Wandering Adventure Party

@daliazygas @cobalt123 yup!

@Pinchy63 such a common experience ️‍🩹

@MsMerope thank you that's a great article.

I like the idea of framing rules & feeling rules when thinking about emotional labour. Both come from the work of American sociologist Arlie Hochschild.

Framing rules set out what is permissible to say. Feeling rules set out what is permissible to feel. Framing rules + feeling rules = ideology.

Sociologists have argued that unwritten rules about domestic work sit within an ideology of intensive mothering. A good mother is this. A bad mother is that.

When we feel upset about domestic labour we're breaking the feeling rules. When we name the division of labour as unjust we're breaking the framing rules. We're nagging. We're upsetting family harmony. It's our fault.

This is not an individual problem.

@erdstern big Yup

@Dougfir that was outside the scope of this study, sadly

@oftencalledcathy ️‍🩹

@acm_redfox

@dulcedemon So unjust. Also so hard to manage the big feels ️‍🩹

@cobalt123 I’m sorry this is happening to you. Heartbreaking & so common. How can our grown up kids learn to be adults if their dad does not behave like one ️‍🩹

@leahmac

(figshare.swinburne.edu.au)

Great article about the kinds of mental load involved, for women, in domestic labour.

Sadly, this is old news.

Twenty years ago I completed a PhD thesis that unpacked & examined these aspects of domestic life.

By interviewing parents & kids separately, asking the same open ended questions - ‘what gets done, who does what, is it fair, & how do you think it should be?’, which I ran through 3 times, first for domestic tasks, then for the work of identifying what needs to be done & making sure it happens, then for noticing how everyone is feeling & keeping every happy in the process - then taking the family as my unit of analysis, I showed that men & kids were unaware of much of the physical & almost all of the intangible work women did in their homes. Boys & men thought everything was fine. Girls did not want to assume, as adults, the domestic servant role they saw their mothers placed in but had no strategies to achieve this beyond ‘I’ll just tell them’.

There was a hierarchy of work in these families in which men’s work & leisure time had highest priority, then kids’ schooling & leisure, then domestic work of all kinds. Womens paid work & leisure was lowest priority of all.

The families that lived without conflict were those in which the hierarchy of work was not disputed. Where women sought to disrupt the hierarchy there was conflict - which became another part of the domestic load she was expected to manage.

My findings showed that contrary to popular narratives of ‘progress’, this dynamic was not likely to change until men as well as women recognise the dynamic & choose to shift it.

This argument was not popular.

Twenty years later, here we are.

I wish I had been wrong.

#DomesticLabour #EmotionWork #MentalLoad #sociology #research #women #mothers

Women carry bulk of the mental load, but men are active in one stage

While research has found mothers do more in all four stages of cognitive labour, there was one stage where men were more active than others.

(www.abc.net.au)