In this episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah interviews Sam Kelly, a therapist who runs a course called Little Cycle Breakers. She shares strategies for getting kids to see what needs doing in a household and help in a way that lightens the parents’ mental load.

In the Q&A we talk about how to manage the situation when teens don’t want to participate in as many family activities because they are busy with school and other things.

Please give the episode a listen, and as always, we welcome feedback and reviews!

By Jennifer D. Sciubba

One of my prized possessions is a 1967 Teen Guide to Homemaking textbook, found years ago in a successful dig through the thrift store shelves. On the cover is the side profile of a sweet strawberry blonde with a pink bow in her bobbed hair. Inside, girls and boys learn the basics of ironing and good nutrition—including plenty of then-in-vogue canned food. In the section on career advice, the authors explain that boys and girls might have different goals when it comes to a career. They say that a girl “can be pretty sure that she will have to know how to be a homemaker and mother,” and so her career outside the home likely won’t be as important as it would be to a boy.

The world teens live in today is radically different from the world in 1967 when the Susans and Tommys of America were reading the Teen Guide to Homemaking, but has the gender revolution completely freed women from those societal constraints? Is the struggle over?

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild tried to answer those very questions. She studied married women working full-time, with husbands who were also working full-time and who had kids ages 6 and under; in other words, me when I was writing the first draft of this book. She watched them come home from work, fold laundry while on the phone, give the kids baths, and so on. She chronicled her observations in her book The Second Shift, in which she argued that although there had been a lot of changes in gender roles across the decades, there were still larger societal issues making some women question whether getting married and having kids was worth it. Working both a first shift outside the home and a second shift inside it was exhausting.

Multiple pressures on women is a global issue. Researchers Mary Brinton and Dong-Ju Lee find that post-industrial societies that encourage women to work outside the home while also painting them as natural caregivers have lower fertility because they impose conflicting narratives on women. We can see this difficult dynamic in East Asia. In much of East Asia, it’s the norm that men are breadwinners and women are responsible for household and child-rearing duties, but women are also welcome to work. With this gender-role ideology, women struggle to reconcile work outside the home and family responsibilities. As a result, they often have only one or two children or forgo childbearing altogether. In low-fertility Japan, a 2009 survey by the East-West Center showed that Japanese wives of reproductive age did 27 hours a week of household duties while their husbands only did 3—and most of those wives worked a paid job, too. Having a family continues to be incompatible with work for Japanese women. An OECD study of 18 member countries ranked Japan second from last “in terms of coverage and strength of policies for work-family reconciliation and family-friendly work arrangements,” and pointing out that “Japan’s childcare coverage and parental leave offered by employers are both especially weak.”

In contrast, when women are discouraged from working, their role as homemakers and mothers is clearer, and fertility is higher, but it’s the interaction between gender norms and labor-market conditions that affects fertility, not just one or the other. Fertility is actually lower in countries where men and women have equal roles, because these norms lock women into a particular lifestyle rather than give them a range of socially acceptable choices about how to combine work and family. Countries that have more flexible arrangements, rather than strict equality, have higher relative fertility, as we see in Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Finding ways to reduce the pressures on women and share household tasks can be an effective way to support women who do want children.

How does that play out in the United States? At first glance, it seems like mothers in the US have perfect freedom to choose whether or not to work outside the home, and the US does have a higher fertility rate than many countries, but if we look deeper we must acknowledge those choices are highly constrained. “Flexibility” without supportive social structures (like affordable and available childcare before school ages) means that some women who might want children will choose not to have them, and those who might want several might settle for smaller families.

The answer isn’t to prevent women from working, it’s to put policies in place to meaningfully support their choices, policies that are likely to result in higher fertility overall, with benefits to the size of the working-age population in the long run.

Over the weekend I did cross a major parenting milestone. The 2-year-old can now reliably sit and watch a video like Peppa Pig or the wide variety of YouTube offerings (“Hazel’s Mom” is a particular favorite). So when my husband took the 10-year-old and 7-year-old out for the afternoon, I left the little guy in the care of the two older boys while I went for a run in the neighborhood. He sat at the computer with the video on, and I had the 12-year-old sit in the same room with him (watching his phone), and basically neither moved for the 30 minutes I was gone. Success!

