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This page should be read along with this one: mothers_and_fathers_gender.htm

This article is a book review.  The book talks about parenting roles of mothers and fathers in families that practice some sort of shared parenting in the context of a working marriage.   Most of the information at ANCPR is for those who are already divorced, or who are working on a divorce.  However, this particular review, along with the book itself, could be very useful for anyone wanting hints as to how to structure their arguments relative to what extent they have participated in the parenting of their children.   In the context of a divorce, this is absolutely essential if you (most often the father, since the mother can have it assumed by the court that she has always been the primary custodian) want to demonstrate conclusively to the court just how important you have been as a parent.  The courts don't consider working like a dog to support the family to be a valid role in parenting.  Most fathers are punished for playing just such a role.  Therefore, if fathers are to maintain their pre-divorce role in their children's lives, they will need to be able to articulate just what their role has been in very specific detail in such a way that it is understandable to the court.  Most fathers are not very well equipped to do this and most of the time their lawyers are of no help.  Being specific about such things as medical decision making, budgeting, buying clothes, helping with homework, after school activies, shopping, camping, shared vacations, parent/teacher conferences, parent/child discussions on any number of subjects.   Fathers need to become able to articulate all of this to the courts as well as their lawyers, so that they don't lose out.

Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works

In the United States, a high proportion of women with small children have jobs outside the home. Housework is no longer the big issue it was in 1963 when Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique. It is now taken for granted that domestic partners can share housework, fight over it, pay someone to do it, or ignore it without compromising their masculinity or femininity. The question that has become salient in feminist research is the feasibility of sharing child care equally between mothers and fathers.The goal is to get beyond the woman taking the main responsibility for their children's welfare with the man "helping," by doing only his assigned tasks. These studies take it for granted that men can "mother"-be intimately involved with and concerned for their children's emotional, intellectual, and physical well-being. They also assume that the more hands-on care parents provide, the better for the children. Nannies, group child-care, nursery schools, and kin are considered poor substitutes. There is a white, middleclass, American bias here-upper-class families traditionally have relied on professional nannies, governesses, and boarding schools, and working-class families on grandmothers and aunts to bring up their children. Many European governments invest in creches, nurseries, and early childhood all-day care, where the daily decisions about the child are out of the parents' hands. In cultures where extended families are the norm, husbands and wives do not parent alone, and are often overruled by senior family members.There is also a heterosexist bias here-lesbian and gay parents have long split domestic work and child care in a variety of ways, but they are rarely used for comparison.

For heterosexual couples, the pressure to structure actively and consciously for equally shared parenting counters the tacit assumption that the mother will do most of it because she is better at it and gets more gratification from it than the father. Caring for children, particularly infants and toddlers, goes to the heart of gender inequality and sex differences. Bracketing the arguments for or against the biological, psychological, or sociological sources of women's and men's nurturance and relational capabilities, books that lay out the processes by which parenting can be shared equally are written to show that family life can be structured so that both parents can be "primary parents." Whether describing one family or grouping the input from interviews and observations of a sample of families, these are, in a sense, "how to" books for heterosexual, gender-egalitarian women and men.

Francine M. Deutsch's Halving ItAll (a superb title, for which Deutsch credits her husband), is just such a book, as indicated by the subtitle: How Equally Shared Parenting Works. It is based on lengthy interviews with 88 couples culled from a sample of 150 found in various ways, and divided on the basis of how much actual child care they did. Couples were designated "equal sharers" if the father did at least fortyfive percent of the work on 24 out of 32 specific parenting tasks: "feeding, comforting, bathing, dressing, changing diapers, toilet-training, supervising personal hygiene, supervising morning routine, picking up after playing, reading, helping to learn, helping with problems, setting limits, disciplining, putting to bed, getting up at night, taking to the doctor or dentist, providing sick care, taking on outings, taking to birthday parties, taking to lessons, going to teacher conferences, buying clothes, supervising in social situations, supervising religious instruction, making arrangements with other parents to organize social life, planning activities, making arrangements for child care, worrying, making decisions, and responding to requests or need for attention"(pp. 240-41).The other groups were 18 couples where the child care was divided 60-40 and 21 where it was divided 75-25, plus 23 working-class couples who did child care in alternating shifts. All parents worked at least 20 hours out of the home and had an average of 2 children who ranged in age from 1 month to 14 years.The men were an average of 38.4 years old, the women 35.9 years old.They were married an average of 11 years. Except for the blue-collar couples, all were uppermiddle class, well-educated, and fairly affluent, and almost all were white. On religion, they divided fairly evenly among Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and none.

These "facts on the ground" (which unfortunately are relegated, along with interesting comments and information from other sources, to footnotes and an appendix) set the stage for Deutsch's main findings: that equal sharing does not emerge from an ideological commitment to gender equality but from "the overwhelming labor demands of a two-job household" (p. 11). It doesn't take special peoplerather, "it is a by-product of the negotiations over all the details of everyday life in a family" (p. 11). Although Deutsch tends to minimize the effects of prior egalitarian or traditional attitudes and career commitments, as they are not necessarily translated into ef fective decisions on work inside and outside the home, they are used to justify and legitimize these decisions. In unequal households, wives live by myths that mask their own ambitiousness and their husband's power to resist their pleas for help; on the surface, at least, they claim their family pattern is their own choice.They are "ambivalent about what they are entitled to at home, ask for less, and ask less directly" (p. 61). Conversely, "equally sharing women feel entitled to equality" (p. 61)-and they negotiate their family patterns openly and directly They are "also not afraid to use power, and the language of power" (p. 65). Some insist they won't get married, stay married, or have children if their husbands won't take on half the child-care load; others have refused to cook or clean until the husband pitches in.

