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The day-to-day nagging about who-is-working-harder is really about not feeling appreciated. The real argument is not 'I am working harder' but 'I am less appreciated.' And I think that is down to lack of communication and lack of ... appreciation.

In my experience, it is crap being at home with small children and it is also crap being responsible for the bills and having boring 24/7 work to do for sixty year without any sort of break (even if that break is to raise children; there is a lot to be said for variety, and people working full-time don't get that luxury).

I don't think people want their partners to say 'oh yes dear, you do ALL THE WORK' - they just want their partners to recognise that they work bloody hard. And that's true for both the person at home and the person who is working out of the home.

I've been brave and posted on it! I hope they don't shout at me!

This competitive tiredness thing pisses me off no end tbh.

I can't say to dh that I am tired or have had a loooong day without being regaled with a long and dull tale about how his day was longer and he is more tired. I am not interested. If I were to say "I have had a shit day" and he were to reply "So have I, lets get dd to bed and vegetate on the sofa with a bottle of wine and wind down" then that would be great. But maddeningly he seems unable to appreciate that just because I haven't worked a 10 hour day doesn't mean I haven't had enough myself.

I have arranged my hours around his work as the nature of his job means that I have to be permanently available to do the nursery run, to cover dd's sickness, hospital appointments, school stuff (run up to reception start in Sept). What gets on my tits the most is that rather than getting some kind of appreciation from him that my career is on hold, all I hear is "it's all right for you, you aren't at work as long as I am." I still work more or less full time btw - 35 hours a week (dropping to 21 soon) but he works 50+. We get up at the same time, leave the house at more or less the same time. I get home earlier but start tea, do the washing up etc etc so I am not sat on my arse whilst he is at work.

I don't want a competition about who is the most tired. I just want him to understand that I have as much right to tiredness or a bad day as he does.

I think Morningpaper is right - it's appreciation that matters. Paid work and caring for children can be hard in different ways and both can have their upsides.

When things are good with my partner we can both recognise that the other works hard even if there are aspects of each other's job we envy. It's when one or both of us starts concentrating on the hard bits of our own job and the good bits of the other's job we have problems. That's usually when we are both tired - real exhaustion is at the root of a lot of competative exhaustion!

Have posted. I don't think the EOC data shows what he claims. And I suspect men overestimate what they do. Still very common for the father to come home and 'help' rather than recognise childcare, housework and family admin is his job too.

Even when the mother works full-time, she still tends to be the one who has to organise holiday clubs, dentist appointments, remember book bags and deal with letters from school. Of course fathers do do stuff but I think in many families the tedious stuff - not playing or bathing but dreary everyday tasks - falls on the mother.

The thing is, women have ALWAYS had a shit deal, but men USED to have a good deal - go to work, then get home and be waited on.

DH says that part of him YEARNS to be Victorian Dad who just gets home and has his pipe and slippers bought to him.

I think Toby Young wrote a column on this recently... wil hunt

Toby Young:

"My position is analogous to that of the white liberal in present-day South Africa. I recognise that the previous regime was unjust, but I can't help feeling a little bitter that my privileged lifestyle has been taken away."

I'd like to be a Victorian dad! Perhaps dh would let me have a day's free trial...

Edam I agree with you, I think his interpretation of the EOC data is rather GENEROUS to men to say the least

Even the executive summary of the EOC report is telling in the language used:

"Whatever their hours of work, fathers find some time for childcare."

FIND SOME TIME FOR CHILDCARE?!?!?!

what does "find some time for childcare mean"

is this like dads "babysitting" their children?

FFS and

I think so RS

HMMMm I wonder if I'll 'find some time' for childcare today?

I mean it IS optional right?

find some time for childcare??

Good job I managed to find some time isn't it? Otherwise the poor mite would be home alone a lot of the time.

Gawd.

The solution to competitive exhaustion is not "calling for an end" to it. As if.

Some (nice) friends of ours had a baby after us & the mother said to me, happily "I suppose it all depends on the other parent having a sense of fairness"

I was so that I could hardly answer.

Actually she said "innate sense of fairness"

Which was even more wildly jealousifying

Hmmm you are onto something there Bink actually

I think that a lot of the 'men' who are saying things like 'Let's call it a day with this warring!' really mean "Bugger off so I can read the paper" rather than "Let me finish that laundry for you babe."

Thanks for the link to the Toby Young column. I'm sure he's not the only one.

I was surprised by the EOC figures too - earlier time use surveys had shown that if you combined paid and unpaid work women worked longer hours than men. (I think it came to about an extra day a week from the last survey) Not sure if these figures show things have changed, or they are counting hours differently. For example if two people are watching TV but one is also ironing how is that counted? I will see if I can find out.

It would be nice if things had changed, and I do think my partner and I work roughly the same number of hours (with different combinations of paid and unpaid work) but that's clearly not universal.

From what I have observed, I think a lot of women are just responsible 'by default' for the children - so even when the men are around, they are free to come and go - trotting around the house, going upstairs, pottering out the shop - whereas the women have to drag the children with them for every bowel movement.

I think that assumed responsibility can be very ingrained, and it's hard to know what to do about that.

Just to say - speaking from the 2-FT-WOH-parent perspective - that this isn't an issue which only plays where one parent WOH fewer hours than the other (so we should be careful of letting it slide into a default-childcarer vs. additional-childcarer type debate).

In my particular situation, it has something subtle & pervasive to do with not being brought up to know (experientially) that IF you, personally, do not do something THAT THEN (as night follows day) somebody else HAS TO. (Which is, I think, what results in a lack of "innate sense of fairness". Though I'd be quite happy with a sense of fairness that wasn't innate but had eg been ground into someone. I am certainly trying to instill it in my children.)

Cross-posting again - that wasn't meant to challenge what you say, MP, about women often being default childcarers (because I totally agree, it's the term I use, through quite a lot of teeth, at home) - it's just saying that the issue arises even when the domestic set-up isn't one parent as primary caregiver.

Very interesting. In principle I hate "competitive tiredness" BUT as a way of dealing with DH moaning about how hard it is being at home with the children, I find it works rather well . That makes me As Bad As Them, doesn't it?

MP is spot on with mothers being the 'default'.

IME many fathers are generally very willing to do anything provided you say very specifically 'DH, please can you do breakfast / put a wash on / take dd to ballet / remove this whining monster from my leg so I can have a wee'
They rarely spontaneously say 'Darling, go back to bed, I will do breakfast'.

And if you say nothing they will carry blissfully on pottering round the house/shed/pub while the mother wrestles the kids because it doesn't occur to them that anything needs doing.

SSB ... happy birthday to ds1!

I think MP and Mrs Badger have hightlighted an important issue about who is the default parent.

We try to take it in turns for one of us to be explicitly 'on duty'. If I'm on duty and I want help I have to ask for it - if I'm not on duty then anything that is happening is not my problem (unless I'm asked for help). It's quite nice lying back with the paper thinking 'not my problem, not my problem,' to myself while world war three breaks out next door. But its a lot easier for me because we only have one, I can see this doesn't work so well if they start running in different directions.....