Speaking of the 2-year-old, he has been on a strike against napping in the crib. So over the weekend, I gave in and let him nap in my lap both days. In related news, my screen time totals on my iPhone are quite high…

I’ve been showering at night because it makes getting ready in the AM much faster. Unfortunately, I’m sometimes cold at night (though we’ve now set the bathroom heat to come on around my shower time). So I’ve come up with the strategy of hanging two towels over the shower door. When I turn the water off, I immediately wrap one around me. Then I can use the other for my hair without getting too shivery.

I also found my real towels this weekend, so I’m no longer using beach towels, though I did like that they were very large.

The 7-year-old recently celebrated a birthday. Since writing is a source of real tension, we had him record video thank yous to the people who gave him gifts. This inspired far less resistance.

We now have our “real” fridge and freezer, which is great, because we have more capacity. One current helpful life strategy is having set meals for certain nights. Wednesday, for instance, is always breakfast-for-dinner day. This tends to be pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and fruit. Easy, and everyone eats it. Friday is pizza night. This will be make-your-own-pizza night again once we get our oven but for now I’m ordering in. We do Sunbasket kits on Monday and Tuesday (usually) as a way to have some variety. We often have steak one night over the weekend, which only leaves two days to sort out. In the morning, I almost always give kids toaster waffles plus fruit. (Some people add milk, or yogurt, and the occasional handful of chocolate chips). Most people have one toaster waffle, though my daughter has two. If you do the math this means we go through a normal box of toaster waffles in two days. This explains the appeal of Costco!

Photo: Ice on a trail from one of my weekend runs.

However, the good news is that much does still fit. I was reminded of that this weekend. We had various things that needed to happen at certain times. We hosted my daughter’s birthday party on Friday afternoon at a paint-your-own-pottery place. We had an appointment Saturday mid-day for the 12-year-old to get his second Covid shot. We had a soccer game on Saturday afternoon, I was singing in church on Sunday morning, and then there was a host of Sunday afternoon things: a 3 p.m. Cub Scout meeting, a 4 p.m. baseball game, a 5 p.m. tennis lesson.

Looking at this, I saw that there were still two fairly open stretches of daylight time: Saturday morning, and Sunday between church and the 3 p.m. Cub Scout event.

So we decided to go to the Boo at the Zoo on Saturday morning. Only the 10-year-old dressed up, but everyone collected candy + snacks (including the toddler who discovered a new love of yogurt-covered raisins). My husband had gotten us tickets to a bird feeding experience, so that was memorable — we all held out our meal worms and got to see the birds in action up close.

Then we proceeded to get stuck in a wretched traffic jam leaving the zoo garage. But! We just all went together to the 12-year-old’s appointment instead of stopping by home, with several of us going to the nearby grocery store and then all meeting up there. The 10-year-old was unhappy that this change of plans meant she only had 30 minutes at home before I took her to her soccer game, but I reminded her that she had from 4 p.m. until bedtime as relaxing time. That’s not exactly a small amount! I ran for the first 30 minutes (during her pre-game practice) and then watched her make several saves as goalie. We made it to the car approximately 30 seconds before the rain started pouring down.

As for the window between church and Cub Scouts, this was enough time to go for a bike ride (an item on my fall fun list!). We did part of the trail in Valley Forge (across the river from the main part of the park). This family activity did not exactly go perfectly either. Somehow, the original process of loading bikes on the bike rack and into the trunk of the other car did not involve counting bikes. When we got to the trail, we discovered that the 10-year-old’s bike had not made it into either car. But! In a stroke of luck similar to the soccer game timing, we had thrown two bikes into the car for the 6-year-old because he was throwing a fit about riding the bigger one that now fits him (which has pink on it…because it had been his big sister’s). So he and she both rode bikes that were slightly too small for them but were serviceable. We did about 8 miles in perfect fall weather through lovely leaves, with only a little bit of unhappiness (someone slipped on a muddy patch).

