Stephanie Kuntz

The usual claim about men is that they often say, well, I'd like to do this, but I need teaching, you know, learned helplessness.

But, you know, we women also have a learned helpfulness.

We, you know, get to be the experts in the early days of child rearing, and sometimes we think that everybody should do it our way.

You know, it's called gatekeeping.

You know, Mike, I've talked about this problem for years, and...

And yet, just last, a couple years ago, when my grandson started, fairly newborn grandson started crying in the other room with my husband was there, I swooped into the room, took the baby out of his arms, you know, and he just looked at me with his jaw open, like, what's wrong with you?

What kind of feminist are you that you wouldn't trust me to hold the baby?

And I said, oh...

So, you know, I sometimes reload the dishwasher.

So we're trying to do something that has not been done before.

And we have to get out of the habits and assumptions and the ways that society is organized that encourage men not to notice the little things that need doing, not to plan for them, not to do the

emotional and planning work of family life and that in keep, you know, being earworms in women and making them do that even when they need to maybe walk away and let the man do it as best he can until he learns to do it.

Well, yes, it is.

I'm fortunate to have grown up so that I really don't care if the bed gets made every day.

My husband does care, so he makes it.

But it is also true that we need to have a little kind of negotiation about that.

I think that there's a book called Fair Play that Haley Swenson from the Better Life Lab, who wrote a wonderful afterword for my book,

talks about in her little piece about how you have to divide up the chores or redistribute them in ways that the person doing it takes full responsibility for all of that chore and you have to decide on the minimum standards for those chores.

So that's a negotiation process.

What are the minimum standards for cleaning up after dinner?