The Mental Workload of Family Life | Allison Daminger (Mom of 1, Author & Sociologist)

[00:00:00] Allison Daminger: cognitive labor, as I define it, is really about figuring out what your family needs, what it owes to others, and then ensuring that those needs and obligations get met. We have anticipating needs, identifying options for meeting them, deciding and monitoring or following up, those are sort of the, the big picture.
[00:00:22] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman. If you've ever had a partner say, just tell me what to do, or felt like you're the one who has to keep track of everything, the appointments, the meals, the forms, the emotional tone of the house, that's what sociologist Allison Daminger calls cognitive labor.
[00:00:52] Adam Fishman: Today we're unpacking what that is, why even the most egalitarian couples fall into imbalance and how we can start to share the invisible work that keeps our homes running. My guest is the aforementioned Allison Daminger, who is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
[00:01:12] Adam Fishman: She specializes in gender, family dynamics and social inequality. In her new book. What's on her mind, the mental workload of family life. She unpacks the largely invisible mental work required to manage household life. Through an extensive and in-depth series of interviews with a wide variety of couples, these interviews shape the research behind what's on her mind and are the foundation of our conversation today.
[00:01:39] Adam Fishman: Allison is the mother of one young child in a largely balanced household. You'll know more about what that means after this episode. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify, so you never miss an episode. You'll find it everywhere you get your podcasts. Welcome, Allison Daminger to the Startup Dad podcast. I'm so excited to have you here today. Thank you for joining me.
[00:02:07] Allison Daminger: I'm so excited to be here today. Adam, thanks so much for the invitation.
[00:02:10] Adam Fishman: All right, so many will recognize that you are not in fact a startup dad,
[00:02:15] Allison Daminger: I am married to a startup dad though, so you know that that's maybe grandfathered me in a little
[00:02:20] Adam Fishman: Excellent. Love, love that. Well, I'm excited to have the, uh, the other perspective on this, on this show. and of course our goal today is to help parents recognize and name this unseen mental load that drives a lot of imbalance at home. And then do some exploration around how to rebalance it, which is a big thing that you explore, in some of the topics you cover in your book.
[00:02:44] Adam Fishman: And the big focus of your book is obviously cognitive labor. that book is called What's On Her Mind, and I am excited to dive in. So let's do it.
[00:02:56] Adam Fishman: I kind of want to go back to the beginning of, of the book. you have shown that so much of what keeps a household running isn't the physical work.
[00:03:06] Adam Fishman: That's the stuff that we can track, but it's the often invisible cognitive labor. So let's just start, for folks who may not have heard of this term, and can you help me define cognitive labor?
[00:03:18] Allison Daminger: it. Tricky because there are a lot of related terms floating around on social media. mental load and emotional labor. I won't go into all of the, parsing out those differences, but cognitive labor, as I define it, is really about figuring out what your family needs, what it owes to others, and then ensuring that those needs and obligations get met. Right. And I, further break it down into four pieces. So we have anticipating needs, identifying options for meeting them, deciding and monitoring or following up, and I can break those down, but, but those are sort of the, the big picture. I often define it for people who are coming from more of a, a sort of professional context as project management, but for the household, right?
[00:04:04] Allison Daminger: Somebody has to make sure that things get done in addition to the actual doing. And that's really what the cognitive labor's all about.
[00:04:11] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And we hear a lot of dads and founders on this show talk about that mostly in reference to their partners, their wives, or significant others. and so, you know, I'm excited to explore that a little bit more and get into it. But before we do, can we talk a little bit about some examples, that maybe some of my listeners might encounter of cognitive labor in their households?
[00:04:37] Allison Daminger: the holidays are coming up, right? And for many people that, brings on a whole mountain of cognitive tasks if you or family does any sort of gift exchange, right? Step one is saying, okay, Christmas is coming, or Hanukkah is coming, or whatever you celebrate. We need to provide some sorts of gift for these 10 people, right? Then step two is identifying your options. Maybe, if you're like me, you know, you go on wire cutter and type in something like best gift for a five-year-old and scroll through the options. maybe, you text the parent of your, uh, niece or nephew and say, what are they into these days? Right? So that identification step can take a lot of different forms, whether it's what we typically think of as research or it's just a simple off the top of your head. Brainstorm third step is deciding. you gotta figure out what those gifts are gonna be. I usually keep an Apple note, on my phone and I have each person and I put, you know, here's the gift we're gonna get. The follow-up is the other piece of it. So oftentimes we are waiting for gifts to be shipped, right? Did they actually arrive in time for whatever holiday you're hoping to get them for? maybe you delegated some of this gift buying, right? So I say to my husband, I don't know what your mom wants.
[00:05:50] Allison Daminger: Make sure she has a gift, right? And I might follow up with him and say, Hey, what did you get for your mom? Do we have it? Is it wrapped? Et cetera. So that's the, the monitoring. one example. sort of seasonal. But we can also think about this, at, you know, the level of the day. So for example, everybody's got to eat. Right. you might anticipate the need to feed your family some sort of dinner in the evening. And then, uh, step two is identifying options. Maybe you have a list of 10 recipes that you rotate through. maybe you've got, you know, five takeout places on speed dial. What are the different possibilities that you could use to get this need of your families met? decide you, you know, call the takeout place or you ask your spouse to pick up some ingredient that you're missing on the way home. then you follow up and say, okay, did my kid eat the meal that I've provided? Or do I need to go back to square one and, you know, get a more palatable option because broccoli is out this week. Did my spouse remember to pick up the can of tomato sauce that I need for my spaghetti and meatballs? what's the wait time on this takeout place? Right? And then if goes awry, right, then you kind of go back to that identifying option stage and reroute.
[00:07:03] Allison Daminger: So this framework can really be applied to the decisions, big, small, in the moment or spanning across, you know, months or years in the case of decisions like how will we care for an elderly parent who can't live on their own?
[00:07:16] Allison Daminger: Right? What are we gonna do for our child who has special needs in school? So some of these are really long-term big picture, projects.
[00:07:24] Adam Fishman: I love that the way that cognitive labor manifests is anything from like short-term run the household day to day, all the way to like very long-term planning. I'm sure something even like where is our kid gonna go to college or how should we start saving for retirement?
[00:07:40] Adam Fishman: Or like, managing an elderly parent. and I think that framework and that sort of process of like the four steps, anticipation, identification of options, just deciding and monitoring is super helpful for me. 'cause I think a lot in frameworks, as do most of my listeners probably.