This upcoming weekend should be easier because all the activities are concentrated on one day, leaving the other mostly open. As for this past weekend, even if parts did feel a bit full, there was still open space, and it was nice to have memories of zooming through those fall leaves even with everything else going on.

Photo: Enjoying some weekend downtime

I managed to clean out several closets and move the stuff to the new house’s garage. Any prospective buyers will now see that our closets have floors, which apparently is a desirable thing in a house.

On the other hand, there was a lot of muddling through. Two kids came home sick from school in the middle of the week. Covid negative, but still sick. My husband went to an event last night and since we didn’t have childcare coverage (also sick!) I dialed into choir by Zoom. This went better than it could have — my daughter watched the baby for the first half hour, I got the 14-year-old signed on to his tutoring session at 7:30, I turned the camera off and got the baby to bed, and then I turned the camera back on to do the rest of the rehearsal in the garage since I didn’t want my singing to wake up the baby. Still, there is a certain ridiculousness to singing into your phone in the garage…

Anyway, it’s my turn to take the baby right now so off to do that and go get individual cakes for a weekend birthday party so no one has to take off their masks to eat. A very 2021 sort of celebration…

Anyway, in finding space for the second bushel we brought home this past weekend, I noticed that we still had about a dozen apples from the last time going bad in the fruit drawer. No one was likely to eat them. So I used the simple recipe that  (if I recall correctly) Calee posted last time (just simmer and mash it, peels and all!) and made a big batch of applesauce that I have been eating this week. It turns out that even going-bad apples can make good applesauce!

One of my little sources of satisfaction in life is using things up. Working from home allows for a lot of that with lunches. My husband and I heated up some Costco pulled pork on Sunday night, which made enough to take us through at least two lunches apiece this week. On one day I decided to use up some kale by frying up the pulled pork and kale in some olive oil in a pan. It was quite tasty, and a very palatable way to eat a ton of greens.

On Tuesday night we had pasta. I cut up some peppers that were lingering in the fridge, plus some spinach that was on its last legs, and put those in the sauce. I have found that almost any wilting veggie can be accommodated quite nicely with some rice and pre-cooked sausage, all pan-fried together. It’s a double bonus if we happen to have some sort of sauce left over from one of our Sunbasket meal kits.

Anyway, there’s a balancing act here. Theoretically, using it up means we could go longer between shops, or buy less. But when the larder looks bare, the kids just don’t eat as many fruits and veggies. I need to have their favorites on hand.

But I can still enjoy my thrift. Now if you need me, I’ll be over here putting water in my shampoo bottle to extend its life for a few more days…

This meant I was here with the three younger kids. It was not the most relaxing weekend ever. The toddler was up before 6 a.m. both mornings, as he had been the previous two mornings during the week when my husband was traveling, and I was feeling a bit…done…on the early morning toddler entertainment front. He is enamored with the Jimmy Fallon board books (Everything is Mama and Your Baby’s First Word Will be Dada) and wants them read over and over again. I also spent a lot of my toddler-free time (when he was sleeping, or when my almost 10-year-old daughter was watching TV with him) cleaning up the house in advance of the listing photos.

However…there has been progress there. Several rooms are less than 5 minutes away from being photographable (personal stuff/functional stuff like waste baskets would just need to be pulled out). This includes the bar kitchen in the basement which has been covered for years by the remnants of those horrible little “find the dinosaur fossil” type kits where you pound at plaster and make dust.

