Staggering parental leave
When our daughter was born, the daycare we wanted to use wouldn’t have a space open until she was six months old. Neither Meredith nor I could or wanted to take that much time off of work individually, but my job offered a generous amount of parental leave that could be taken non-continuously. So we staggered our leave — Meredith took a few months off, and I took the first few weeks with her, returned to work for a while, then took the rest of my time when she went back.
Many of our peers have taken the same approach, but like us, their decision was dictated only by work demands or childcare opportunities. Having experienced it, I’d suggest new parents consider staggering their leave even if they don’t have to, because having a long stretch of time as the only caregiver will make you better at it.
Some caveats before explaining why:
This is only relevant for families with two working parents, and only to those who each have generous and flexible parental leave—which is still uncommon in America, but it’s becoming more common, especially among the types of people likely to read this.
This is focused on having your first child. I can’t speak firsthand, but the benefit here probably doesn’t apply for someone who’s already an experienced parent, and there may be more need to have two pairs of hands available.
I’ll write from a mom-and-dad perspective because that’s what I know; most but maybe not all probably applies to same-sex couples.
For the mother, solo parenting while physically and emotionally recovering from childbirth will be really hard. I wouldn’t recommend intentionally going down this road unless you have enough parental leave to first take a decent chunk of time off together and then take more off later.
Solo parenting ups your game
Our rationale for stagger parental leave was to stretch our caregiving capacity until we could enroll our daughter in daycare. But a side effect was that each of us had a couple months as a solo parent during workdays. (Meredith was just a closed door away when working from home, but I felt obligated not to distract her during the day, just as she’d done for me. This was possible because she was exclusively pumping at this point, so I didn’t need her for feeding.)
When your partner is on call, you can (intentionally or unconsciously) choose to focus on some tasks and avoid others. This means you probably have some blind spots as a parent. Before my staggered leave, I’d never cut my daughter’s nails, and only once had I given her a bath; before hers, Meredith had never put her and the car seat in the car. Solo parenting forces you to overcome those blind spots and learn how to do everything.
More importantly, for any familiar or unfamiliar tasks, solo parenting forces you to take “total responsibility”—doing every required step to get the task done, including mental tasks like planning and preparing for it. Before solo parenting, I had changed hundreds of diapers, but I didn’t know where to find the backup diapers we’d received at the baby shower; I had dressed my daughter dozens of times, but I didn’t know where we kept clothes that were the next size up; I knew how to work our existing gear, but I didn’t know what else we had in store and when she’d age into it.
Those earlier steps are critical, but because they’re invisible, they may go underappreciated. This is especially true for men, who are less likely to take on the mental load of managing a household. Even modern, progressive dads who want to share this work may be caught in a self-fulfilling prophecy: schools are more likely to contact moms during the day; other men talk less about parenting so new dads come in with less contextual knowledge; and there’s simply less pressure on fathers to be all-in caregivers. Solo parenting is a forcing function for each parent, including dad, to share the mental load.
Specialization has limits
In a two-parent relationship, does each parent really need to have experience doing every part of every task? Specializing and dividing up work has benefits: you always know who’s responsible for getting something done, you can see how much load each parent has, and the other parent knows when they can be “off-duty.” For these reasons, a lot of advice on equal parenting focuses on how to separate and divide up tasks between partners.1
But whether or not you divide tasks on a day-to-day basis, I think each parent should have some experience doing everything. If nothing else, you’ll appreciate each other’s contribution better, especially the “invisible” work—it’s easy to feel like what you do has a lot of hidden complexity but what someone else does is trivial, until you try it. And you’ll also have an easier time passing off tasks when needed. If mom knows that taking a spa day will involve answering five texts asking where the clothes are, she won’t find it relaxing and may not even go. And if an emergency happens and only one partner is available, you won’t have the added stress of not knowing how important things get done.
So I think all new parents with the option should consider staggering parental leave, so each one gets solo parenting experience. (If you don’t have the option, you could get the experience in other ways, such as by having each partner take a day to themselves more frequently.) And employers should give new parents ample and flexible parental leave to make it possible.
See for example Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play, although I don’t really recommend the system it describes—it may be useful as a short-term intervention for a couple whose time allocation has gotten way out of balance, but in my opinion it’s much too rigid to be useful for a couple that’s coming from a place of openness and trust.