[00:07:56] Adam Fishman: so one of the things that I found really interesting in your book was that. a lot of times the sort of most thankless or least obvious, parts of cognitive labor are this like anticipation and monitoring part. the most thankless, but often the hardest because it requires like forethought and then following up and things like that.
[00:08:20] Adam Fishman: And a lot of times that tended to fall in a lot of your interviews, mostly on, women in, heterosexual, uh, couples. And so, I'm excited to get into that a little bit later in our, in our conversation, but I found that really, interesting way of breaking it down into, well, what are sort of, low value, high load, uh, tasks.
[00:08:41] Adam Fishman: You, you had that really interesting one. Then this idea that like a lot of times when men get brought in, they sort of get brought in at the most like visible step, the decision, what are we gonna do? But there's so much work that's happened before we even get there. and then afterwards. So, I can't wait to talk about this.
[00:08:59] Adam Fishman: So, I wanted to ask you, you know, this work is largely invisible and maybe except for the decision making, why does so much of this work just disappear from our awareness and, and even in your research, even for the person who is doing the work they did, didn't even think about it, you know?
[00:09:17] Adam Fishman: No, no pun intended. why is this stuff so invisible?
[00:09:20] Allison Daminger: I think there are a couple reasons here. So one factor is, until very recently didn't have the language if academics were talking about it hadn't diffused to the public, I see some signs that that's changing, especially for women. most of the women I know, they're like, oh, every other post on my social media feed is about mental load. So I think that's changing. But when I started this research, it was 2017 and this was not, uh, a topic that was, you know, all the rage. So one thing is we, have frameworks for understanding chores. Things like cooking, cleaning, shopping, driving kids places, mowing the lawn, right? Those were established categories and people's mental model was, you know, this is the work that's required. And so I think without the language to say these things that you're doing by instinct almost, right? It feels kind of intuitive or, or natural when you're just, oh, I'm thinking about stuff, right? It's not necessarily something that I chose to do in this moment. It just popped into my head, because there was no language, because, it was hard to point to a product, right?
[00:10:28] Allison Daminger: So if I am anticipating, okay, you know, the holidays are coming, here's what we need to do for travel, here's what we're gonna do for meals, right? That is a little bit amorphous in terms of what the outcomes are, to your point, until we get to the decision stage and the actual execution phase, right?
[00:10:45] Allison Daminger: That's when we start to see tangible products. And so for a lot of people, including the people doing the work, I think they just hadn't conceptualized that this was valuable. So I think about a, woman that I interviewed and you know, I was asking her. Some questions about sort of, what happens when, you know you're low on toilet paper?
[00:11:04] Allison Daminger: Right? I don't know. I just, I just notice it and I put it on a list. that is. Something, right? That is not nothing, but it, it just felt to her like, okay, this is a matter of a few seconds here and there. that's the other component of it that makes this really tricky is we're so used to thinking about work, whether it's paid or unpaid work in terms of time, right?
[00:11:27] Allison Daminger: How many hours are we spending on chores, on childcare, on, our employment and cognitive labor doesn't really translate well into minutes and hours. There've been some, efforts to quantify this work and, you know, I think the, the measurement tools are getting better, but in the past when they tried to quantify it, they would come up with, you know, maybe an hour a week. that just did not match at all with the impact that my interviewees were telling me about. Right. And I think that's because the clock is just the wrong tool for the job.
[00:11:57] Adam Fishman: I mean, there's so much interesting in what you just said there. you know, I know this is happening like in my household with my wife all the time because, you know, we'll be lying in bed, it'll be 10 30 at night and suddenly she'll go, oh, this thing has to happen. And I'm like, now that I have read your book, I have this language.
[00:12:15] Adam Fishman: I'm like, oh, there's, there's some cognitive labor happening there and I know this is happening all the time. and then my own experience while I was actually reading your book in the midst of it, I was like, okay, gotta make a flu shot appointments for my kids. So I did a bunch of like anticipation and planning tasks in between reading your book, which is part of the reason it took me a while to get through it.
[00:12:37] Adam Fishman: 'cause I kept interrupting myself to go, oh, oh, I have to do that. Oh, are we out of toilet paper? Like, uh, this is so, so funny. so that, that really kind of grounds it.
[00:12:46] Allison Daminger: your description of, you know, your experience and your wife's experience really matches a lot of what I saw in the research. You know, before I got on this interview, I made sure my phone was on do not disturb. Right. But you can't turn off these kind of metaphorical pings in your
[00:13:02] Allison Daminger: brain.
[00:13:02] Allison Daminger: They're like, oh, toilet paper, flu shot. Right? And so many of the women that I spoke with described it as this switch that they wished they could turn off when they were doing something. You know, that was just for fun, for leisure, where they were in the middle of an important work task and for a variety of reasons they could not.
[00:13:20] Allison Daminger: Right? And that's part of what makes this so disruptive is that even if it's just a few seconds, right, we know that multitasking, context switching is costly from, a, a cognitive perspective. And so that is where a lot of this impact come from.
[00:13:35] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And a little bit later we're gonna talk about some of the really interesting contradictions that you found in your research. But first I wanna talk about the research itself. So tell me a bit about what you did, to do the research for this book. And you mentioned starting all the way back in like 2017, starting to do this.
[00:13:55] Adam Fishman: So I'm really curious, the thing that was eight years, seven, eight years in the making, what that looked like.
[00:14:00] Allison Daminger: my husband who as I said is an entrepreneur, likes to, to joke that, you know, academics are quite slow in the business world, we we're snappier. So, um, yes, this was a long time, a long time coming, but it started when I was just really interested in decision making. I had done some work prior to grad school in behavioral economics, and one of the things that I learned was that decision making is costly along the lines of what we've just been talking about.
[00:14:25] Allison Daminger: You know, if you have just gotten through an intense work week and someone says, Hey, what do you want for dinner? It's like, oh my God, I want you to decide. Right. The last thing I
[00:14:34] Adam Fishman: Yeah.
[00:14:35] Allison Daminger: to make another decision. I just, I have no resources left. And I had been doing, some interviews for a project that never got off the ground, but was looking at school choice. So this was in Boston where I was for grad school. And, schools were a big thing. It was not just a context where you send your kid to the, you know, public school down the street. It was, we've got, you know, almost infinite options here. What are we gonna do? And I was talking to mostly moms and they would, say things like, well, you know, we, we talked to some friends, we did some research, we put together a spreadsheet.