There were also a few nice moments. I took the three kids for a short hike on Saturday morning before various sports, and it was lovely to see the early fall color. I ordered in sushi for myself Saturday night, and enjoyed that. Sunday, I had a few hours of coverage for the toddler, so I could do some birthday stuff for the soon-to-be-10-year-old (with her 6-year-old brother in tow). We ate at Olive Garden — her request — and then went to Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Since the space is contained and the kids didn’t really need me, I sat at a booth and read my daily chapter in War and Peace. It was quite the juxtaposition. Tolstoy opens many sections of the book with a discussion of how individual choice isn’t shaping history nearly to the extent that much “Great Man” theorizing claims. Perhaps. It’s curious to think what forces beyond my individual choice led me to be sitting there in the booth, with one eye on my son, who was using his unlimited play pass to hone his skill at the claw machine. By the time we left he had won 8 small bouncy balls, which I could not help but see as just more stuff to be moved. At least he was happy about it!

The big boys all came home around 6:30, at which point we had a birthday dinner, and later cake and presents. In a very on-brand moment, my daughter had let me know which kind of wrapping paper she wanted her presents wrapped in. So I obliged, and made sure to use the bows that were tonally matched. In life, I suppose it is good to ask for what you want.

Now it is nearly noon on Monday morning. I have not followed my own advice at all, and have spent the morning clearing the decks of various things instead of doing my main task for the day, which is revising chapter 3 in Tranquility by Tuesday. But! Onward. It will get done by the end of the day.

Photo: Living his best life

I am not so sure. While I understand the appeal — you just get it done! It’s not weighing on you! — there are downsides. Among them:

— Are you sure that task is only going to take 2 minutes? Few people are master time estimators. Something that only takes a minute seems harmless enough, but if it winds up being a 10-minute task, that can start becoming a major distraction from what you originally intended to do with the time.

— Are you sure you will immediately resume what you were doing or planned to do with a block of time? Many people cycle through various ease-into-work activities whenever they stop doing something. It occurs to you to send an email. You go do that — it will only take 2 minutes! — but then, hey, look, there are new shiny unopened emails in your inbox….

— Life can disappear into 2-minute tasks. We live in a distracted world, and concentrated blocks of time can be hard to come by. Letting these chunks get chopped up for any reason can limit what you can accomplish.

My general rule is to “batch the little things.” Each week, I make what I call a Friday punch list. This list includes things like filling out forms, paying bills that aren’t on auto pay, signing contracts, responding to emails that aren’t urgent but will require a bit of thought, making travel arrangements, etc. I recognize that many things require a faster response than once a week, but making a punch list of little things for each work day could also work. Designate a time to tackle this list. Ideally, this will be a low-energy time. Maybe it’s the 30 minute before or after a lunch break, or at 2:30 p.m. when your energy dips.

It shouldn’t be first thing in the morning — which sounds like batching, but is better referred to as “clearing the decks.” I see this all the time on work time logs. You have 8 things on your list for the day. One is big and complex and will take a lot of time. The other 7 are smaller. Many might only require a few minutes. So, why not tackle all the little stuff first, so you feel like you’re making progress and everything is getting crossed off the list?

The problem is that we all run out of steam. You start the list of little things at 8 a.m., and by the time you’re done with them, and the various things that result because of them (someone calls you back, or gets back to you with something you feel you should respond to…) maybe it’s 9:45 and oh look, I have a 10 a.m. meeting, and then when you’re done with that at 11:15 you cycle through email checks and other ease-into-work activities, and then you’re hungry for lunch, and then after lunch you’re kind of tired and… Tackle the big thing from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., though, and you might make real progress on that. Then the little things could all get done in that 11:15 to lunch window and during your afternoon slump.

When I suggested the “Batch the little things” rule to my Tranquility by Tuesday project participants, a few people mentioned that if they didn’t do the little thing immediately, it would keep weighing on them. I think as long as you designate a particular time to tackle something, this need not be true. Many people who mentioned this challenge turned out to be keeping a mental list of tasks they needed to get done. Don’t keep the punch list in your head! Write it down somewhere! And give it a time. Most of us don’t obsess about a dentist appointment that’s on the calendar for Thursday morning at 8 a.m. — we know it will probably happen at that time. Same thing for a task. If you know you will fill out that form on Thursday at 2:30 p.m., then you can stop thinking about it until then. There is a time for that form…and now is not that time.

Do you batch the little things?

