Setting the next generation up for something better

One of the delights of academic life is feeling no compunction about reaching out to researchers whose work I admire to start up a dialogue. Last year I sent one of those “omg, I love your work!” emails to Naomi Darom, a journalist and sociologist, after reading her fascinating paper “However I talk about it, my kids tell me I’m doing it wrong”: U.S. Mothers of Cisgender Children Grapple With Gender Diversity.

To summarize the paper, I’ll quote myself in 2024’s end-of-year research roundup:

Darom reports that mothers of cisgender adolescents regularly find themselves “schooled” by their children about shifting community norms vis-à-vis gender. That is, their teens do some combination of a) explaining the “new regime” to their mom (‘Nonbinary means…’), and b) trying to prevent her from committing a gender-related faux pas (‘You can’t say that anymore, mom!’).

Given my enthusiasm for her research, I was delighted when Naomi joined Substack a few months back. After exchanging comments on a few of each other’s posts, we decided it was time to collaborate. Check out The Gender Nerd wherever you get your substacks, and read on to hear us debate whether there’s any hope for achieving household labor equity among today’s adults.

First, though, some quick notes about upcoming happenings!

Greetings from New Jersey, where I’m right in the middle of my East Coast tour for What’s On Her Mind. Coming up this week:

I’ll be at Porter Square Books, in conversation with the delightful Paige Connell. Paige tells me (from experience) it’s important you know this: we will be at the Seaport PSB branch. Don’t plug the bookstore into your GPS and land in Cambridge by mistake! You want to go to 50 Liberty Drive: Suite 500.

This one is hosted by Head House Books, and I’ll be joined by the wise Elizabeth Earnshaw. I’ve got an important note for this event, too: grab your ticket ahead of time, if you can! It’s just $5 and will go toward any purchase at Head House that night.

Naomi Darom: To kick things off, let’s start with some basics: what drew you to the topic of cognitive domestic labor, and what were you expecting to find?

Allison Daminger: A lot of serendipity brought me here, to be honest! You know how when you apply to PhD programs you have to propose a research topic? My proposal had zero mention of gender, or housework, or pretty much any other keyword that would describe my work today. (Okay, maybe not zero overlap - “inequality” has always been a throughline.) But when I started the program, I was assigned reading on the second shift and the motherhood penalty, and it sort of blew my mind. I put what I was learning about domestic labor inequality together with what I’d learned at my pre-grad school job, where I’d been a consultant at an applied behavioral science firm. One of the projects I worked on there started from the premise that decision-making is taxing. And so I wondered: what if we thought about decision-making as a form of labor and looked at who was making decisions in families? How would that change our understanding of how gender shaped household labor? I expected that probably women were doing a lot of it, but what I really wanted to understand was why.

And can I ask you: what sparked your interest in studying gender, especially across generations? My introduction to your work was your article from a few years ago, where you really challenged my understanding of this thing we call “gender socialization” but is sometimes quite vaguely defined. How did that get going?

ND: Becoming a mother got me interested in what we learn (or not) from our parents about gender and sexuality, and how that shows up in the way we talk to our children. Those questions turned into my dissertation, in which I interviewed mothers raising teens about the conversations they had (or didn’t) with their parents around gender and sexuality, and how they talk about it with their children.

I cited your work on cognitive labor in my dissertation, when I wrote about how mothers are still the parents most likely to be tasked with talking to children about sexuality. Most communication about sex and puberty occurred between mothers and daughters, though fathers did talk to their sons. Feeling responsible for this conversation, planning it and carrying it out - it’s all part of the cognitive labor you describe. You found that in heterosexual couples women still do most of this work, yet couples don’t see it as gendered and instead chalk it up to personalities and skills (“my wife is just better at this”), which you call “personal essentialism.” There’s been a pretty grim public conversation, not least on Substack, about the unequal division of cognitive labor and how hard it is to change these dynamics, even in families where men declare egalitarian values. Do you think there’s any hope for making men carry more of the cognitive load?

AD: At a recent book event, an audience member asked whether I thought the gender revolution had failed and we should give up on that whole household labor equality thing. Grim, indeed! I told him that I’m not quite ready to hang up my hat and call it quits, in part because I’ve interviewed couples who have managed to shift toward a more egalitarian division, and because I know a number of men and couples personally who are making strides on this front.