[00:15:07] Allison Daminger: we went to a bunch of open houses. And then we decided, and I asked some follow up questions to really get at what, the granular steps in that process were. And when I did that, the, we fell apart.
[00:15:20] Allison Daminger: I. heard from some friends that this deadline was coming up and that I should get on top of it. And so I, you know, did a search. I went on some local parenting forums. I put together a, you know, calendar invites for all the open houses. I sent them to my husband. We attended the open houses, and then we made a decision
[00:15:39] Allison Daminger: and I was like, wait a minute. That work it doesn't really fit into the categories that we usually apply to, housework, childcare, et cetera. the first round of interviews was with college educated couples, with young kids, five and under. these were folks who I expected were sort of in the thick of parenting, right? most of them were employed for pay, and so they were, in the, squeeze as, Karin Lowe calls it. And so what I wanted to understand was what decisions were they making for their families? How was the decision work divided between partners and what impact did it have on them? So that was sort of the, the germ, of the project. And I realized that, okay, because we didn't have a lot of language around these concepts, I was going to have to come up with some creative ways to make this something people could talk about. And so what I decided to do was to model, off what researchers often do for, for time use research, which is ask people to log how they're spending their minutes. And so instead of logging minutes, I asked people to log their decisions. I said, make a list of the decisions you make for your family, or you're thinking about making for your family over the course of the day before the interview. And then I got to the interview and I interviewed each partner independently, sometimes back to back so they could trade off childcare, you know, sometimes Wednesday and Thursday. And we would go through their decision log and I would ask them, you know, okay, you decided to feed your kid cheers for breakfast. One of their options did you consider, right? How did those items get into your fridge? How did you know what your kid would like? Right? all these questions that sort of helped get under the surface of the cognitive work that had led up to that stage. So I did all that research with, with those couples. and then I got a bunch of questions from folks who I was talking about this research with who said, is this just an elites thing? Right? You talk to college educated, middle and upper middle class folks. What would we see if we broadened? and so I did another round of interviews with folks with a wider range of educational backgrounds. Then I got questions that was like, is this just a straight couples thing? And so then I did another round of interviews, uh, with queer couples. And so all told, it was, I think like roughly 175 interviews with the members of about 95, couples. And that's why it took so long.
[00:18:02] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I was gonna say amazing. Like body of research, doing qualitative research and interviewing all these folks. Not only the like scheduling and finding the time on their calendars, but then like doing it, synthesizing it, like coming up with themes and hypotheses based on that. Like, yeah, no wonder it took years.
[00:18:20] Adam Fishman: Like just thinking about that makes me tired. So, when you did this research, did you kind of get better at doing these interviews over time and like learn how to walk back or back up into some of the things that led there? So like, did you find that you got, stronger as an interviewer or a researcher as as time went on when you were doing these?
[00:18:40] Allison Daminger: I certainly hope so.
[00:18:42] Allison Daminger: I think a few things that I got better at, one is allowing for silence, the patterns that we bring into our social conversations, are not necessarily the ones that make for a good research interview. So, you know, I'm not necessarily recommending this to you as a podcast interviewer, but allowing my, interviewees to, pause and think, right? And to know when the silence was. I have something more to say, but I'm deciding whether and how to say it versus I'm done. And then the art, the follow up question, right? So, I think one thing that separates a more sort of amateur researcher, interviewer from a, more seasoned one is how well do you listen to what they say and then ask custom follow up questions, right?
[00:19:30] Allison Daminger: So you always start with a script, but then the interviews would often go off course because, you know, they would surprise me. And so over time I got more comfortable with just saying, huh, this makes me curious, what do you mean by that? So those are a few of the skills that I had to work on.
[00:19:45] Adam Fishman: Very cool. Yeah, I, uh. As a podcast host, have been working on this myself, so we'll see how I do. in that research, you were then able to kind of bucket these different couples. you've got woman led households, you've got man led, you've got balanced. And then as you mentioned, you also looked at queer couples and then you have imbalanced versus balanced households on, on that side.
[00:20:10] Adam Fishman: So can you help me understand those different buckets and, and how you determined like what bucket a household fell into?
[00:20:18] Allison Daminger: Yes, I'll try to give you a, a snippet. It was a very painstaking process.
[00:20:23] Allison Daminger: but basically what I did was I. Did these, you know, hour to two hour interviews with each partner. And at the end of it, I would have a whole lot of examples of how cognitive labor showed up in their lives. I sorted through all these examples and I realized they could be bucketed into about 10 different household domains. So some of them will be very familiar, right? Food shopping. but I was interested in the cognitive components of those. So not just who cooks, but who meal plants, who makes the grocery list, who notices when we're running low on things. And there are also a few categories that, you know, I think are somewhat unique to the cognitive sphere.
[00:21:01] Allison Daminger: So things like travel and leisure, right? That's, not a lot of physical chores there. It's more like who plans what we're gonna do on the weekend or for vacations. managing social relationships, right? Who is in touch with the extended family? Who remembers birthdays? so I had these 10 categories. And then I sorted each couple's examples, into those categories. And I looked at patterns of leadership and said, who tends to be the one who initiates, who takes charge in this domain? for example, you know, in the, the cleaning domain, who is usually the one who says, Hey, this is getting messy.
[00:21:40] Allison Daminger: We should clean this. Who's the one who remembers to re-up on wipes or Windex? Right? and then I aggregate it across the 10 domains to say, okay, who leads cognitively speaking in the majority of domains in the household? If it's a woman, it's a woman in the household. If it's a man, it's a man led household. And balanced households were those where, you know, it wasn't exactly 50 50, but it was pretty close in terms of the number of domains that they each led.
[00:22:08] Adam Fishman: Awesome. So basically take this, synthesize this massive amount of research and conversation into thematic categories of, of cognitive labor, and then you said you reduced it to about 10 and then kind of be able to bucket, at this particular household. a woman in the, couple, let's say it's a heterosexual household, did like seven or eight out of 10 of these things.
[00:22:31] Adam Fishman: That's a woman-led household. similar, uh, in the, in the man led household and maybe more 50 50 in the balanced household.
