I’m a teacher at heart. That’s why delivering presentations on parenting is one of my favorite professional activities. Recently, I was asked to speak to a group of Chicago-based business leaders and entrepreneurs about intentional parenting, the foundation of my parent-coaching practice. These executives, members of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), are recognized around the globe as being at the forefront of business leadership.
Although the organization itself is diverse, as it happened, my audience was male – and they were eager to learn as much as I could teach them about how to become more successful and effective in their roles as fathers.
I really applaud these men. This committed, engaged group of dads prioritized “parenting” over “maximizing profits” -- or any other business topic as the focus for their YPO meeting. Walking in, I knew they were actively thinking about their roles as dads and would be receptive to hearing how they could become better.
Naturally, I used language they were accustomed to. Namely, that as CEOs, they know what it takes to operate a business. They’re the ones who develop strategic goals, set policies, provide leadership, and hire and manage the people who execute their vision. In the end, they’re the ones who are ultimately accountable for the business’s success…or its failure.
Then I told them this: As parents, you and your partner are the C-suite. To run a household, parents need to constantly assess the familial landscape for what needs attention. We make a range of both everyday and strategic decisions about our kids, from what they eat to where they go to school… and from how we discipline to how we articulate and pass on our values.
So before I launched into the foundations of intentional parenting, I pivoted to the topic of what it means for dads to share the workloads with their partners.
In partnerships where there are two (often working) adults at the helm, often the workload isn’t shared. A common scenario is that one parent feels overwhelmed and underappreciated by the burdens of parenting and running a home while the other is under the impression that everything is fine. From my perspective, if there hasn’t been an explicit discussion about who will do what in a family, there’s likely an imbalance that needs to be addressed.
So I challenged these men to think about how the workload – physical, emotional, and mental – was divided in their homes. Many were eager to relate that they dropped off or picked up the kids half the time, coached the soccer team, shared in cooking dinner – and of course, “they were happy to do whatever their partner asked them to do.”
Therein lies the rub. The stress and challenge of being a parent isn’t simply the doing of the tasks – it’s the thinking, strategizing and planning time that is required to be truly engaged and effective. These are the activities that consume most parents’ working life, but we don’t always extrapolate those same activities to our family lives.
This imbalance in the “mental” aspect of parenting is where I see the most discrepancy – and sometimes it’s what lies underneath a couple’s presenting issue when they first start working with me. Because even if both parents share equally in the execution of the tasks – or if they have the funds to outsource the cleaning, cooking, carpooling and childcare– one partner still does much of the heavy lifting that remains:
· Monitoring each child’s emotional well-being, deciding when they need support and securing it
· Maintaining relationships with family, including in-laws
· Organizing play dates and sleepovers
· Anticipating, deciding and managing childcare both after school and during the summer
· Identifying if a child needs academic tutoring and engaging professionals to help
· Deciding how to celebrate birthdays and family vacations
· Scheduling the myriad appointments for taking care of major home systems and appliances
· I think you see the point?
I invited the attendees to take a broad look at their home lives without any shame or self-retribution. I noted that the status quo in many households is as much a societal failure as anything. Systems that are bolstered by the persistent traditional notions of family often leaves mothers – both working and stay-at-home – shouldering an inordinate amount of the responsibilities of running a household and raising children. In fact, the 2017 Modern Family Index by Bright Horizons found that at the time, 72% of women felt it was their job to stay on top of household and parenting responsibilities.
This notion of the “mental workload” got the group looking at their roles as Co-CEOs of their households with a new lens. Have they and their partner ever had an explicit decision about how all the labor would be divided? Were they assuming that their partner was okay with how things worked? Were their wives/partners performing the majority of the cognitive and emotional labor by default? If so, what could they do about it?
Before I pivoted back to intentional parenting, I offered some suggestions for why the conversation about shared responsibilities is mission-critical, then gave them some high-level suggestions for how to have the conversation that would help them right any imbalance.
To hear those details, stay tuned for my March blog post where I’ll explain in more detail how you and your partner can better share the load as Co-CEOs!