This wraps up another full week of book activities, the highlights of which have been:

• A return visit to our fellow parenting writer and friend, Amy Tiemann, as guests on her Mojo Mom podcast.  We love talking with Amy about ESP because she gets past the obvious surface questions and into the nuances.  We have had the pleasure of being interviewed by her prior to our book publication days, but it was especially nice to speak with her now about our hopes for the book and some of its details.  If you have about 30 minutes, this one is well worth the listen.
• Part II of our 'radio tour' of 10 minute interviews across the country, and a final stop on Montreal's Kim Fraser Show (CJAD 800).  We really enjoyed talking with Kim about the realities of ESP, and of course we love how she pronounces our last name with French panache.  This high-energy, fun segment is about 20 minutes in length if you'd like to listen along.
• An extremely thoughtful review of Equally Shared Parenting by family/marriage therapy academic Carmen Knudson-Martin, who blogs with her sociology professor counterpart, Anne Mahoney, at our sister site, www.equalcouples.com.  Carmen understands ESP down to its very core, and her comments about intentionality and ownership are music to our ears.

No, this is not an R-rated post.  I'm talking about baby showers (and, for that matter, "bridal" showers).  Astri von Arbin Ahlander, one of a dynamic duo of Gen-Y writers for True/Slant's thought-provoking Work.Life blog, rants this week about why in the world we still insist on throwing these events for women only...and including only women on the guest list. 

Why indeed?

I love Astri's argument, so I'll just paste it in here as she tells it:

"If we're all going to at least play along with the contemporary idea of equal parenting (whether this actually happens or not is another question), then a man's life is going to change a great deal with the coming of baby too. If we expect men these days to change diapers and give baths, why do we arrange a party where the mother is the sole recipient of the diapers and the rubber duckies?"

She goes on to conclude:

"Why do I insist so on ruining the pink party? For two reasons. First of all, a baby shower thrown for a mother-to-be and attended almost exclusively by women sets the tone for who is really going to be changing those diapers and giving those baths: the mother. Hmm…so much for equal parenting. Secondly, isn't it kind of unfair to start a new-dad-to-be's parenthood path by suggesting his role in the matter isn't worth celebrating? You devoted dads are worth sticking up for."

I'm right with ya, Astri.  If we aim to create an equal partnership in parenting, we should begin that way whenever possible.  In our case, the guest list for our own baby shower was traditionally female, but Marc and I attended together and opened the gifts and thanked the givers together.  And I've loved throwing baby showers for my male colleagues as they await their first children. 

Let's take this one more step while we're at it...let's think of our baby's birth (the actual birth itself) as the moment both partners become parents.  Sure, we women are doing the work and experiencing - in the first person - something extraordinary.  But that isn't the only thing going on.  The minute we hear that first amazing wail, two parents have crossed a threshold - together.

I think Amy is slacking off on her laundry duties. I mean, I've washed two loads this week to her one, and her batch is still sitting in the dryer with permanent wrinkles by now. It looks like I'll have to make M's lunch tonight too - even though it's Amy's turn...after all, it's almost 10p.m. and she hasn't done it yet. And another thing: I gassed up the car the last 3 times. Is it too much to ask that she swing by the pump sometime? Jeez.

Sound familiar? I sure hope not! But yet this horrid scorekeeping mentality is the Number 1 complaint we get from commenters on articles written about equally shared parenting. That, and its close cousin, the accusation of ESP being possible only between two highly neurotic people devoted against all else to exactly splitting every (that's every) household chore down the middle.

Well, we finally got to face these myths down yesterday in our guest post on Lisa Belkin's Motherlode blog in the New York Times. And boy does it feel good! Huge thanks go to Lisa for giving us this powerful platform to do so.

Now, back at the ESP ranch, we know there really isn't much need to address the issue. If you're an equal parenting afficionado or practitioner yourself, you already know the truth - that ESP is probably the opposite of scorekeeping and rigidity. It's about breaking out of the rigid molds that society would have us fit, and teaming up with our best friends (that's our partners) to come up with a new way of sharing both the burdens and the joys of life together. It's about wanting the best for our partners, not micromanaging them or keeping track of their contributions. It's about trust, and puzzle-solving...together.

But now that I'm here in ESP-friendly company, I do have one more beef with the 50/50-scorekeeping myths. And that is that splitting a task exactly down the middle, and even checking on how well one might be doing with that math over time, is totally fine. Laudable. Smart. See, it's all in the motivation.

As ESP couples, we want an equal partnership. We know this brings us both our best chance at lives we can honestly say we love. And yet thousands of niggling societal pressures push us into inequality every day. The boss that expects a man to stay late because his wife can pick up the kids (right?). The school that always calls Mom about the kids' progress or when they become ill - even if Dad's name is first on the call list. The neighbor who shares housekeeping tips with Mom and makes fun of how men can't cook to save their lives. To stay the course of equality, ESP couples have to be aware - consciously choosing it over and over in a culture that expects otherwise. And doing that often means either continually noticing and correcting course by talking, talking, talking together...or putting autopilot equality in place whenever possible.

Autopilot equality is a great thing. But the crazy part is that, to an outsider, it can look like the most petty of 50/50 division or scorekeeping. Mom cooks on M/W/F, Dad cooks on T/Th/S and Sunday is pizza night. Dad wakes up if the baby cries before 2 a.m., Mom handles cries after this cutoff. Mom drives to the party, Dad drives home. Silly? Or a really easy way to keep things - a few things - nice and equal. Which is just what both of you want anyway.

So here's to the beauty of the 50/50 split...when executed ESP-style!

Yes, it's more book news... We seem to live and breathe it right now, and of course we'd love to share a bit of this crazy experience with you. Today, we did a 15-station 'radio media tour,' which is what publishers set up for authors instead of sending them out on expensive physical book tours (at least those of us who aren't celebrities). It was fun, although we felt that we kept saying the same thing over and over every 10 minutes!