[00:22:37] Allison Daminger: that's exactly right. And, and I think one of the big advantages of having talked to both members of the couple, and often on the same day or within a day or two of each other, was that I could get both people's perspective on the same issue. we know from other research that people are bad at estimating their own level of participation in household tasks. Um, and so it was really helpful for me to say, who speaks with more detail about these things? I could ask people to narrate, you know, how did the food get into your pantry? One partner would usually tell me, okay, here's this extensive system I have, here's exactly what happens. And the other partner would be like, well, we shop once a week and there's a list somewhere.
[00:23:17] Allison Daminger: Right? And so that would tell me that, okay, even if they're both involved to some degree, one partner is really the one who's kind of driving this process.
[00:23:25] Adam Fishman: yeah, I loved so many of the, of the stories in there. I also found what you just mentioned about like interviewing both, parts of the, of the couple. I found that oftentimes, and we'll get into this a little bit, that in a woman led a household, the woman would maybe downplay some of that percentage and the husband would come in and be like, oh no, it was like 75, 80, 90%.
[00:23:48] Adam Fishman: but then there were a few examples of women who were like, no, I do a hundred percent, like full stop.
[00:23:53] Allison Daminger: Yeah, that was fascinating to me and not necessarily what I expected.
[00:23:58] Allison Daminger: Right? I, I would've expected both partners to play up their own contributions,
[00:24:04] Allison Daminger: and that wasn't the majority of cases,
[00:24:06] Allison Daminger: I'm not quite sure what to make of that. I think perhaps because they knew that I was talking to their partner, they had an incentive to be a little bit more, you know, uh, truthful or,
[00:24:16] Allison Daminger: complimentary of their partner.
[00:24:18] Allison Daminger: the other thing that I think is a piece of it too is, is that. Couples had these ideals of how they wanted to be. And so I think for a lot of women, they wanted to not feel like it was a really gender traditional division of this work. And
[00:24:33] Allison Daminger: so it felt a little bit bad to say, well, yeah, actually I think I do 80 or 90% of it.
[00:24:38] Allison Daminger: Whereas for men, I, I think they were often viewing it as very complimentary to say, my wife is Supermom.
[00:24:46] Allison Daminger: She's the best. She's so good at this stuff. And so they viewed it not as, oh my goodness, so much work is on her plate, but look how much I appreciate and admire all the work that she's doing.
[00:24:56] Allison Daminger: She's
[00:24:56] Allison Daminger: so good at.
[00:24:58] Adam Fishman: You found in specifically in different sex or, or heterosexual couples, that something like 80% of those households were woman led. was that surprising to you, or, or did that sort of confirm something that you, you thought you would find?
[00:25:13] Allison Daminger: I remember sitting down with a, a mentor in grad school when I was, you know, preparing to, to do this research, and she said to me, you're gonna have to find something more interesting than just women do most of this work because everybody already knows that. so no, it wasn't especially surprising.
[00:25:29] Allison Daminger: I felt like there were, you know, a lot of, uh, references in pop culture and, and hints in other, scholarship that probably women were gonna do the majority of this work. And so that was like maybe the least interesting part for
[00:25:41] Allison Daminger: me. The more interesting parts, to my mentor's advice were how couples made sense of it.
[00:25:47] Allison Daminger: how did they explain and narrow. Create those inequalities
[00:25:51] Allison Daminger: and what created them in the first place.
[00:25:53] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I'm looking forward to talking about that. There's a lot of rationalization that couples were doing in your interviews, so we'll get into that in a little, in a little bit. so when I was going through the chapter on the woman led households, there were times where I was laughing out loud at some of the things that the husband said and or wanted to just like throttle the husbands and be like, do more.
[00:26:15] Adam Fishman: and you raised some topics that we've discussed on this podcast before, like weaponized incompetence, which I, which I love. but in addition to that, I wanted to get into the two different archetypes that you describe in your book. There's the superhuman and the Bumbler. and so can you describe those two archetypes?
[00:26:35] Adam Fishman: 'cause I think that'd be really interesting for listeners.
[00:26:38] Allison Daminger: Yeah, so I would ask people, you know, we'd, we'd go through this whole series of questions about the, the nitty gritty of how this work is divided in their household. And then toward the end I would ask them for an estimate. You know, and this wasn't necessarily what I would take at face value, but just what's your perception of the allocation?
[00:26:57] Allison Daminger: You know, you do X percent of this work, your partner does Y percent, and then I would ask them, well, why do you think that is? Because often they would give me their percentage and say, well, it's not quite my ideal. Right? And so we would talk about like, where do you think this comes from? And the number one thing I heard from people of, of all genders, in that response was, this is our personality, right? They would say one partner is a superhuman, she is type A. She is a multitasker. She's always thinking two steps ahead, right? She's just incredibly organized. And, you know, sometimes it would veer into a more critical take, right? She's a control freak. Those words
[00:27:38] Allison Daminger: came up often. so that was the superhuman, right?
[00:27:42] Allison Daminger: Really on top of things, sometimes to a fault. And then the other partner in the relationship would be described as laid back, happy, go lucky, a little bit disorganized, fly by the seat of his pants. or, you know, more positively they would talk about how he was so present in the moment,
[00:28:00] Allison Daminger: these archetypes are not all good or bad.
[00:28:02] Allison Daminger: They could be, you know, framed in different ways. And what I thought was interesting was almost always the superhuman was a, she almost always, the bumbler was a he, right? And I went to the, the psychology literature on personality difference. Just to check and to be like, is this, you know, a massive gender difference in, in levels of organization and executive function and things like that. Because it was just so gendered in the study. And you know, long story short, there are slight differences between men and women, but there's mostly overlap in the distribution of these personality traits. the level of difference that I heard reflected in the interviews was nowhere near,a match for what we actually see at a population level in terms of how men and women are, are different from each other.
[00:28:48] Adam Fishman: Yeah, and I'm gonna talk about that with you in a, in a second. But there's two interesting, sort of asides that I wanted to bring up. One was, one's a personal anecdote and one is a quote from your, book. And so one of the women in your study had this amazing quote, this is one of those examples where I wanted to like throttle the husband.
[00:29:06] Adam Fishman: so she's this amazing quote about her husband, which was like, oh, he's never gonna remember his mother's birthday. So that's my job. And I was floored by this. I was like, wait. The husband is not gonna remember his mom's birthday, the person who brought him into the world. But apparently this is a thing
[00:29:24] Adam Fishman: so anyways, that quote, I was like, I almost wanted to like throw the book across the room when I, when I came to this. and then as another, like, personal anecdote, I was talking to a dad the other day, and I asked him, Who's your daughter's teacher? Who does your daughter have for, for kindergarten?
