It was actually the power of what my mother did staying home and raising 5 children that helped me “invent” shared care.

I knew I wanted my children to have the same experience I had had growing up - someone whose job was to really prioritize the family needs. I guess that’s why I looked for someone like Jeff (he cooked a 3 course meal without opening a cook book on our second date!)

Interestingly enough, Jeff and I would both tell you that parenting young children can sometimes feel like the harder job. And of course now that my kids are older, I look back nostalgically, and get all the hand holding I can with my 11 and 17 year old children.

So … I hope it’s been cleared up, ThirdPath (www.thirdpath.org) is less about 50-50 parenting, and more about supporting each couple to find the right balance for them.

And if there is one bias we add to the mix, it’s the importance of having no regrets. As one dad wrote in a ThirdPath email update, “If you are feeling conflicted about your work family balance, always err on spending more time with family.”

It helps that my husband really does do about half the work and that with the money, we were able to hire someone to clean, which neither of us likes. Its probably a 55/45 split…seriously we are that close. that said, I’m not sure the idea of a list or “scorekeeping” is so terrible if you are the kind of people who respond to that. We don’t do it, but I would be fine with it as a reminder.

If he left me with all the responsibility for the afterwork care for our daughter he’d miss out and I’d have tried to find part time work or quit…not a doubt.

It has to work for both of you. Good luck everyone.

I work full time right now, but in January I’ll become a SAHM (yikes!). We already have a sort of informal plan in which I take care of the cooking, cleaning, good portion of the child care and he handles the mowing, the garbage, the house maintenance, the cars… It’s traditional (yawn), but it works for us.

I agree that SAHMs don’t get enough credit in society, and it’s not something I believe will change any time soon (uh oh, am I getting cynical?). Like Sara, I’m going into it expecting my role as mother to be top priority. My own mother gave me two pieces of advice. One, know and accept that being a SAHM is largely a thankless job and, two, maintain adult friendships or you’ll go bonkers. I’m a little nervous about the latter; unlike Sara, most of my friends work, so I’ll have to do something about that!

Great post. Great topic. Thanks.

The descriptions of equally shared parenting that I’ve seen have been very off-putting — spreadsheets, color-coded charts, and endless discussions about who does what. It sounds like it would be hard to avoid scorekeeping, and I can’t see many people voluntarily signing up for such a system.

Rather than trying to divide things so that each person is doing 50% of the cooking, laundry, etc., it seems to me it would work best when each partner has full responsibility for different areas — one cooks dinner, while the other is responsible for laundry, for instance.

The tough part for any woman who isn’t in an equal parenting situation is how do you persuade your husband to take on more of the housework and childcare? My husband cooks dinner every night, but he chose to start doing it on his own — if I had “assigned” it to him or had long discussions to convince him to do it, it would never have worked.

Schedules and lists don’t work for us, but my husband does pitch in. He’s a terrific cook (much better than I am) and often cleans the kitchen after dinner. Laundry? Forget about it. One time, being nice, he washed everything in our laundry hamper. Most of it was my work clothes that I’d typically hang up right out of the dryer. I wanted to cry when I saw them lying on a heap, completely wrinkeled. So I do the laundry.

We have a good relationship of mutual respect, but I think it would take too much energy for us to figure out what exactly equal would mean.