But even more fun is discovering reviews of Equally Shared Parenting in cyberspace - by old friends, new friends, colleagues, and complete strangers.  Here's a sampling:

• Review in Minnesota Parent magazine:  This one had us laughing out loud at author Beth Hawkins' assumptions about us from heresay, and smiling from ear-to-ear at her realizations after she read the book.  But it does make us more determined than ever to squash those horrid scorekeeping and 50/50-exact-chore-split myths about ESP!
• Review by Laura Vanderkam:  Laura wrote a great quote about us that we included on our book jacket, and has since become a work/life balance colleague and friend.  She writes about our book now in her blog 168 Hours, which is also the title of her next book - due out this Spring - on taking control of your own time (we all have 168 hours to call our own every week). She includes spot-on examples of bath frequency and playroom clean-up routines to illustrate how two parents need to come up with family standards to create harmonious equal sharing.  Laura's only beef with our book is our portrayal of dual reduced-hours work as a great way to make time for everything that matters most; she believes that full-time work (or more) is fully compatible with a balanced life. I think there is no right answer here - for us, meaningful and productive work fits very well into 32 hours weekly, while for others this best-life balance point may be different.  Thanks, Laura, for a lovely review!
• Review at First Time Second Time: ESP couple extraordinaire (and featured couple in our book), Gail and Lyn, review our book from a lesbian family perspective. It definitely makes us smile to read their take on how the book is welcoming to same-sex partners, and is the first parenting book they have read that doesn't talk down to dads. Hooray!
• Review at Two Hot Mamas: Very sweet, heartfelt review by one half of this lesbian couple as they eagerly await their first baby. I'm so thankful to know that our book has helped them think about how they will approach parenthood, making room for sharing all the burdens and the joys. This is a perfect example of why we wrote this book!  Best wishes, Mamas, for the months ahead (their baby girl was born just yesterday).

And, finally, while not a book review, we had the pleasure of contributing to the wonderful new web resource for everything shared, Shareable.net. Check out our piece on how a couple might hold tight to their equal partnership and balanced lives as they take that plunge into parenthood.

Have you written a review of our book? Let us know - we'd love to share it here!

We had a wonderful, official send-off for our book yesterday at the Watertown Public Library.  Our book launch party felt just right, with a whole gaggle of kids sitting at our feet as we gave a short presentation to those in attendance.  It was heartwarming to see our friends and family, some of our featured ESP couples and some who absolutely qualify for the sequel to our book (although somehow talking about a second book seems a bit like bringing up the idea of a second child to a mother who has just finished labor with her first), and some new faces we're glad to meet.

Today, it was Radio Day for us!  Things started at 6:00am when we snuck out of the house to the WGBH studios (our local NPR affiliate station) to do a short 6:45 a.m. spot with Lisa Belkin on The Takeaway.  You can listen here (about 6 minutes).  A big "thank you" hug to Marc's wonderful mother for sleeping over so that she could be with M and T.  And, of course, an equal "thank you" to Lisa for sharing her weekly radio spot with us.

Then, it was on to the studios of WBNW, a local AM radio station, in the afternoon to do a longer spot with Rob Mitchell on his Pages to People book review show.  This will air this coming Saturday at 6 p.m.  We will post a link to the show once it airs - check our Events and Appearances page.  It was a pleasure to talk with Rob because he was able to give us plenty of time to delve into the book's details.

Then, we were back on the phone as guests for the second half of fatherhood expert Armin Brott's Positive Parenting show.  The air date for this show is not set yet, but we'll post the link on our Events and Appearances page when it becomes available.

And, finally, we had the pleasure of speaking with Diego Mulligan, host of The Journey Home, on KSFR-FM, Santa Fe Public Radio.  This was a live show so we should have a link to share with you soon - again on our Events and Appearances page.

Phew!  Okay, we're officially ready to sleep soundly now!

Just a quick note to say we're popping up all over the place - this is kinda fun! We were featured by Lisa Belkin in her NY Times Motherlode blog yesterday, along with several other authors. It was great to have our book introduced as Lisa's first grandchild (grandbook?). We were sad to see so much of the conversation in the comments once again focused on equal task sharing (never mind exact 50/50 division of every task), but frankly we're a bit too busy right now to fire up the ol' rebuttal machine (perhaps more on that in a later post). Hopefully all of you wonderful readers know this is hardly the case.

We promise - we will return to our regularly scheduled programming at some point in the near future.  But please allow us to celebrate today just for today.  We are so happy to share our book with the world, and to get out the empowering - and very true - message that equally shared parenting is accessible, practical, sustainable and real.  It makes us feel terrific to read and hear from so many sources that our book is full of varied examples of ESP, so that almost any couple can connect with someone who is featured in its pages.  So much as been written about egalitarian marriage as an impossible ideal.  But it's not!


Here are a few highlights of the book's recent coverage:

• Our live TV debut!  We were on FOX News here in Boston yesterday morning.  Click here if you would like to watch this 5 minute segment.
• Great reviews from some of our amazing, fantastic, esteemed colleagues:  sociologist Carmen Knudson-Martin at Equal Couples, author Kristin Maschka at Remodeling Motherhood, and communications consultant (and featured ESP mom in Chapter 2 of our book) Michelle Barry Franco at The Brazen Soul.  Your support feels wonderful!

It sure was great to walk into a bookstore today and see our book.  Hooray!

Tomorrow is the big day. The book we've given (almost) all of our personal time to in the past year is finally entering the bookstores. Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents will be real.

So on this quiet and rather peaceful evening, we just want to say one thing:

Thank you.