[00:29:39] Adam Fishman: he didn't know he had to go ask his daughter, uh, for the teacher's name. And I was reading her book at the time. So I was like, ah, this is an interesting example. And like, a sorting function for, for cognitive labor. I'll bet his wife knows the name of his daughter's teacher. he just couldn't be bothered to remember that factoid.
[00:29:59] Allison Daminger: There's a really, amazing research paper from around the year 2000. it's titled My Wife Can Tell Me Who I Know. And the argument was sort of this, this researcher was trying to interview dads about family life and, you know, she'd ask about various things like, you know, that the daughter's teacher or the daughter's friends and the husband would say like, my wife would know, right?
[00:30:23] Allison Daminger: And so this, this is, a kind of humorous phenomenon, but was something that did come
[00:30:27] Allison Daminger: up a lot in, in my research.
[00:30:28] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And you mentioned, I think there's a, a really fun comic, maybe you referenced her on your substack, which is the Daminger Dispatch, which I love. who has like this quiz that you can take that sort of helps you figure out like who does more of the cognitive labor. And one of the things was like, can you name three of your kids' friends?
[00:30:48] Adam Fishman: and I was like, oh, well I can do that. but I wonder if a lot of dads, can. this isn't all, you know, dad bashing here. I do want to talk about the male led household, which is another slightly more rare, uh, one. the last thing I wanted to ask about is this idea of like rationalization and how couples did this.
[00:31:04] Adam Fishman: So. I found it super fascinating that there was this huge disconnect between, I think what you described as deployment and ability, uh, within women-led households. And a lot of the men in the study, even men who are described sort of in fit, that bumbler archetype, they have a professional job that requires an extremely high level of executive functioning, like one of the dads.
[00:31:28] Adam Fishman: you covered this. I sort of was thinking this as I was reading it in the book, and then you, went back to this, one of the dads was in the military, was a professional athlete, and then he runs scheduling. He's like second in command as an administrator for the entire middle school that's his professional job.
[00:31:44] Adam Fishman: And so he has to do all the scheduling and things like that. So like military professional athlete runs, scheduling seems like a high executive functioning person. And yet. The same dad was sort of the bumbler at home. Why is that? Like what did you find about that disconnect between this deployment and ability within some of these households?
[00:32:06] Allison Daminger: So I think that because so many men and women alike, understood household cognitive labor to be a function of their personalities, they really didn't sort of look at, well, what's happening across spheres,
[00:32:21] Allison Daminger: what's my partner doing at home versus at work? Uh, what am I doing at home versus at work? And what I try to argue is that a lot of possibilities open up when we think about. These are skills rather than trait based, uh, techniques. Right? So there's a lot of cognitive labor that, as you were saying, maps onto what we would traditionally call executive function. And I found that men and women were deploying them differently, right?
[00:32:47] Allison Daminger: So it would be very hard to argue that the, the male project managers I interviewed did not have project management skills,
[00:32:54] Allison Daminger: it seems as though they have these skills. They're just not deploying them in the domestic context for whatever reason. Then the question is, well, why might that be? I'm glad you said, you know, this is not about dad bashing. 'cause that's, I'm a sociologist, right? My, my job is to say, what are the social forces, what are the incentive structures that are leading men and women down these different pathways? we think about what are men and women held most accountable for in the eyes of others, men are held most accountable for breadwinning,
[00:33:26] Allison Daminger: that's shifted a little bit, but still the, this idea of man as provider. Makes sense that more of his cognitive resources would be devoted to that task that he really sees himself as responsible for, expects to be judged negatively for if he doesn't live up to it. Right? And then for women, we're held accountable for family outcomes, right?
[00:33:47] Allison Daminger: Does our child show up with seasonally appropriate clothing to school? Right. Is our home reasonably clean? These are outcomes that women tend to be judged for, tend to, you know, see as more essential to their identity for a whole host of reasons. And so it's not just about bad faith on the parts of men who are saying like, Hmm, not my problem. Right. It's, it's a lot more subtle forces that have gone into the fact that yeah, you, you have a stronger incentive to lean in at work, your paid job. and so I think that's part of what we're seeing here is that the perception is that the buck stops with her at home. Right, and that she will loop him in.
[00:34:28] Allison Daminger: He should be helpful and supportive, but it is her domain. I think despite all of the changes to the gender structure over the past, you know, half century or so, that idea remains quite sticky and helps explain some of these behaviors.
[00:34:42] Adam Fishman: Yeah. So in a sense is really the social pressure or this sort of external, peer pressure in a way that drives a lot of women to assume more of the cognitive labor is, was that sort of one of the takeaways
[00:34:56] Allison Daminger: Absolutely. Yeah.
[00:34:57] Allison Daminger: So it's, who's gonna be judged? Who also is gonna have to pick up the pieces if something goes wrong.
[00:35:02] Allison Daminger: So there's a great paper by some economists that, they did an experiment to look at, you know, who gets the phone call from the school, women are the ones who usually get the phone call.
[00:35:10] Allison Daminger: even if you say, please call dad, right? It's, it's more likely to be mom. so part of it is anticipating consequences and saying, my life is gonna be harder if we don't get this right the first time. Men are, for a lot of reasons, insulated from those consequences. And then another factor too is, our social networks, and especially our parenting social networks, are incredibly gender segregated.
[00:35:35] Allison Daminger: I spoke with a number of men who would say, it would be really weird if I was calling another mom to make a play date for our kids, the ways that our communities are oriented. Right? I, I could keep going and listing these factors, but suffice to say there, there are lots of reasons that are not just, you know, bad intent.
[00:35:53] Adam Fishman: Yeah. We've talked about this on the show before. the dad who takes, uh, the kid to the, playground and is the only. non female member of the playground community. and that sort of is an example of that in, in real life. one of the things you talked about, that helps people rationalize this imbalance is, you know, a lot of people saying, well, it's not a gender thing.
[00:36:16] Adam Fishman: You have an entire chapter, I think called it's not a gender thing. and that's a quote from one of the moms that you talked to. and you went from there to this idea of personal essentialism, which was an interesting concept that I had not really heard of before. So, can you tell me about what personal essentialism is?
