As Rhona and her colleague, Tina Stanley note in Fight Right for Your Baby: The How-To Guide for Expecting and New Parents to Shift from Conflict to Connection, disagreements about who does what—including housework, yardwork, shopping, and managing finances—are common for everyone who cohabits. Becoming parents intensifies the charge around the division of labor by adding an overwhelming number of new tasks. Many parents get caught in a debate about who is more exhausted, who works harder, or who has the more difficult or important role. The Who Does What Exercise—which you can download as a Word-form or as a static PDF—helps expecting and new parents dig into your distribution of roles and related tasks, and get better aligned. Because the roles we play in relationships, especially once we become parents, are so numerous and varied, this exercise includes a lot of detail and will take some effort to complete. Why spend time delving into your current and future distribution of household, parenting, and childcare tasks? Read on to find out.

Research suggests that heterosexual relationships, in particular, often rely on—or revert to—traditional gender roles when a baby arrives, which means that the division of household and parenting labor is often an area of relationship stress and negative conflict for new (and veteran) parents. In the United States, most heterosexual women—including those who work outside the home—still perform more than half of the housework and childcare tasks than their male spouses. Plus, often when heterosexual mothers’ prenatal expectations don’t match what they perceive as fathers’ postpartum efforts—i.e., when moms think their mates do less than they said they would, or than those moms believed they would—their relationship satisfaction suffers. 

For these reasons and more, many new parents report a drop in relationship fulfillment and a rise in conflict, which often translate into coparenting challenges. Here, coparenting refers to collaborative parenting among those who help raise a child, not the limited usage of that term to describe parents who are exes. Many studies confirm that, regardless of parents’ sexual orientations, effective coparenting—i.e., collaborating with your spouse while raising your child(ren), respectfully addressing differences such as contrasting parenting styles, and seeking constructive compromise in varied areas, including how you navigate household and childcare duties—supports your babies’/children’s developmental health and wellbeing. Ineffective coparenting negatively impacts your child(ren). 

Invisible and emotional labor further impede establishing an equitable distribution of tasks, and increase negative conflict and disconnection. Invisible labor consists of household- and family-related work performed by one person that doesn’t register on the other’s radar. Emotional labor refers to the mental energy expended to maintain the health and wellbeing of relationships, of individuals in those relationships—especially children—and of a household. Invisible and emotional labor are sometimes interdependent and often spark feelings of being put upon, unappreciated, lonely, or abandoned. Invisible and emotional labor become especially burdensome when one person shoulders—or believes they shoulder—much more of it, when the pressure and impact of that labor remain unarticulated, unexplored or unrecognized, or when one of you remains unaware of or insensitive to the invisible or emotional labor the other performs. Check out the resources below to help you navigate the new household and childcare demands of parenting with greater ease and skill.