How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

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Instead of seething silently over the dishes while your partner catches up on the news on the couch, just ask him to get up to help.

The book just drips with privilege -- how many of us can afford to eat out at such a restaurant regularly enough to have a "usual"? When I'm counseling couples, I've noticed a pattern: if I ask a broad question like 'How are you doing?

Yes, in an ideal world, he would notice and jump up to help on his own, but it is far better to ask for what you need than silently stew. It’s more that a million little pieces of information are passed to women via a social pipeline—information that is generally not passed to men. The more a child can use their imagination with a toy—initiating the action, rather than having it prescribed for them—the better. This, combined with a lack of sleep, a suddenly unfair division of household chores and her husband’s new found passion for very long bike rides, meant that Jancee found it hard to look at her well-meaning, clever, funny husband playing with his iPhone without feeling a white-hot rage.

It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another. Similarly, a British study discovered that boys get paid 15 percent more for the same chores done by girls. As I mentioned, I checked this book out from the library, but if I hadn’t, I would have been marking up this whole book. Although there was nothing new for me, I probably would still recommend this book, simply because it brings a number of good ideas together into one place, and it presents everything as easy to implement pieces of advice. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day,” he told graduates.

Dunn weaves her personal stories in with interviews from experts in fields as diverse as couples' counseling to organizational gurus on a quest to save her sanity and her marriage from the hole that it had fallen into post-baby. If you don’t have both partners fully taking ownership, then you’ll stay stuck in the employer/sullen teenage employee dynamic. That’s how the Parenting with Intention Journal came to be…because, as I shared what I learned about intentional parenting with other moms in my clinic or online, it resonated with them. One parent who wishes she and her husband had discussed these issues earlier is Jancee Dunn, a New York-based journalist, and author of How Not to Hate Your Husband After Having Kids.

I found some of the situations disturbingly exagerated, some having lots in common with (my) real life and some beyond reality (some things just cannot be done). We can’t necessarily do anything about the gender-role programming we received in childhood (and continue to receive). As I look back on my parenthood journey and think about the times I’ve felt the most overwhelmed or lost, they all share one common theme: in all of them, I felt directionless or like I was moving in the wrong direction. And yet this is the norm for many heterosexual new parents: that the woman, whether she works or not, will do most of the labor (much of it unseen) around child-rearing and housekeeping. Meanwhile, she says, a behaviour that might just have been "a little annoying" before kids might turn into a full-fledged issue.

For the non-birthing parent, seeing their partner change even before the baby comes can be confusing and disorienting. When I shared this book on Instagram, someone commented saying they might check it out if they had more children, but it’s definitely not just for the after-baby period where you’re readjusting to a new lifestyle. He doesn’t have it, and if you don’t let him learn, you’re engaging in “maternal gatekeeping,” or keeping him from participating in the nitty-gritty of childcare.

Recommended for parents of all ages, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids contains wisdom for just about every troublesome situation that one may find themselves in after children. Not only are girls more likely to be asked to help out at home, they are less likely to get paid: the national nonprofit Junior Achievement found that the pay gap between males and females starts squarely at home, with allowance: 67 percent of boys said that they received allowances, while just 59 percent of girls did. Oh, and "Say nice things to the person you have committed to for life and are raising children with. Dunn was brave to be so open and forthright in giving the reader a look into the problems she has encountered with her husband and child. And when boys with female siblings see the grunt work being off-loaded onto their sisters, the effects can carry into midlife, according to a paper published in the Journal of Politics.

At the end of the day and on the other side of all of the experts, Dunn comes to a dozen important realizations. Plus, leaving is a great way to get Dad involved in those early months without having someone critique the way he does things.