[00:36:35] Allison Daminger: Yeah. So this is a, a kind of play on gender essentialism, right? Which is the idea that we see certain traits, characteristics, interests, preferences as essential to the category of man or the category of woman, right? And so we might, you know, make a gender essentialist statement by saying something like, women are just better at multitasking. That wasn't what I was seeing in my data. That came up sometimes, but much more often it was, she is really good at multitasking,
[00:37:09] Allison Daminger: right? And so there was this sort of separation. They were, they were not calling on these gender categories. They were focusing on traits of an individual woman partnered with an individual man. But what I saw when I looked, you know, across these, you know, nearly a hundred couples was, wait a minute, the superhuman is, is almost always a woman. The, the bumbler is almost always a man, right? And so it is a gender thing, but in individual couples, it didn't feel that way. Right? And partly that's because they didn't necessarily want to do things that way. A lot of them talked about how they really saw the model of their parents and wanted to do something different. they viewed themselves as, equal partners, right? They wanted to be in a relationship of, of mutuality and fairness. And so when. They were confronted with, with ways in which they were not quite living up to those ideals. That was sort of uncomfortable. And so the, the rationalizations come in to say, we've been shunted toward this gender traditional division of labor for all the reasons we just laid out. This isn't what we wanted. Right. And so it must be about something other than gender, right?
[00:38:15] Allison Daminger: Because this isn't what we, we set out to do.
[00:38:17] Adam Fishman: Yeah. So it was like, it's not because she's a woman, but my wife just happens to be more organized than me, and that's her skill. And so therefore, you know, she does the organizational tasks and the, and the labor around organ organizing.
[00:38:31] Allison Daminger: And for a lot of couples, that really kept them stuck
[00:38:36] Allison Daminger: because I would have women say to me things like, well, this isn't my ideal, but to change it, I would have to change my husband's brain. I can't or don't want to do that. And so I guess this is what it is.
[00:38:47] Allison Daminger: And so for a lot of couples, it, it sort of kept them stuck. It reduced conflict, right? It helped them to say, well, no one is, is doing anything wrong here? This is just who we are as individuals and so we're gonna keep doing things in this fashion, even though it is, is suboptimal.
[00:39:04] Adam Fishman: Yeah. So in some way was there sort of a hidden undertone of conflict avoidance in some of this stuff? Like people maybe didn't knowingly do it to avoid conflict, but it sounds like that was kind of ever present.
[00:39:18] Allison Daminger: I think so. I think that for a lot of women in particular, it was much easier to sort of accept an unequal status quo if they felt like this was just how their husband's brain worked. Rather than, for whatever reason, he's choosing not to deploy his skills in
[00:39:38] Allison Daminger: this home context. That was maddening, whereas, oh, that's who he is. I don't know that it was a deliberate conflict avoidance strategy, but that was the net effect.
[00:39:48] Allison Daminger: And many women talked about how they had sort of had more of these fights earlier in their relationship and then kind of resigned themselves to this is just how he is.
[00:39:58] Adam Fishman: Yeah. You mentioned, this idea of mutuality and you have a three part series on your, on your blog, and then I think in one of your papers you talked about the myth of mutuality. Can you explain the myth of, of mutuality to me?
[00:40:12] Allison Daminger: Yeah, so this was a really fun, uh, collaboration I did with my friend Jacqueline Wong. She had done a research study focused on how dual earner couples make big career decisions, so things like where and whether to move, for a partner's career. And I had all this data on how couples make decisions about how they manage their home lives. And so we sort of decided to combine forces and say like, how are these dynamics playing out in these two domains? And one common theme in both of those data sets was that couples really strongly aspired to this, idea of, it's not you versus me, it's, it's us, right? They, they did not like the idea of, of thinking about power and negotiations and, you know, your interest versus my interests. So we call this, you know, mutuality, right? That was sort of the, the thing that they defined as being a good relationship and, and what they wanted to believe they were in. But then we also show that when it came time to things like, you know, dividing labor, figuring out whose interests carry the day, when interests are opposed, that mutuality seemed to be more of a, a myth than a reality, right?
[00:41:21] Allison Daminger: Because men's interests were often the ones that, you know, took, priority when it came to the career space
[00:41:27] Allison Daminger: and women's labor was, was often what was, you know, running the household. And so we tried to unpack and say, where does the mutuality ideal go wrong? and we have a, a bunch of different, techniques, but we call it the myth of mutuality because for most couples it was more of an ideal than an actual reality.
[00:41:46] Adam Fishman: Oh, interesting. So like everyone's sort of like, this is what we want, but when the rubber meets the road, that was not exactly how things shook out in their, in their household.
[00:41:55] Allison Daminger: things like, you know, where they had two different opposing interests, right? His interest was for them to move to city A. Her interest was for them to stay where they were, right? They would, you know, have these conversations and, and sort of reframe things and say, well, it's, you know, we've decided that collectively it's in our interest to move to city A. And it's like, wait a minute. His, needs sort of subbed in for the, the we, and we argue that, you know, there's a lot of, hidden power dynamics that make it so that that is what often happens for, for heterosexual couples.
[00:42:29] Adam Fishman: Yeah. one of the things that you talk about in the book is this, question, and you mentioned it a few minutes ago, of like, can you become a cognitive labor leader or are you born that way? and you use an analogy in your book to talk about your own life and travel planning.
[00:42:49] Adam Fishman: can you talk a little bit about that and, and how it sort of helps us understand whether people are born this way or become this way over time?
[00:42:59] Allison Daminger: I. I'm a horrible navigator, right? I, I put on Google Maps, if I'm going places I've been 20 times before, it's, you know, kind of a, a joke between my husband and I that I have no sense of direction. And so as a result, he is kind of our navigator in chief, uh, when we're going somewhere, especially when we're traveling somewhere new, right? He's the one who plans our route. He's the one who, you know, says, okay, like this is the best option for getting from A to B. We should take the train or we should drive, or whatever. And you know, the, the story we tell ourselves is that that's just because he's better at it than I am. But you know, when I really interrogate that, it's like, okay, he. Has put in a lot of practice.
[00:43:48] Allison Daminger: He finds it interesting to, to just like explore Google Maps. He, enjoys kind of testing himself, right? not using GPS navigation is, is better for your cognitive aging.