- to all of the wonderful ESP couples who have shared their lives and philosophies with us during interviews. We are deeply grateful to be entrusted to shape your stories into blueprints for the next generation of parents.
- to our dear mentors and colleagues in the fight to bring gender equal partnerships to the table of lifestyle choices. We are honored to learn from you and partner with you in this mission.
- to our friends and family for helping us through in so many ways. We could not be more fortunate.

Oh, and let's all go check out the bookstores tomorrow!

Tick, tick, tick...two days until our book release date! We are definitely gearing up around here - with our main missions being to: 1) get the word out to all of the parents who want equal partnerships and balanced lives that there is now a practical handbook to help them achieve these dreams, and 2) have a lot of fun along the way.

The fun has already begun, I'm happy to share. We were guests on The Jefferson Exchange, an NPR show originating from Oregon, last Wednesday (you can listen by downloading the podcast here; warning - it does take a few minutes to load). And we were featured in two different articles on the terrific new website, Shareable.net:

• The Top 10 Shareable Events of 2009 (equally shared parenting is #8)
• Eight Books We're Looking Forward to in 2010 (we're #4)

Also, in today's Boston Globe, you can find us in this sweet article about how to handle missing your child's big milestones when they happen on your partner's watch instead of when you are home to see them firsthand.

We hope you plan to join us for the fun of the next few weeks and months. We will post our book events on our new Events and Appearances page as we schedule them. And if you are in the Boston area, we hope you're free to join us for the official book launch party next Sunday (1/10) at 2pm at the Watertown Public Library - see you there!

On the cusp of our own book's release in one week, we are happy to review a wonderful new book by sociologist, Kathleen Gerson. Dr. Gerson is the author of several well-known gender studies books such as No Man's Land: Men's Changing Commitments to Work and Family and The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality. Now, she adds to this literature with The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation if Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America. We have long been fans of her work, and had the opportunity to meet up with Dr. Gerson at a couple of conferences last year. She is a diehard optimist among so many pessimistic peers in her field, and a true believer in the value of ESP. We count her among our closest academic mentors and supporters.

Even without this glowing introduction, we'd be excited to read her new book. It is an analysis of in-depth interviews with 120 young men and women - ages 18 to 32 - on how they feel about their families of origin and how they would like to structure their relationships as adults. The book is a revealing window into how the newest generation of adult partners/parents views the gender changes that took place in their parents' lives and how they plan to carry out future changes in their own lives.

The good news in the book's pages is abundant. Looking back at the interviewees' childhood experiences, Dr. Gerson finds that they are far more focused on how well their own parents adapted to financial or emotional hardship than on what exact form their family took to do so (e.g., married, divorced, male breadwinner/SAHM, dual income). A happy childhood home was most strongly related not to its form but rather to how well it supported all family members with mutually respectful relationships, a satisfying balance between work and home, and caring, egalitarian bonds. Sounds a lot like ESP, right?

Contrary to some popular opinions that pin young men and women as either relationship drifters who shun commitment or traditionalists who are opting out of workplace equality, Dr. Gerson also found that most of her interviewees desired a lasting, egalitarian partnership for themselves. The majority of both women and men want a committed bond in which they share both paid work and family caretaking, regardless of how they were raised.

The bad news is that these young respondents don't think that they can find what they are looking for - the right partner or the right job that allows them to truly balance work and family in an equal partnership. Instead, they think they will have to settle for something that is a distant second to their dream future. This is indeed bad news, but it gets worse. The second choice life for most women interviewees is different than the second choice for most men. Incompatibly different.

The women are determined not to be trapped in an unhappy marriage or mistreated by an unfaithful partner, and so center their futures around work at all costs. If they can't have an equal partnership, they will settle instead for economic independence. The men, however, can't quite see how equal sharing will play out for them in the still-traditional world of work, and so choose a second option that keeps them at the head of the household - as primary breadwinner.

But back up a minute. What they really want is ESP. Or, in Dr. Gerson's eloquent words, "they want to create enduring and egalitarian partnerships that allow them to strike a personal balance between family and work." The bolding is mine, pointing out a striking resemblance to the two foundations of equally shared parenting - an equal partnership and balanced lives for both partners. Yet, "it is often easier to hold values than to live them, and young adults face a gap between what they want and what they think they can actually get."

The Unfinished Revolution includes lovely details about these young adults' desires for equality and balance, and why these values are so important to them - "not [as] a selfish wish to have it all, but rather a shared desire for the best of both worlds." They hope to get there even if they have to sacrifice maximizing their incomes, but they don't have role models or a blueprint to follow.

At least for another week...

We highly recommend The Unfinished Revolution, which has joined our other favorite ESP references on our Resources page.

We have our first book review from an official literature review organization!

Vachon, Marc & Amy Vachon. Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents. Perigee: Putnam. Jan. 2010. 228p. index. ISBN 978-0-399-53558-1. $23.95. CHILD REARING. Parents and the brains behind EquallySharedParenting.com, Marc Vachon and Amy Vachon describe equally shared parenting (ESP) as the "purposeful practice of two parents sharing equally in the four domains of child rearing, housework, breadwinning, and time for self," resulting in each partner doing only half the work, owning half the responsibility, and getting half of the power. The authors do an outstanding job of arguing against the model of Dad as apprentice parent and the assumption that mom does child rearing best, acknowledging that the cultural standard of maternity leave and the realities of breastfeeding start off most new parents on an inequitable path. This is not a theoretical piece for burned-out moms seeking more help with the housework, but a working document that motivated couples can turn to for guidance in designing a more balanced relationship. Somewhere above, Betty Friedan is cheering. This columnist is shouting from the rafters. Brilliant!
- Julianne J. Smith, Library Review, 12/17/2009 (starred review)

What a wonderful vision of Betty Friedan cheering from beyond the grave. And we love that she considers the book a working document that couples can really use to create ESP. That's the aim!

