by Katrina on September 10, 2012
I’ve hit one of those weird rough patches. In the last two months… The radiator hose on our car exploded in a steaming mess while driving our daughter to a camping trip. The day Car #1 got back from the shop, Car #2 blew a tire. A week later, on my way to an important […]
by Katrina on February 9, 2012
I read The Second Shift more than a decade ago, when I was fresh out of graduate school, working at an Internet startup, newly married (to my first husband), and planning to have a child. That book scared the hell out of me. It was based on research conducted in the 1980s by the prize-winning […]
by Katrina on November 2, 2010
Until I had kids, I was pretty happy with my brain. It got good grades in school, held its own in an argument, memorized lines in plays, and the year I lived in Chile, it learned Spanish. It was capable of empathy, which made it easy for me to make friends. It could fall in […]
by Katrina on July 26, 2010
A quiet revolution has been taking place in Sweden for 15 years, affecting everything from the gender pay gap to workplace culture to relationships between parents and children. It all started at home. Here’s a link to the fascinating New York Times story about this phenomenon. Now here’s my distilled version—with original illustrations! This Swedish […]
by Katrina on July 21, 2010
This is part of a series of posts about how working couples share the under-the-radar chores that, taken together, represent the “psychic burden” of parenting. Be sure to read these parts first: Part I. Survey results Part II. Why it’s fair Part III. Why it’s not fair My last post explored how parents (mostly moms) […]
by Katrina on July 20, 2010
This is part of a series of posts about how working couples share the under-the-radar chores that, taken together, represent the “psychic burden” of raising children. Be sure to read these parts first: Part I. Survey results Part II. Why it’s fair My last post looked at why half of the parents surveyed felt they […]
by Katrina on July 19, 2010
This is part of a series of posts about how working couples share the under-the-radar chores that, taken together, represent the “psychic burden” of raising a family. Part. I is here. Working moms are bearing more (sometimes much more) of the “psychic burden” of parenting than working dads. Yet, when asked in my recent survey, […]
by Katrina on July 14, 2010
This is the first of a series of posts about how working couples share the under-the-radar tasks that, taken together, represent the “psychic burden” of parenting. Even though studies show fathers are changing more diapers and folding more laundry than ever, mothers are still bearing most of the “psychic burden” of parenting—the scheduling, organizing, and […]
by Katrina on June 14, 2010
Studies show today’s fathers are doing significantly more child care and housework than their fathers did. Here’s my question: Are these dads just folding more laundry, or are they also taking responsibility for the complicated logistics of family life? And here’s my other question: Do heterosexual couples divide up chores differently than gay and lesbian […]
by Katrina on March 24, 2010
My friend Jane has a problem. She works full-time for a government agency in California and has two little girls in preschool. Jane is really good at her job. Jane is losing her mind.