[00:44:01] Allison Daminger: And so he has the, these ideas that he doesn't want to use Google Maps and so he has got a lot of practice navigating. the other thing though is that, you know, I didn't meet him until I was in my late twenties. I had done a lot of international travel solo or with, with friends who also were not especially keen on navigation. And it's interesting that when I'm by myself, I manage okay,
[00:44:26] Allison Daminger: right? I, I suddenly can figure out, you know, uh, it's maybe not super easy from the start, right? But it becomes so over time. And so what I take away from that is, is that. There are, patterns that get ingrained. One of my interviewees talked about how, you know, when you are, with a partner, you sort of shut off certain parts of your brain because you know that they've got it. And eventually it comes to really be this, wide chasm between you in terms of your skills. And it can seem like that is just so innate. But when you sort of peel back the layers, it's like, well, you know, my husband was not born with a great sense of direction, right? This is just something that for a whole host of reasons he's invested in. And now that we're together, I have many fewer opportunities to practice it. So my skills are atrophying as his continue to grow, right? And so these, these ideas about inherent difference, if you peel back the layers, you know, are often much more about these, these broader patterns of investment and practice and learning.
[00:45:35] Adam Fishman: that would imply that, with maybe certain exceptions, cognitive, uh, labor leaders in the household can be made, right? If you just invest enough time in developing those skills, even if they're not innately your, your skills. So,
[00:45:51] Allison Daminger: part of the reason that, that Eric, my husband is, is the one doing it is that he finds it enjoyable, right? And so in, in our relationship, like, because he likes it and I don't, it's sort of an easy complementarity, like, okay, of course you take it. But I think that, you know, for other couples where one of you does not have an intrinsic interest in whatever this is, you're just doing it, right?
[00:46:14] Allison Daminger: Those are opportunities where you might wanna revisit and say. We could change this if we wanted to. It wouldn't happen overnight, right? Because you know, one partner has had much more practice than the other, but it is a choice that you could decide to invest in switching things up.
[00:46:30] Adam Fishman: speaking of switching things up, this is a wonderful segue to talking about the increasingly rare male led household. so this is the other side of the coin. This is where the men, uh, in a heterosexual relationship, did more than 50%, of the cognitive labor in a household. When you found these folks, these diamonds in the rough, what were some of your observations, uh, about those households?
[00:46:56] Adam Fishman: Like things that jumped off the page for you in terms of differences between, a woman led household.
[00:47:02] Allison Daminger: Yeah. So with the, the man led and the balanced households in I think nearly a hundred percent of cases, these were households where partners had equal careers in terms of earnings and hours, or her career was sort of bigger, right? And so it seemed like a prerequisite, at least in this sample, was for her career to be, you know, significant on, on parallel or even greater than his in terms of what it brought to the family financially or what it took from her in, in terms of time. So that was one thing that stood out. the other thing that stood out was that the man led and woman-led couples were, were not quite mirror images of each other, right? So I, I did not interview any couples that were kind of 90 10. He was doing the vast majority of the cognitive labor. there were a few areas in particular where even in those man led couples, she still took on, you know, the leadership role. And there was particularly around kids and managing things like the pediatrician, managing the relationship with the school, managing the relationship with the kids' friends, right? And so that says to me that that's something about, you know, motherhood is really closely tied to this particular role, right?
[00:48:20] Allison Daminger: Probably because of the, the expectations that we talked about earlier. possibly because of, you know, early patterns in terms of, okay, she's breastfeeding and so she builds this different relationship and then that spirals. the other thing that that stood out to me was that, the man led and balanced couples.
[00:48:36] Allison Daminger: I think I expected that. They would be really different in terms of their ideology. Like I expected that these would be these, you know, kind of uber feminist couples, and that wasn't really what I saw. they were much more regular couples. Some of them had set out not necessarily for, you know, capital f feminist reasons to shape their lives in a way that gave her career priority or that gave their careers equal priority. There were some couples who were really kind of intentional in that way. But there were other couples who really just sort of fell into that division. They had these, unexpected shifts where usually it was that her career took off while his career kind of stagnated. And in those cases, you know, they responded and they shifted things or, you know, this was already happening.
[00:49:30] Allison Daminger: And so when they had kids, he kind of took on more of the lead parent role. there wasn't like, people sometimes ask me like, what's the, the secret sauce?
[00:49:38] Adam Fishman: How do we do it?
[00:49:39] Allison Daminger: exactly. I, I don't have that magic formula. and there were multiple pathways in which I think is, you know, also good news is that if you're not in, you know, a situation where you planned on this from the start, there are other ways that you can get there later
[00:49:53] Adam Fishman: Yeah. One thing I found really interesting is, like you sort of posed this question in the book, which I can't, I, I'm not sure that we, you were able to answer really, which is this idea of like, does career success lead to cognitive labor equality or, a male led household. Like let's say if the, woman in the household is, has a more greedier career, or.
[00:50:16] Adam Fishman: Is it vice versa? Does the like, high cognitive labor, equality lead to more space for a woman to kind of be a leader in the workforce as well? did you find a correlation or did you, I can't remember if you drew a conclusion there.
[00:50:34] Allison Daminger: Yeah, no, that's a good catch. I, I don't think I have the data to really definitively say, my best guess is that they're kind of mutually reinforcing, right? I don't think it's a clear A to B. It's more like these, these both sort of feed into
[00:50:50] Allison Daminger: each other and, and create something. the things that I really. Did see was that the actual facts of each partner's career are important, right? So I, I mentioned a minute ago that, you know, in these man led couples, she always had the, the kind of bigger career, but there were a number of couples for whom that was the case, and she still did the majority of the cognitive labor,
[00:51:14] Allison Daminger: right? So I, I think sometimes people get stuck on the economics and think it's just a story about earnings or hours and, I don't think that's true. I think what, what really matters above and beyond is what meaning do partners apply, right? Do they see it as, oh, this, this sort of interesting fluke that she's currently the higher earner, but he has this, you know, bigger ambition.
[00:51:37] Allison Daminger: And so like, he's, he's still the, the primary career in our household, right? Or do you say, huh, for whatever reason, she's got higher earning potential, she seems to be on a good track. Like, let's, let's run with it. the facts are. they're not irrelevant, but couples can make very different meaning outta the same facts.
[00:51:56] Allison Daminger: So I think it's more about their, their values and perspectives and whether or not they're aligned in terms of they want this to mean for their family lives.