And more cheers for our mentor and colleague, Carmen Knudson-Martin, at Equal Couples for highlighting our book (and Kathleen Gerson's fantastic new book - more on that later) in her latest post.

It seems pretty well established, if not completely accepted as truth, that money can't buy happiness. Sure, it can help reduce some financial worries, open doors to opportunities, or even allow us to take risks that might otherwise be irresponsible but given the choice between a hunk of precious metal or a solid foundation for a relationship I'm prepared to work on the foundation.

Today, some new research from the University of Western Ontario "reveals that couples who share the responsibility for paid and unpaid work report higher average measures of happiness and life satisfaction than those in other family models." This article from Science Daily discusses this new research and goes on to point out the value to "society in terms of gender equity and its ability to maximize labour force participation by all adults."

If the government reflects the wishes of the people, we can expect policies that foster the choices of parents who want to live by this model. Of course, that may take time - but the lead researchers expect the government to "support equal opportunities for men and women to access education and work, provide conditions that facilitate work-life balance and promote greater involvement of men in housework and childcare."

Regardless of which policies come down the pike, there is no need to wait for your dreams. If an ESP arrangement makes sense to you, take steps now to make it happen. More money won't make you happier, but a partnership in which you can walk in each others shoes daily and have access to the bounty of life in all domains just might do the trick.

Just a quick note to tell you that we've made a few changes to www.equallysharedparenting.com as we prepare for our book launch on January 5th. If you view our main menu in the orange box to the left of every page, you'll see a new option called ESP: The Book. Here, you will find an introduction to our book, with links to order it from various booksellers and also links to quotes from experts who have read the book, an excerpt and partial list of topics included, events and appearances (we'll add to this as time goes on), and our Perigee press kit and publicist information.

We have also collapsed the old 'About Marc and Amy' and 'Contact Us' sections into a new Contact Marc and Amy tab for space reasons.

We'd love to hear what you think of the website changes, or any additional ideas you may have.

On December 1st, the National Fatherhood Initiative announced the results of its Mama Says survey.  This is the first national survey of how mothers view fathers and fatherhood, and consisted of an online 80+ question poll of 1533 mothers.

Among the key findings of the survey are:

• For parents who live together, the top predictors of a mother's satisfaction with her partner's fathering were his closeness to the kids and how well he manages his own work/life balance.
• Most mothers think that fathers are replaceable - that a child's father could be replaced either by a single mom who parents alone or by another male.
• Very few mothers think that men and women parent similarly.
• Most mothers consider women to be far more nurturing than men.

There are other key findings, but these four stood out for me as I read the survey results (full study can be found here).  First of all, we have to keep in mind that the survey's main aim was to get one parent's opinion of (or satisfaction with) the other parent - this is always tricky since it is always best to mind one's own business rather than evaluate someone else's performance.  But let's put that aside for the moment.  The first finding above speaks to the connection between one partner's happiness and the other partner's life balance.  It is just another small piece of evidence that this whole parenting thing works best as a team sport, and that when we work together to assure that each partner has a chance at a balanced life (and a meaningful connection with our children), everyone wins.

The sad finding about father replaceability is rather hard to interpret.  For women who are more connected to their children than their partners are, and surviving with this inequality, the result makes sense.  We all have to made do with what we have, or make a change.  If a father disappears or dies (as my own father did), a mother has to believe her kids have a chance at happiness (look Mom, I'm happy!).  And short of these scenarios of 0% father presence, mothers with less involved but existing partners have to also believe that the kids will thrive.  The question doesn't ask whether mothers feel that a fully involved co-parenting father can be replaced by a good-for-nothing bum of a new boyfriend with no consequences to the kids.  Nor, by the way, do we know what fathers think...would they say that a mother can be replaced by a single father or a new female companion?  I suspect they would not be as cavalier about their answer as the moms in the survey seemed to be, but in an ESP worldview the answers should be no different.

The last two findings were somewhat buried in the report, but interesting (and also sad) to ESP parents.  Do men and women parent similarly?  Our culture trains us to say "no" with a vengeance - both from what we observe on TV and from how our society is set up to teach men and women their proper roles at home.  But very little is actually nature (it's nurture).  Men and women, globally speaking, can parent similarly. Individual fathers and mothers parent very differently, of course, and that's one of the big perks of ESP.  Two different parents, two styles, two heads better than one - lucky kids.  The question of male nurturing runs along the same lines.  Yet we have a chicken-and-egg quandry here.  If moms believe moms are better at nurturing, moms will continue to take control in this arena...thus winning the nurturing trophies and proving the myth.  We all know boys are better at math than girls...right?  Or perhaps....

Mama Says is an interesting set of data.  It is reflective of the state of parenting in America, surely, and worthy of review.  A followup study would be useful, several years from now and then again in several decades.  How would the results be different if the percentage of ESP couples in the survey was larger?

You are invited! 

Our book, Equally Shared Parenting: Rewriting the Rules for a New Generation of Parents, will be released in just a few weeks, and we are planning a launch party here in the Boston area.  If you are in town, mark your calendar for:

Sunday, January 10, 2010
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Watertown Public Library (in the Event Room)
123 Main Street, Watertown, MA  02472


We are thrilled to be celebrating our book at this wonderful, local community space - the perfect choice in our minds.  There is plenty of room, and kids are welcome.  We would be thrilled to meet you and talk ESP for awhile.

Meanwhile, our mail carrier brought us an exciting gift today - our own two copies of the book.  It feels great to hold one in our hands, and we can't wait to share it with you.

Many of us would like to work a few less hours per week than we do, but we are locked into full-time positions. Usually that means a minimum of 40 hours per week. But what would a 35 or 30 hour per week position look like from our employer's point of view?

