Experiment No. 25: Household Responsibility Meters

The Basics

Target Audience: Partners, housemates
Ages: Adults
Category: Mental load
Estimated Time: 5 minutes per day
Difficulty Level: Easy

For many of us, the pandemic has piled up responsibilities at home. The necessities of social distancing have centralized our work, school and social lives in one space. Living rooms and bedrooms have become makeshift offices; kitchen tables have become school desks. Days that used to include time and space apart from our partners and children are now jam-packed with household members all stuck in one place. For many working parents, any dividing line between work and home has disappeared. What’s more, reducing interaction to our small ‘bubbles’ has meant that access to informal care networks and paid childcare is limited or non-existent.

Dr. Tim Adkins, professor of sociology at Marquette University and father of twin one-year-old boys, notes that many households are struggling to find “off time”, or even time to focus on one task at a time. In his household, where he’s teaching online while taking care of his boys, Tim explains that he often feels 100 percent responsible for his household, sometimes he and his wife each feel 50 percent responsible, but neither Tim nor his wife ever feel like they’re getting time to be at “zero percent.”

On the plus side, all this time at home is making household labor more visible, and some research shows that men are doing slightly more housework than before the pandemic. But overall, all this extra responsibility at home is causing a lot of strain. A growing wave of research shows that women, and mothers in particular, are feeling overwhelmed by the increased responsibilities at home due to the pandemic. Stress, anxiety, and frustration have increased among moms who started spending a great deal more time than usual with their kids during the pandemic. This isn’t because moms don’t want to spend time with their kids—it’s because shoving work, schooling, and childcare into the same limited space and time is overwhelming! Dads are feeling the squeeze too. As Dr. Adkins put it, “I hate being stressed out about work when I’m taking care of my kids. I need to take care of [my work] so I can be present and 100 percent here.”

Sometimes it can be hard to put into words all the work we do for our families and households each day. Many household tasks can be put on a chore chart, like dishes or vacuuming. But other things are harder to chart or quantify, such as researching potential new schools for a child or overseeing e-learning. The pandemic has increased this invisible labor—that unseen, unpaid daily work—for everyone, especially women and mothers. In order to make that invisible labor more visible to yourself and your household members, we suggest that all (adult) household members track the responsibility they feel for their household for one week.

Directions

1. Plan a household check-in. Come together at a time that works for everyone. Start by having an open conversation to acknowledge that the pandemic has added a lot of household responsibilities that can feel overwhelming. Affirm that these responsibilities should be shared so that no household member gets too overwhelmed or burnt-out.
2. Take a look at the Household Responsibility Meter tracking sheet together (below). Agree that you will each commit to filling out the tracker, at the end of each day, for one week. (Ahead of time, appoint one person to print out the sheets and bring copies for everyone.)
3. Spend one week tracking how responsible you feel for your household each day. Each household member takes a few minutes to color in the daily thermometer to signify how responsible they felt that day for the household. You may also want to jot down some notes about what types of tasks, worries, etc. constitute the level of responsibility you’re feeling that day. This can help make the invisible visible to your partner or others in your household. Tracking your daily ‘responsibility level’ can be done on your own.
4. After one week, come together and compare your Responsibility Meters. How do the meters compare to each other? Does it feel fair? If you jotted down some notes throughout the week, discuss what types of things you were feeling responsible for on different days. Although seeing lop-sided levels of responsibility may feel frustrating, try to keep this a positive, information-sharing-and-gathering conversation. This may be the first time that some of your invisible responsibilities are visible to your partner or housemates.
5. Make a plan to share responsibilities more fairly based on what you learned. You might start small: for example, one partner could invite the other to sit down together and research something, perhaps about childcare, schooling, virus safety precautions, etc., that they were going to do alone. Or, if you find that your household is sharing things pretty evenly, look for ways to reduce some of the excess mental labor caused by the pandemic.

Research shows that the pandemic has exacerbated sleep inequality between mothers and fathers. While 44 percent of mothers in May and 50 percent in September reported poor sleep quality, fewer fathers said the same: 21 percent in May and 33 percent in September. Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry argues that sleep is a social justice issue: “Being exhausted is not how we’re supposed to be navigating this world.”

Connect With the Better Life Lab

Are you going to try this week’s experiment? Do you have a story about how you and your own family solved a problem with the work at home? Is there a specific challenge you’ve been trying to tackle? Can this experiment be improved? Please let us know via this form, at bllx@newamerica.org, or in our Facebook group for BLLx Beta Testers.

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