I wouldn’t be that way – I’d get right back into shape.

Here I am — my son is almost three, and I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve seen the inside of a dance studio. I may have shed the pounds of pregnancy, but I’ve also shed other things I wish I could have back: Continue reading »

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Parenthood Isn't Easy

In trying to accommodate our kids and make them happy, psychologist Richard Weissbourd says that we’re making them less happy.

Weissbourd’s book “The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development” argues that doting parents who cater to their children’s every need and whim create “more fragile, entitled, and self-occupied” kids.

Parents today (myself included) are so concerned with making their kids happy. Are we just making them miserable? Continue reading »

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If researchers were to set up video cameras up in your home  and record your family life for a week, what do you think they would see?  If the California families who participated in just such an experiment are any indication, they’d see fussing, fighting and a whole lot of stress and mess.

The video experiment, conducted by University of California graduate students from 2002 to 2005, recorded the everyday lives of 32 middle class families living in the Los Angeles area. Though ethnically diverse, the families shared a few important characteristics:  All had two working parents and multiple children.  Continue reading »

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Well here’s a paragraph that sets fatherhood involvement back a few generations. In an article in the Times of London purporting to let wives in on the “secret lives” of their husbands — one of those gossipy little vacant pieces of crap that will surely wind up with a book deal and a movie — the author talks to a fund manager, who rightly agreed to print only his first name and admits he just doesn’t have the motivation, time or energy to be an everyday dad.

“I think every dad knows this: work is your friend,” says Simon, 49, a fund manager. “It’s about the only weapon men have got left in these days where husbands and wives are supposed to share all the chores equally. Continue reading »

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First off, let me say that it would freak me out to no end to share my wife with another man, let alone two, or three, or how ever many other brother husbands she may want to have if polygamy were legal. So deep down, I’m not a big fan of this type of family life. 

But this review of the popular HBO show “Big Love” — a fabulous drama that looks at a fictitious ultra-Mormon family that makes polygamy work, most of the time — makes the idea sound downright grand. Continue reading »

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