Nice Blog: Working Parents

Thought I'd highlight and recommend one of the blogs on my Links list (over there on the right): the Working Parents blog from Business Week.com. It's written by a rotating panel of six Business Week editors and pretty much every entry has been a worthwhile comment on the problems or symptoms of being a parent trying to juggle a job, a family and a marriage at the same time. I don't agree with all the writers' opinions, but just knowing that other parents struggle with the same issues is comforting and helps me keep things in perspective.

I found these two recent entries particularly interesting: The Elusive 50/50 Division of Labor, and The Elusive 50/50 Division of Labor, Part II

They look at both sides of a classic argument (tell me you've never had this one): Do most men do a worse job at taking care of things around the house because they expect their wives to take care of it? Or do most women not trust their husbands to take care of things because their standards are too high? The Part II entry has an interview with Marc Vachon. Marc and his wife Amy recently launched a web site called equallysharedparenting.com. They've both decided to work part-time and stay home part-time, and they created the site to share pros and cons and help other parents who are interested in doing this.

They've worked out a new approach to sharing tasks: if you want to split up the workload at home, you also have to split the difference on what standards the work needs to be done to. Whoever takes responsibility for a given chore gets to do it their way, and the other partner takes responsibility for butting out and accepting the shared standard. Ironically, this is a basic principle of being a good manager at work, and making compromises with your partner is what marriage is all about. But it's funny how rarely we (at least I) use this skill in an explicit way at home.