First of all, because attractive 30-35 hour positions with decent benefits aren't available yet around every corner, employers who offer them can hook an employee for the long haul. It's the 'golden handcuffs'. Once someone lands such a job, he or she is likely to stick around simply because another job like this is hard to get. I have no statistics to back me up here, but I bet a staff of 30 hour per week employees turns over much more slowly than a full-time staff.

Secondly, not all jobs require exactly 40 hours per week to do. Face it - all of us have some slack in our jobs, where we aren't terribly efficient or are just plain goofing off. I'll bet most of us could get almost the same amount of work done in 30 efficient hours that we get done in 40 regular hours. So, an employer who can detect which positions can be done in less than full time stands to save a bundle of money by offering reduced hours to employees who want them.

By offering such positions, employers can draw from two pools of talented workers. One pool is the existing top-performing full-time employee who would love to trim off a few hours from his/her work week (e.g., the would-be equally sharing parent). The other is the highly qualified stay-at-home mom (or dad) who doesn't work now because she (or he) doesn't want a full-time job.

Reduced hour positions deserve pro-rated benefits. But forward-thinking employers can tailor their benefit structure to lose nothing (or very little) by offering reduced benefits to a 30-35 hour per week employee rather than full benefits to a 40 hour employee.

Employees who work 30-35 hours per week for one company consider this job to be their sole or primary job. This is in contrast to many 20 hour per week employees who hold down 2 or more jobs with divided loyalties to each. Therefore, your typical 30+ hour per week employee is likely to be just as connected and involved in the success of his/her company as a full-time employee.

So, reduced hours is great for employers! The above benefits apply to both big and small companies. There is a huge untapped need for excellent reduced hour positions with acceptable benefits, and the employer who markets open positions like this first wins. Meanwhile, if you want a reduced hour position, go ahead and ask! Maybe even use some of these arguments to convince your boss that your idea is the best thing for everyone.

Another ESP family has added their story to our Real Life Stories page - that's two new stories in one month!  We are happy to introduce you to our latest ESP friends - Juli and Russel and their 18-month old son, B.  They live in Los Angeles, where Juli is pursuing her PhD in Sociology and Russel works part-time as a web development consultant. 

We are so appreciative of Juli and Russel's story as an example of how ESP can work when one partner is a full-time student.  They know their current situation is temporary (really, this is true for all of us, right?), and are already planning ahead to tweak their sharing as Juli prepares to enter her first academic job and Russel rethinks his long-term career plans. 

One of Juli's realizations along their parenting journey thus far has been that different isn't wrong.  For them, sharing B's care with Russel taking the helm during the days and Juli taking over in the evenings works well - even if it isn't the 'normal' way families are structured.  Thumbs up, Juli and Russel!  And a warm welcome to the ESP Real Life Story family.

Babble has an informative article this week on why men don't tend to take paternity leave - especially in proportion to the leave that new mothers do. Of course the fact that only 13% of American workplaces offer paid paternity leave options has something to do with this discrepancy. But it is way more than that. Only 58% of the men who actually have such a juicy tidbit dangled in front of them even take it. Free time off to bond with their baby and a full 42% turn it down! And less than 10% of all American men take more than 2 weeks off when they become fathers.

The article features a few men who bucked the trend and loved it. We've found the same thing in our research for our forthcoming book - that men who screw up their courage to ask and then take extended paternity leave time don't regret it and feel grateful for having had the opportunity to do something so amazing, fleeting, and yet that lasts forever in the strength of their bond to their kids.

Why do most men not jump at such a chance? The answers are complex, including the pressure at work to climb higher without pause (why?), the fear that their absence will cause co-workers to do just fine without them (sounds like a mark of a well-planned leave to me!), the social stigma of caretaking as women's work (get over it!), the pressure to provide-provide-provide when there are now more mouths to feed (that's what your wife's job is for - half of that providing). Maybe even the feeling that our partners are better at the babycare than we are, so why bring in the second-string help (of course, this is self-prophecy - if we never get good at handling a crying baby, we'll never be good at handling a crying baby)?

These are crazy reasons to miss out on one of the top wonders of the modern world. Did I miss anything more valid?

Millions of American families - with our pathetic corporate parental leave policies - sacrifice good money to keep mothers home way past any paid leave so that they can be with their babies for 3, 6, 9, 12+ months. What would happen if we allocated some of this (even half!) to these babies' fathers instead? How would this change our marital landscape a year down the road - or 3 years, 6 years, 9 years, 12 years later?

Such possibilities!

We're so happy to announce that another couple's ESP experience has been added to our Real Life Stories page. For the past year, we've not focused on adding these stories since we've been collecting them for our upcoming book (which is loaded with terrific ESP couples). But we have only learned of this newest couple recently - too late to be included in our book, unfortunately. The great news is that they have written their story for the website instead. And it's a wonderful example of the power of equally shared parenting.

Please meet Darien and Darrin, an Hawaiian parenting team with three children. Both are writers who have published multiple acclaimed books - hers in fiction (under pen name Mia King) and his in mastering the mental game of golf. Darrin also runs his own award-winning golf academy. Together, they have taken some daring leaps to create a life they love. And they credit ESP to helping them live truthfully and honoring both of their dreams.

Welcome to Darien and Darrin!

"Dads are the ones reporting growing concerns with work-life balance. Most men with a child under the age of one wish they could spend more time with them. And only one in four men now thinks that mothers should be the main carers of children."

This quote from the The Guardian (UK) caught my eye in an article posted this past Sunday called Yes, It's Hard for Working Mums. But Dads Want to Be With Their Children Too. The piece does an excellent job pointing out inequities in the workplace through matter-of-fact statements like: "These dated attitudes towards fathers can't last. Most of the wives (or partners) of fathers with pre-school children are now in work. In the old days employers operated in a 'buy one, get one free' labour market: you employed the man, safe in the knowledge that his wife would be the one doing the night-feeds, running to school to collect sickly children and disappearing from the world of work altogether for a few years."

