Essays on The Future of Family

Over the past fifty years, our embrace of egalitarian values has transformed our approach to marriage and parenthood. ‘Partnership’ has become the primary driver of our spousal and parenting relationships, and the evidence is everywhere:

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Relationships: we now strongly desire egalitarian values within our committed relationships

Marriage: We primarily marry for love and companionship

Households: dual-earner married parents are now the dominant household structure

Social Beliefs: the overwhelming majority of us now believe in gender equality

Men and Family: the role as “dad’ has become central to men’s personal identities

Technology: more digital tools now assume that couples will share their domestic responsibilities 

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As modern spouses and parents, we’ve placed egalitarian partnership at the center of our family lives. This is what makes our failure to realize this ideal inside of our homes so puzzling:

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Domestically: we find ourselves stuck in outdated gender roles, marked by a lopsided division of domestic labor that is especially pronounced between dual-earner parents, and worsens further when moms out earn their husbands.

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Historically, this chronic gender-based workload imbalance has been framed as a woman’s issue. Today, we understand that this framing is both reductive and harmful. The issue is a breakdown in our most important family partnership that can lead directly to the deterioration of the marriage. And given that the overwhelming majority of marriages are between opposite-sex couples, that makes it a woman’s issue, a man’s issue, and a family issue simultaneously, even if the marriage doesn’t end in divorce. 

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So why has balanced domestic partnership eluded our generation of egalitarian parents? And what will it take for us to sustainably rebalance our domestic workloads?

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These are questions that deeply interest me, not only because the answers could improve the emotional lives of millions of parent partners and their children, while also unlocking trillions of dollars in economic value for families and broader society, but also because I'm struggling with the same challenge inside my own home. 

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I am an egalitarian husband and father co-leading a dual-career household dominated by three wonderful little goblins, and the amount of family work I carry doesn’t hold a candle to that of my wife. 

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But I’m working everyday to change that.