That’s Men: Give stressed-out mums a break and help out with the kids

What do stressed-out mothers want from their partners? According to a new book, what they most want is help with the children and with coping with all that wonderful, irrepressible, but also stressful, energy.

It sounds obvious, but sometimes we men forget that, while it’s important to do gardening and work around the house, it’s the children who really drain parents’ energy.

Jennifer Senior's All Joy and no Fun: the Paradox of Modern Parenthood has a good title because, according to research, parents' reported happiness levels tend to fall when children are born. Yet few parents would deny that the happiness is replaced by a deeper joy that they wouldn't want to be without.

Mothers tend to be more involved in the direct, hands-on caregiving than fathers, and that’s why they tend to get more frazzled than fathers.

For instance, that hands-on caregiving means mothers are hit by multiple deadlines. Usually they are the ones who get the kids up and fed by a certain time, dressed by a certain time, brought to school by a certain time, collected from school, brought to swimming and music and football and all the rest of it, always by a certain time.

Day in chaos

The rest of the mother’s life gets squeezed into the periods between the deadlines. And, as every parent knows, it takes only one unexpected early finish at school or one soaring temperature to throw the rest of the day into chaos.

Very often, what’s being fitted into those other little periods is not fun or self-fulfilment but housework. And there is very little that is fulfilling about housework. The other implication of all that direct hands-on care is that women are generally the ones who go to the children when they wake up in the night.

Some parents – and this was my case too – are blessed with children who actually sleep. Many, however, are not and that, in turn, means women are the ones most likely to be going around like zombies the next day because of lack of sleep.

In a world in which both parents are almost certainly working outside the home, that’s going to feel like an unfair division of labour. In the US, on average, fathers and mothers work similar numbers of hours if you include the unpaid work that mothers do in the home, and unpaid childcare. But mothers, coping with that irrepressible energy and all those demands, do more multitasking than fathers and end up more frazzled.

Observing two mothers and their two small children in the cafe in which I wrote this column, I was struck by the fact that there wasn’t even a couple of minutes when they were “off duty”. It’s the eternal vigilance that wears them down.

When it comes to harmony between the sexes, it helps to remember that whatever else we men may do around the house, taking on more of the childcare is what’s going to make the big difference.

So giving mowing the lawn a miss in favour of taking the kids off her hands for a few hours might be one of the more effective contributions you can make towards de-stressing your partner. And a de-stressed partner is a lot easier to live with than a frazzled woman getting by on her nerves.

This applies also when parents are living apart. Sometimes a father will take the kids for, say, Friday evening and bring them back to the mother early the next morning. With that kind of arrangement, she isn’t getting any time to relax into the day. If the father can take on the Saturday morning activities also, that can give her a well-deserved break.

Most fathers do their bit as parents – and some make immense sacrifices – but it’s worth considering whether you’re doing the right bit.

All the Joy and no Fun: the Paradox of Modern Parenthood by Jennifer Senior is published by Virago

Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email. pomorain@yahoo.com