Then the article follows up with the resulting impact on women: "Mothers were still expected to be the main carer - hence the endurance of phrases such as 'working mother' or 'career woman', which make no apparent sense when applied to men. Small wonder that so many quit."

In conclusion, the author minces no words when proposing the solution: "For women to have more equality at work, we need more equality at home; in this struggle for equality, fathers and feminists are on the same side."

Of course, balanced lives for both parents with equal access to all the joys of adult life is an ideal both genders can embrace. Women may like the label of ESP initially more than men, but I have seen time and again that men get as much, if not more, from this lifestyle.

What could make more sense, and contain more hope, than both genders teaming up to solve this puzzle together?

Now I know that Marc just posted an blog entry on the great trend of including both mothers and fathers in media pieces about parenting. Well, I agree. But some people haven't quite gotten the news. Here's a perfectly awful example of what can happen when we leave fathers out of the discussion: The Dr. Phil Show. In a recent show, this supposedly enlightened advice guru somehow traveled back in time, and dupped a whole studio audience worth of people to do so with him. And he left me so dumbfounded by his choice of show topic and omissions that it has taken me a few weeks to write this blog post - mostly because I needed to find a way to address his behavior in a civil manner.

On Wednesday October 14th, the Dr. Phil Show featured a reprise of a trick he's done before - an audience of stay-at-home mothers on one side of the aisle facing off with an audience of working moms on the other. The first time he tried this ratings gimmick several years ago, he was loudly admonished by mothers everywhere for trying to pit us against each other and create the Mommy Wars that the media so desperately want to make real. And worse yet, whenever this kind of mom-against-mom battle is encouraged, all parents lose - the very real issues that all of us face about the lack of flexible, well-paid and interesting work that would allow everyone to make good family choices, the lack of high quality and affordable childcare, etc.

So here he goes again. "Gee whiz, golly," I can hear the good doctor saying. "I'm only trying to help the two sides see each other's point of view." No...he knows it makes for good ratings. Period.

The part that frosted me the most as I forced myself to watch the judgments fly from his guests was that not once did he (or any guest) mention the Other Parent. Not once in a full 60 minute show did he suggest that a child's father could take part in caring for his own children. Is this 1960 all over again????

We heard from stay at home moms who claimed that their choice, although many days very hard, was the most selfless - all for the good of the kids who should be nurtured and loved 24/7 by their mothers (fathers, apparently, are figureheads). We had working moms who provided stories and statistics about how children flourish when their moms are happy, when they are in good quality childcare, etc. (but the moms juggled it all, apparently). And we saw an emotionally tortured new mom about to return to work from her maternity leave - unable to fathom leaving her baby. The last woman's husband even came to the show (he didn't merit a chair on stage, however), but there wasn't one mention of how he might care for the baby.

All the angst and burden (and joy!) of juggling childraising and work was assumed to be a mothers only issue. All the choices - work, work part-time, work from home, don't work at all - all Mom's.

Gag me with a shovel.

Yes, there are plenty of families (I came from one) with only one parent - be that a mother or a father. These single parents have a hard road to support their children financially, mentally, emotionally, physically. But for families with two parents, well, there are two parents to shoulder the duties - of childraising, of breadwinning, of housework. Mathematically, dear Dr. Phil, the options go far beyond 'mom works and puts the kids in 60+ hours of outside care' or 'mom quits and stays home.'

Until we stop thinking of childraising as a woman's sole responsibility, we're stuck. Until we start to showcase alternatives that free both women and men from culturally imposed roles, we think things are black and white - all or none. And we saddle our husbands with second parent status (proportional to our level of control at home).

The new mom at the end of the show who was bereft at leaving her child to return to work all but admitted that the reason for her anxiety was because she wanted to remain the number one person in her son's life...and because she would just plain miss his little face when she was at work. Understandable. But it was sure ironic that, as she was telling her story, the background flashed to a picture of her son wearing a onsie that said 'It's All About Me.' Her desire to be the center of the child's world is about her - not what is best for her son. If her motives for avoiding outside childcare were child-based instead, she could resolve her anxieties by selecting a loving outside provider - or (gasp) sharing the childcare time with her husband as equals. What a gift to her son this could be!

I'm more than disgusted by Dr. Phil's mom-fight show. Has he not heard that fathers are waking up across the world to the joy of full-on parenting for themselves? Is he not interested in making the world a better, easier place for all parents to lovingly raise children? Whatever choice each family makes, it should be made for the good of everyone - moms, dads, kids. Let's fight for that, not against each other.

Get real, Dr. Phil.

As I absorb various news articles and other media pieces on parenting these days, I'm encouraged that the trend is towards including both parents - finally. I'm seeing fewer and fewer articles that leave out fathers, and more and more like this one that focus on the beauty of both parents teaming up for the greater good. It seems increasingly presumed that more dad involvement in childcare is good for both the kids and the marriage.

One such voice of teamwork recently surfaced with the release of a new book called Partnership Parenting by Marsha and Kyle Pruett - a professor of social work and child psychiatrist team, and parenting couple. I haven't read the book yet, but I like what I've heard about it so far. The Pruetts claim that sharing the parenting duties is good for the kids and the parents. They are clear that artificially, or actually, dividing the chores to achieve some arbitrary 50/50 goal of equal tasks completed is silly. And they also speak of the importance of deciding as a team how the parenting "show" should be run.

I couldn't agree more. Just about all of the ESP couples we have interviewed refer to their relationship as a team of equals regardless of how evenly they divide any particular chore. Very few ever claim their primary goal is equal task division (in fact, they aren't focused on chore division much at all) even as they are also clear that the more they can share any domain the closer they come to their ideals.