*This version of the 2-minute rule is different from the Atomic Habits 2-minute rule, which says (roughly) that when you start a new habit, the habit should only take 2 minutes to do.

Photo: From Longwood Gardens over the weekend. We went to the fireworks and fountain performance, which was pretty spectacular! 

As part of that, I’ve been packing up the infant clothes in bins — to go in the attic for now, though probably they’ll be donated at some point. I realized, going through the bins, that some of the cute baby stuff never got worn this time around.

I’ve been pondering why this is. For starters, we turn out to have a lot of baby clothes. Also, a big part of it is that we didn’t go many places. We wouldn’t have taken a newborn many places during flu season anyway, and then the pandemic began, and so there was much time at home. He wound up wearing pajamas frequently. Very practical — only one piece to deal with, comfy to nap in, and with footy pajamas, no socks to get lost. Making sure he was wearing all the cute outfits we had would have been a lot of bother, and in the midst of the newborn days, you tend to be tired enough that the easy way always seems like the best way.

And most likely it is. But then time passes and it turns out that there’s only really a 6 month window to wear those 6-12 month clothes.

In any case, things do get easier. I’m sleeping better. The little guy is old enough to assist with putting his arms through sleeves. He is going out and about. So the older kid clothes are getting worn. As are the older older kid clothes! My 6-year-old went to camp today in a T-shirt from that camp that an older child passed down. Good to see that get used.

In other news: I turn out to be flexible. Maybe not in terms of personality (though I like to think so…) but like a gymnast. A few children are working on doing splits and I mentioned that I had been able to do them at one point. They were curious if I still had this ability. I tried, and it turns out I do! Not bad for age 42. Also, when touching my toes I can put my hands flat on the floor. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this ability, other than brag about it here.

Photo: A single tiny baby Croc. Sadly, I cannot find the other half of the pair.

However, this weekend, the amount of mess in the house had reached what I consider a maddening point (if anyone has seen my desk that is saying something!) There were also a large number of things in my brain that, while I am not thrilled that I am the one remembering them, were things that needed to be remembered. My husband had plenty of logistical things he was in charge of as well, such as booking a trip for him and some of the older kids to a family memorial service in a few weeks, signing a kid up for tennis, various complications with bids on chimney work, etc.

I realized that if I didn’t make a list to get these things out of my head — did I wash the pool towels? The kids’ sheets? Did I order lunches? Did the piano and alto sax get practiced? And by the way, the kids need to sweep up the paper bits the dog chewed up and get their clothes put away and… — I would be thinking of stuff that needed to be done all day, in addition to the normal Sunday logistics (does the 6-year-old have his soccer cleats? A water bottle? Is he wearing sunscreen?)

So I made a Sunday checklist. I listed the things that needed to happen with check boxes next to them and the person responsible. My husband took the 6-year-old to rock climbing (during which he dealt with chimney matters…good times), and during this time my older kids and I traded off caring for the toddler and working through the list.

I think it worked pretty well. The house is cleaner. The upstairs hallway is no longer covered with a ridiculous amount of kid flotsam. We got clarity on some future scheduling — knowing that people are not doing something is important too. People practiced their instruments. Thank you notes got written (not addressed yet, but baby steps…) By batching all this, we were still able to do some fun activities, like spending a long time in the pool when a family friend came over mid-day.

In general, I’d like the kids to shoulder more of the task load around here. The big ones are definitely old enough. They can take on some of the housework and weekend baby-help that I’m not sure needs to be outsourced anymore with so many capable people in the house. In KJ Dell’Antonia’s book, How to be a Happier Parent, she mentions that many people get upset because they want their kids to do chores without being asked. That might be the gold standard, but if you don’t get so hung up on that desire, you can wind up with the chores done. Which has some real upsides too! So I may start making a Sunday list more often.

How do you tackle kid responsibilities?

Photo: Growing in the new yard! I took the 9-year-old and toddler over there for a short walk after dinner on Sunday. This is part of my desire to log 1000 steps after dinner, as I suggested in a recent Before Breakfast episode.