Before we became parents the concept of “Mental Load” was largely theoretical as both of us were easily able to manage the everyday logistics of our own lives. With children coming into the equation everything suddenly becomes a juggling exercise - at least that was our experience.
I’ve read in several publications that the mental load or, to use a different wording, the organisation of everyday logistics is often predominantly done by women/mothers.
We try to share all tasks as evenly as possible. We both work approximately the same amount of time. We both earn similar wages. We share costs on a 50:50 basis. We both took the exact same amount of parental leave. However, the logistics of everyday life have, without even trying to aim for that, drifted more towards my wife.
How do you go about sharing this task? What kind of technical/IT solutions do you use to remain on the same page? Is it even necessary to share this task or are there others ways to “specialise” in certain areas of being a parent?
Where I live (Germany), many organisations seem afraid to call the father, even if specifically instructed to do so in my experience. Our day care for example never hesitated to call my wife for every little last thing when they knew she was on parental leave. When they knew that she was working full time again and I was on parental leave the day care seemed reluctant to call me. Even when they did, they apparently had a mental block that meant they would communicate very differently with me than with my wife. It almost feels like a man’s time is usually respected while a woman’s time is regarded as “free”, so she can pick up the kids anytime anywhere at the drop of a hat.
We found that keeping a shared cloud storage for things like mail from the various bureaucratic institutions we need to deal with as parents has been very helpful. Everything is available at any time without having to spend half an hour searching for the right piece of paper.
We use a google family calendar, which works like a charm. We’re trying to limit the exposure to google and similar evil tech companies recently. Do you know of a good alternative to the family calendar that doesn’t consist of just inviting each other to dozens of events?
If you’re self hosting other things already then https://radicale.org/v3.html or https://nextcloud.com/ offer shared calendars.
It’s crazy. My short stint working in child care I would always call the male parent first if I had their contacts, but it seems deeply ingrained in people to consider a mother “parent” and father “helper”.
Maybe they’d be more comfortable calling you if you called them every day “just to check up, to see how the kid is doing”, making it abundantly (and annoyingly) clear that you have nothing but time for your kid. And encourage your wife to respond “Have you called the primary contact?” whenever someone calls her.
I only have my own phone calendar, no shared alternatives unfortunately, but there is a multitude of options when you search for “family calendars”. Or create a personal calendar for your child with both of you having the password and colour code it for who is responsible for each entry.