Much of the discussion so far about the Pruetts' new book seems to focus on the benefits of accepting each parent as he or she is - not expecting fathers to act like mothers or vice versa. Amen to that! The Pruetts are also experts on the research supporting the benefits of shared parenting on the well being of children. Amy and I have intentionally avoided focusing on the facts about ESP's benefits to children since we are not academic researchers, but we firmly believe, as I'm sure is true for most parents, that our choices work for our family. It's great to have a resource for these facts now.

I am looking forward to diving into Partnership Parenting.

We have been anticipating a new book called This Is Not How I Thought It Would Be: Remodeling Motherhood to Get the Lives We Want Today by Kristin Maschka for many months. Having had the privilege of reading an advance copy of Kristin's manuscript, we knew it was going to be an empowering and very ESP-centric book. And we're happy to announce that it was released earlier this month.

Remodeling Motherhood is Kristin's own personal story of transforming her marriage from a traditional SAHM/working dad union to an ESP partnership - and how the result has given both her and her husband, David, lives that now feel so right. It is the first book we know of that describes this journey. We've gotten to know Kristin (who is a former president of Mothers & More) through emails over the past year, and she is a solid believer in equally shared parenting who walks the walk . To highlight her terrific book, we sent her a few questions so that you could begin to know her as well. Take it away, Kristin....

1. We love your story because you and David took on a world of gender assumptions about marriage and parenting and re-wrote your own rules instead. What do you think was the hardest 'rule' for each of you to re-write?

I think the hardest to rewrite were the unwritten rules that "Mothers are responsible for and best at family; Fathers are clueless" so that we could share responsibility for family work. We couldn't seem to share the responsibility even though we wanted to. Over time we realized that we struggled because we were also dealing with so many other unwritten rules in other areas - like his job being 60 hours a week, and an assumption that caring for family didn't take any time, and my feeling that my identity was wrapped up in being a "good mother." We had to remodel everything else to get at this universal challenge for couples around truly sharing family responsibilities.

When I asked David, he said that the hardest thing for him was that he didn't understand why I was so unhappy in the role of being at home and not employed. Our experiences were so vastly different when our daughter, Kate, was born - he continued his job and mine stopped - that his view at that time was that what I was doing was less stressful than what he was doing. He felt like it was a gift he was giving to me and our family, me not having to go into the workforce to deal with difficult people and to have the stress of making money and keeping a job . So when I resented him for our situation he was confused and frustrated. In hindsight he says the unwritten rule at work was his assumption that caring for family wasn't really hard work, wasn't as stressful or demanding as employment. So he thought at first, what is wrong with Kristin? He was surprised to learn that other women often have the same reaction, and that made him feel better about us because it wasn't just us or just Kristin struggling with this issue.


2. Since writing This Is Not How I Thought It Would Be, how have you and David continued to stay the course of equality and balanced lives? What has been, or continues to be, the most difficult part for each of you?

We both agree that what continues to be the hardest part is staying on top of changes in our relationship with each other and the way we share the family work week to week and month to month. We still do regular checkups - How are we feeling about our relationship? How are we feeling about how the family work is being handled? And when we face a big change, like we did recently when I took a new job, we try to be proactive about talking about what that means for sharing family responsibilities. Given the recession, I think we are in a situation many families are finding themselves in where the mother is either re-entering or increasing paid work, and the father is facing either a work slow-down or even a layoff. In our case, because we've been working hard on these conversations for years, this has been an easier transition for us than it might be for other couples. But it's still really hard both to make time for those conversations and to have them without blaming each other and pointing fingers.

For me another hard part continues to be fighting back any guilt I have for not spending more time with our daughter, for not picking her up at school every day at 3 pm like my own mother did. Even when she's spending tons of time with her grandparents and with David, I fight this assumption that it's only time with me that really counts because I'm the "mom." David doesn't share the guilt, doesn't get why I feel guilty, and wishes I would just get over it - but I'm the one who's absorbed the assumptions about what a "good mother" does and they don't disappear easily.

3. How do you think that Kate has benefited from your choice to parent her together? Do you think there are any pitfalls for children whose parents make this choice?

Kate has benefitted most by having a richer relationship with her father, and also by becoming aware of subconscious assumptions about mothers and fathers at an early age. Shortly before I finished the book she was watching TV one morning and shouted at me to come and see something. She rewound the TV and showed me a commercial for juice that featured a mother and child and a voiceover about "Motherhood means giving 100 percent." She stopped it and said, "Do you see that, Mommy? They think mommies are the only ones who take care of kids, but that's not true!"

I think the only possible pitfall for children is how stressful it can be for mothers and fathers as individuals and as couples when they face barriers to sharing family and parenting responsibilities, barriers like their jobs or assumptions from family and friends .

4. Do you see this newly-remodeled option for motherhood and fatherhood (what we've termed equally shared parenting) as a true possibility for all parents who desire it? Do you feel the barriers are more personal (such as being able to let go or re-prioritize) or external (such as those involving workplace, laws, childcare options)?

I think it is a true possibility for all parents because I think what we're really aiming for is to share the RESPONSIBILITY, not necessarily to share all the tasks 50/50. There are plenty of reasons couples might not want or be able to share all the family tasks 50/50, but I think with some hard work, and some intentional efforts to give fathers in particular lots of opportunities for practice and to help mothers "let go" sometimes, parents can make lots of progress toward sharing the responsibility.