Family patterns of equality and inequality varied. Some equal-sharers alternated the same tasks and some divided the tasks; the working-class families did all the care at alternate times ("mother and Mr. Mom"). Some shared equally from the birth of their first child; others when the mother went back to work, sometimes after several years of being the prime parent. Some used child care facilities outside the home; others did not. Inequality in the division of child care resulted from wives' cutting back on their paid work time, but also from wives' working full-time and being burdened with most of the child-care chores as well. Husbands who were not equal sharers ranged from those who shared as much as they could given their time spent on the job, those who helped when it was convenient for them, and slackers who sat around while their wives did all the domestic work. The mundane details, negotiations, and justifications of constructing gender-equal and gender-unequal divisions of child-care work are described by Deutsch through stories about typical couples.

Biology-pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding-are often invoked as insurmountable barriers to equal parenting, seeming to give women bonding advantages. Yet many husbands accompany their wives to their obstetric check-ups, listen to the baby's heartbeat and look at the sonograms together, take prenatal classes, coach their wives through the birth, and even without paid parental leave, stay home from work for a week or two after the birth. All these are ways of bonding with their children, modern versions of couvade, where the father imitates the mother's procreative behavior. Many reports of equal parenting, like Deutsch's, describe husbands waking up with their wives during night feedings, and diapering and burping the baby, thus sharing the breastfeeding work and the bonding. In her study, breastfeeding had little relationship to the extent of shared parenting. As adoptive parents show, competence, nurturance, and love come from hands-on care, not from hormones, birthing, or suckling. Equal parenting doesn't go against principles of nature; biology, says Deutsch, is a justification for men's lesser involvement and the resultant lesser closeness with their children.

The ability to earn more money was similarly used as a justification for inequality in child care. The correlation of income with extent of sharing child care was telling: Among the couples where the mother did a little or lot more child care, the husband earned an average of about $19,000 a year more than the wife. Among the equal sharers, the discrepancy was only $6,000, and thirty percent of the wives earned more than their husbands. Among the alternating shifters, the dif ference was $11,000. These discrepancies, Deutsch claims, were as much the result as the cause of how much child care was shared. Decisions about what jobs husbands as well as wives took, how much time they spent working, and their interpretations of the demands of those jobs were part of the negotiations around child care. Most of the wives could earn what their husbands earned; it was commitment to equal sharing of child care versus gender-based norms that influenced time spent in paid work and in domestic work. Among working-class alternating-shift couples, when the wife was the better earner, the husband worked more hours and she did more child care; thus they maintained the gender-appropriate roles of primary breadwinner and primary parent.

So much for the process. What of the "product"? Deutsch says that the advantages of equal parenting for the children are higher self esteem and two knowledgeable, responsible adults who can substitute and fill in for each other. For the adults, the marriage bond is strengthened by their shared involvement with their children. Women gain the freedom of more time and less stress. Men are not as able to devote every waking minute to their careers, but they gain other rewards: "the bond they forged with their wives, the special relationships with their children, and the development they saw in themselves were priceless (p. 230). Neither partner gets to have a conventional "male career," because neither has a "wife" to do the work at home. Both are workers in both spheres; both get the rewards of their jobs or careers and hands-on parenting.

How widespread is equal parenting likely to be? A study by Laura Sanchez and Elizabeth Thomson based on two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households (1987-88, 199294) found that new parents are much more likely to be gender-traditional than egalitarian in their domestic division of labor. Deutsch herself says at the end of her book that in addition to routinization of equally shared parenting, we need genderequal pay scales,"family-friendly policies" in workplaces and encouragement of their use, plus wide-spread access to a system of high-quality child care outside the home.And also necessary are mothers who are willing to share parent-child intimacy and fathers who value it enough to "do more."

Deutsch's equal sharers were more pragmatic than ideological; personal equality rather than gender equality was their goal. But whether or not gender rebellion is intended, the accomplishment of equally-shared parenting has important implications for the gendered structures of our social worlds. By suggesting the interchangeability of women and men in a domain as central to people's lives as caring for infants and raising children, shared parenting challenges one of the major gender divisions on which so much of modern society is still based. Sandra Bem, who called for eradicating such divisions in The Lenses of Gender (1993), said that her own family as described in An Unconventional Family (1998), was the feminist practice to her feminist theory of degendering. These books certainly make us conscious of how unequal most parenting is, and they also make us aware of alternatives. But they also tell us how difficult it is to go against norms-dif ficult psychologically interactively and structurally.The women and men who share parenting equally are de facto gender rebels. For their impact to be long-lasting, the gendered structure of paid work and domestic labor has to be radically transformed. And that is a much harder accomplishment than transforming the structure of individual lives. But for stories illustrating how equally-shared parenting can actually be done, read Halving ItAll. For comparable research and discussions of controversial issues, read the footnotes.

Judith Lorber is professor emerita of sociology at Brooklyn College and The Graduate School, City University of New York. She is the author of Paradoxes of Gender, Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics, Gender and the Social Construction of Illness, and Women Physicians: Careers, Status and Power, and co-editor of Revisioning Gender and The Social Construction of Gender. She was founding editor of Gender & Society.