That said, those couples face an uphill battle. By the time they’ve entered adult relationships, they have decades of gender conditioning behind them. And by the time they try to change their division of labor–often after the arrival of a child, or some other life upheaval–they’re usually working against engrained habits.

So one of the strategies I’ve been thinking about lately is, how do we set the next generation up for something different? I’m curious if your own research on parent-child dynamics, to say nothing of your own experience as a parent, has given you any sense of how today’s parents are approaching these issues.

ND: A consistent finding from sociology is that children learn gender roles through looking at their parents, meaning that if today’s children observe their mothers doing most cognitive labor in the house they are likely to think that’s the natural order of things. In my research, I found that education doesn’t just flow from adults to children - that children can teach their parents a lot about gender as well. But I’m not sure how that translates into something as invisible as cognitive labor.

Speaking from personal experience, the key to teaching your kids to notice what needs to be done around the house is to task them with doing something from start to finish. My kids take turns clearing up after dinner. They don’t like it, but they do it (my husband and I shop for food and do all the cooking so, as we tell them, it’s unfair to expect us to do all the cleanup as well). The expectation is that they leave the kitchen reasonably tidy. So, this is about more than loading the dishwasher: it’s looking around and noticing the dirty pot still on the stove or the crumbs on the dining room table. Seeing and noticing are key because, from my experience, once we write something off as another person’s problem we barely notice it. I think that’s the idea behind the Fair Play cards as well - the person tasked with a chore (i.e. shopping for food) takes ownership of it, from planning to completion.

What do you think? How central are attention and noticing to cognitive labor?

AD: I love this! I think noticing and attention are absolutely central - I tell the story in my book of a woman who was frustrated that her husband rarely tidied because, she told me, he just didn’t “notice” or “see” objects out of place. This man was not blind in a literal sense, but he was blind to the idea that those out-of-place objects were things he might want to do something about. (One of my favorite papers from recent years is all about this phenomenon.)

And I think you’re right, too, that attention and responsibility are closely linked. When we see something as someone else’s problem, we stop noticing it. And this is not just a man thing! I’m very guilty of forgetting to check the gas tank, because my husband is almost always the one to fill it. It just doesn’t register for me until the car starts yelling at me to refuel.

What if we started talking about attention as a form of privilege? It is a privilege to be able to choose (even if subconsciously) whether to pay attention to household functioning. We need to teach the next generation (especially the next generation of men) how to notice things that need doing, yes, but we also need to teach them that noticing things is part of what it means to be a team player in the family arena.

[Side note: there’s an influencer who sells a course called “Little Cyclebreakers” that promises to teach kids to “notice and do.” I haven’t tried it out myself but would love to hear from any readers who have!]

One thing I’m curious about is how you handle it with your own kids when things go awry. Back when kitchen-cleaning was a new practice, what did you do when the dirty pot was left on the stove, or the crumbs on the table?

I ask because I hear often from (mostly) women that they want their partner to own a task from end-to-end, but in practice they are still on the hook to monitor things.

ND: Yes, that’s the catch. We needed to monitor the kids when they first started their chores and let them know what was expected. I don’t think there’s a way around it. On the other hand, a half-tidy kitchen is still less work than a fully messy one :)

Performing chores - age-appropriate ones, of course - has been shown to contribute to children’s self-competence, self-efficacy and pride, in elementary and high school and even in young adulthood. It’s even linked to later professional success. So, win-win! It’s essential not to gender the chores but have all kids do the same types of chores. What do you think - is that the key to reigniting the stalled revolution?

AD: It’s certainly an important piece, though I’m hesitant (typical academic…) to label anything “the” key. It reminds me a bit of the anti-poverty work I did at the behavioral science firm. A lot of the discourse in the field back then was about how the key to interrupting cycles of poverty was to intervene in early childhood.. I bought those arguments, but I didn’t think that meant we should stop investing in teens and adults, even if change was harder at those later life stages.

It’s an imperfect analogy, for sure, but my point is really that it’s a “both/and”: if we invest today in teaching kids of all genders skills like noticing and monitoring, I suspect we’ll be a lot better off in a few decades than we are today, at least in terms of household equality. And, I’m not going to give up on the adults just yet.