There are both personal and external barriers to really living our lives as if we truly believed "Mothers and fathers share the responsibility and are equally capable of caring for children and home." That's why I think so many of us find ourselves asking, "Why can't we share the family work even though we want to?" On the personal side, it's really hard to recognize or admit that most of us still harbor subconscious assumptions like "Mothers are responsible for family." It took a crunchy waffle to make me see it. One morning, as my husband and I rushed through the morning routine to get our daughter to preschool, I asked him to make her a waffle. When the wailing started, I returned to the kitchen, picked up the toaster waffle, and promptly scolded my husband. "Of course she won't eat that. It's crunchy from the toaster!" For at least a year, I'd been microwaving the toaster waffles every morning so they would be soft. In that moment, it dawned on me that we did have a problem - and I was part of it. I was the only one who knew crunchy waffles were unacceptable because I was the only one who'd been preparing them. Yet I was blaming David for toasting a toaster waffle!

Subconsciously anyway, I believed "Mothers are responsible for family" so I just did everything and with so much practice, I was better at everything. Kate depended on me. David knew I would do everything and wasn't even sure he knew what "everything" was. And I silently, and sometimes not so silently, resented being responsible for everything. I felt resentment about doing it all, but because I was living up to that "good mother" ideal, I also felt a pleasant feeling of superiority from being better at it.

One of the reasons we still harbor these assumptions personally is that the world around us tends to reinforce them. For example, when in-laws and friends always talk to mom about things like playdates or parenting advice. Or when people refer to fathers as "babysitting" their own kids. Underneath those things is the assumption that mothers are responsible for kids. Another external barrier for us was that my husband was working 60-70 hour weeks when our daughter was born and my proposal to go part-time got turned down. It took us years to reshape our employment in a way that even gave us the time to share the family work and our employment the way we wanted. Because the barriers are both personal and external, I think mothers and fathers make the most progress when they remodel the whole thing together, rather than remodeling being a solo project for the mother.

5. What one (or two or three) thing(s) would you advise new mothers and fathers to think about as they piece together their lives?

Keep in mind that these days fathers are pretty much in the same boat as mothers. They are feeling just as much work-life conflict. In trying to be involved fathers, they face a host of cultural assumptions to the contrary. So change the conversation by stopping the blame game and help each other see the real barriers - both personal and external - keeping you both from the lives you want.

Be proactive and explicit about sharing responsibility for family work. Get a list of all the work it takes to maintain family and home, there's one on my website at http://www.remodelingmotherhood.com/ under Remodeling Tools. Using an objective list to support regular conversations about "who's doing what at home" helps make it less about pointing fingers and more about "What's the best way for us to get all this done well?"

Keep at it. You are pioneers and this remodeling doesn't happen overnight. My husband and I tackled this over a seven year period, and at that point we renewed our wedding vows as a way of celebrating how far we'd come and the realization that our marriage with our daughter was fundamentally a new and different contract that our marriage before she arrived.

6. Finally, what is your hope, as you send your book out into the world?

I hope this book opens up lots of conversations: among mothers with other mothers, among couples at their kitchen tables, and among mothers and fathers with society about what we need to live the lives that are best for ourselves and our families. And I hope it gives mothers and fathers both the understanding and the tools they need to take on their own remodeling projects.

It's Amy again. Isn't she wonderful? I highly recommend Remodeling Motherhood and will be emphatically adding it to our Resources page. Oh, and if you are in the Boston/Worcester area, please join Marc and myself at Kristin's upcoming book event at Tatnuck Booksellers in Westborough, MA on Friday November 13th at 7-9pm. Click here for a description of the event.

Thank you, Kristin, for a fantastic step forward in the global equally shared parenting discussion.

Continuing from my last post on the Shriver Report, I'd like to focus on its essay by sociologist Michael Kimmel - a work of pure ESP gold. The essay, entitled Has a Man's World Become a Woman's Nation?, starts with a description of how women's increasing equality in the workplace and at home has led to different reactions from different types of men.

Some men, Kimmel explains, view women's expanding roles as an invasion of their own space and God-given rights. Others, the 'masculinists,' long for a world where men are men and women are women, and focus on the (very small) differences between the genders rather than all the characteristics and abilities that we share. A third subset considers fatherhood to be political; these men speak of fighting bitter custody battles to retain equal rights to their children, and of the effect of a fatherless America on crime. Each of these rather stereotypical male models actually represents only a small population of American men, says Kimmel.

The final type of evolving man that Kimmel describes is the largest sector of all. He is someone who quietly accepts the equality of women and ends up joyfully realizing how evolving gender roles can benefit his life as much as they can benefit his wife's. He supports wage equality, comparable worth, women's candidacies for public office, and dual-career families. To this male subtype, women's equality is just what is fair and it doesn't threaten his value as a man. As Kimmel says, even though we still have a long way to go to get to true equality, "without fanfare or struggle, [these men] drifted into more egalitarian relationships because they love their wives, partners, and children."

The last third of Kimmel's essay is devoted to describing what happens to men (and women and children) in egalitarian relationships. This is the really good stuff! "...when men do share housework as well as child care, the payoff is significant," says Kimmel. Research shows that, in egalitarian relationships:

• Children are less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, less likely to be put on prescription medication, and less likely to see a child psychologist for behavioral problems.
• Children have lower rates of absenteeism and higher school achievement scores.
• Children get along better with their peers and have more friends if they do housework with their fathers, and they show more positive behaviors. That's because men who take on domestic work teach children cooperation and democratic family values.
• Wives are happier, regardless of class/race/ethnicity, reporting the highest levels of marital satisfaction and lowest rates of depression, and are less likely to see therapists or take prescription medication.
• Wives are more likely to stay fit.
• Husbands are physically healthier - they smoke less, drink less, take recreational drugs less often. They are more likely to stay in shape and visit their doctors for routine screenings. They are less likely to end up in emergency rooms or miss work due to illness.
• Husbands are less often diagnosed with depression, see therapists or take prescription medication. They report higher levels of marital satisfaction. And they live longer.
• Couples have more sex.

Anybody out there really want to pass this up?