Not surprisingly, splitting the childcare with my husband while all four of us are home and both adults need to work, has been… difficult. I’ve always covered more of the child care in our family, as I can leave work much earlier and I take our only car for my commute. Both my husband’s later end time, and the fact that he takes public transportation (and our kids’ school is not on a good bus line), means that for years he never picked them up. (Just this year I negotiated for my husband to pick them up one day a week so I could go to an earlier martial arts class, and that had been so nice.) I also take them to more of their activities, and do more with them on the weekends, because I prefer leaving the house and my husband is fine to stay home.
All this to say, I wasn’t surprised when, after the first five days of shelter-in-place, I had to initiate a discussion of how we could more equally divide the child care during these weeks of quarantine.
We have tried a couple different schedules. I even write when each parent is “on” to the right of our schedule on the big white board (that I took from my classroom). I think what will end up working best for us is me taking the kids for the “school day” 8am to 4pm-ish, and my husband taking the afternoon / evening shift of 4pm to 8:30pm ish. My husband also comes up and does lunch with the kids from noon to 1pm. (He’s working down in our unit, where we have a table and chair and a lot of quite.)
I know this gives my husband a lot more covered hours during the day, but right now he needs those hours more than I do. If I can have the afternoons to grade papers and finalize the stuff going out the next day, I can watch The Outside and go to bed at a decent time. (This happened last night! It was glorious!) I can also get some work done during the day, especially when my kids are playing ABC Mouse and Adventure Academy or listening to podcasts and audiobooks (or reading) during quiet time. It’s harder for my husband to get work done with the kids around because a lot of his work involves phone calls and zoom meetings.
He also doesn’t have to work at all on the weekends right now, which is when I get my big chunks of time to front load my planning. It’s only the beginning of the week, but I do think the work I did over the weekend is making this week go a lot smoother than last week.
I don’t necessarily think this a “fair” division of labor, but I also think it’s probably what will work best for our family. I’ve read a couple of articles about how women shoulder more of the burden when families shelter-in-place, and how this pandemic is horrible for feminism, and I recognize so many of the patterns in our set up. Women already have to deal with so much injustice, it’s frustrating that this is going to further stall out the little progress women have made.
I would love to hear more about how couples and families are handling these new circumstances. Please let me know what is working for you.
Our situation is reversed: my husband is usually with our children more during the week due to my job being more demanding and requiring more hours. Now he is still going to work every day because his job continues as usual and he is not set up for telework, while I am home with our 8-year-old twin boys while also working remotely full-time.
So far, things are going OK. We’ll see how they are in a week or so. 😉
I think you are doing excellent job at looking at the needs of your adult’s jobs, your adult’s skills and abilities, your children’s needs and abilities and figuring out solutions that can be achieved with everyone pulling together.
In my family one of your generation is single parenting and doing a 12-14 hour work day. Luckily that grand is mature, excellent student, fully on board with cooperating and in 8th grade. 3rd grader family has two parents both of whom have high crises pressure jobs and are working 12-16 hour days with giant pressure loads. No weekends off. 3rd grader has about 10 hrs of homeschool per day from their teachers to work. It takes adult help but child is adjusting and they are splitting who’s on call duty constantly. Tiny home so they all know who is on phone and who isn’t. I expect teachers will be making adjustments in assignments as they get real time feedback from parents about problems and quantity of work. Each family is different and their best solutions will vary.
Your home may not be gender contributions equal in time with children due to particular circumstances specific to jobs and personalities. BUT, spouse IS increasing his time against his preference to maintain the home and do the best for the children. It IS hard! Equalizing loss of sleep now to avoid reduced ability to fight any virus that arrives at your home is really important to not becoming a one parent home. The 14 yr old in my family is single parent home due to death of other parent. Not a desirable situation. AVOID IT.