[00:52:06] Adam Fishman: one of the takeaways that I had from your book is that the, in these male led households, and you sort of alluded to this in our conversation, you don't necessarily see that the bumbler and the superhuman roles like flip or invert entirely, which, you know, is what one might expect before they read, the research.
[00:52:26] Adam Fishman: So was that one of your takeaways that like, that didn't necessarily equate to an inversion of those archetypes?
[00:52:33] Allison Daminger: Yes, absolutely. I, I think that there were elements of that, but it was a little bit more domain specific,
[00:52:40] Allison Daminger: right? So in the kind of woman led households, it was sort of a global, you know, she's the control freak, she's Type A, he's laid back. Whereas in the man led couples, it would be more like, okay, he's a bit of a control freak for cleanliness, right?
[00:52:54] Allison Daminger: And she is a bit of a control freak for this.
[00:52:57] Allison Daminger: So it's a little bit more, specific to issues rather than like our global personalities.
[00:53:04] Adam Fishman: the other thing that I found really interesting and, and maybe not surprising, and this comes all the way back to what we talked about with sort of external pressure or social pressure, is that in a lot of these male led households, it seemed like. The woman in the household felt a lot more guilty about the fact that it was a male led household or that, there was an imbalance skewed towards her partner, and they, so they seemed to care a lot about that balance.
[00:53:32] Adam Fishman: When there was this male led imbalance, men didn't necessarily seem to care the same way. is that a correct takeaway from the book?
[00:53:40] Allison Daminger: Yes, so did see that when a couple was, was male led usually she did not sort of see that as permission to check out. So I had some examples of, um, stay at home dads partnered with employed moms, and she usually kind of kept tabs on, okay, here's, here's what's happening, here's the schedule.
[00:54:05] Allison Daminger: I tried to, you know, be cognizant of the fact that he's been on all day. And so I think about, you know, what can I do from the office on my lunch break? Whereas, you know, if it was the reverse situation, got a stay-at-home mom with an employed dad, it was sort of like, well, that's her domain,
[00:54:20] Allison Daminger: and so I think that for these man led and balanced couples, there was a bit of a sense that they were transgressing norms
[00:54:28] Allison Daminger: and that was something that, you know, in various ways both partners had to deal with. And for women it was, oh, am I putting too much on him? this is more than the vast majority of men are doing.
[00:54:40] Allison Daminger: Like, is that okay? Whereas if you're doing the norm, if you're following what the majority of people do, there's less sort of guilt and uncertainty because it's, it's like there's different, you know, negative emotions
[00:54:53] Allison Daminger: perhaps, but not that kind of, oh my goodness, I'm, I'm breaking a norm.
[00:54:58] Adam Fishman: so I want to talk about solutions or things we might explore in just a minute. before that though, I want to just talk really briefly about the balanced households. you, broke balanced households down into kind of two structures. can you tell me about the two different structures or ways of defining that balance that you uncovered?
[00:55:22] Allison Daminger: Yeah. So if you think back to what I said earlier about the, 10 domains of household life, right? The cooking, the cleaning, the travel, the kid management. Couples could reach balance in two ways. They could either split things and say, okay, you partner A are gonna handle cooking and shopping and travel, and you partner B are gonna handle kid stuff and home maintenance and finances. Right? Those would be the splitters. The shares were folks where domain leadership was, quite fuzzy. Right. I got really frustrated sometimes with those couples because I couldn't categorize them. There was, there was no clear leader. But eventually I realized, okay, this is a, a way of achieving balance is that both partners are invested and, and making decisions about food. Both partners are invested in making decisions about childcare. Right. And so those were kind of the two pathways that couples reached balance through.
[00:56:18] Adam Fishman: I mean, I have to say, just reading about the sharers in that construct, it sounded exhausting to me. I was like, you're involved in every decision, together. how do you find enough hours in the day to do this? I also was struck that in the balanced households, not everybody seemed.
[00:56:35] Adam Fishman: Completely happy with their sort of situation and, and set up. Was that something that you, you found or am I like just interpreting that,
[00:56:43] Allison Daminger: No, you're, you're not making that up. And I think that's something that, you know, if we talk about my evolution over the course of, of this research, I, I think that I had this, this sense that, well, 50 50 is, is the good thing. That's what we
[00:56:54] Allison Daminger: should strive for. And some of the least happy semen couples were those who seemed to have achieved that 50 50.
[00:57:02] Allison Daminger: And so what I make of that is, what matters most is that you are clear about your values, your priorities, your, your desired outcome, and then are you able to reach it,
[00:57:15] Allison Daminger: right? Is your life in alignment with those values?
[00:57:18] Allison Daminger: And for some of the couples, I spoke with where her career had taken off, his had kind of lagged. Part of the frustration was this was not what one or both partners had wanted or expected for their lives. And so there was this dissonance that, oh, I'm in this role that I, I didn't expect to be in. Right. And so I, you know, do not necessarily advocate for every household going for balance, right? I think there are a lot of reasons that a couple might be woman led or man led, um, or imbalanced if you're in a queer partnership and it's more important that you do that mindfully and that it is a decision rather than something that you just default into.
[00:58:00] Adam Fishman: you know, when we think about this sort of societal pressure, cultural pressure that, that people feel, and we talked about how that reflects on the moms in the women-led households. I found it really interesting that, uh, many of the people that you talked to had kind of fallen into what you described this sort of male led, situation because.
[00:58:20] Adam Fishman: Maybe the woman's career had taken off. in reading some of the commentary from the people that you interviewed, it's almost like the dads felt bad about this because they weren't living up to their ideal as the breadwinner, you know? it's sort of like you also mentioned the, the idea that the dad's domain is like the lawn.
[00:58:40] Adam Fishman: If the lawn looks nice, I'm doing a good job as, as the man in the household. but the, this sort of cultural pressure in, in reverse or, on men was, was really apparent in a lot of these interviews that they just like, weren't getting the job done,
[00:58:54] Adam Fishman: I felt for a lot of these dads. 'cause I, I thought they were doing really valuable work. I.
[00:58:59] Allison Daminger: I think in, you know, our, conversations about, you know, patriarchy and things like that, we sometimes miss the fact that stuff hurts men too. Right? there's a lot of research to suggest that the opportunities and options for women have expanded a ton, right? We've, we really leaned into this idea that girls can do anything, they can be anything, and we haven't seen a parallel expansion for men,
[00:59:22] Allison Daminger: there's still a much narrower set of societal expectations. And so I think that's some of what was reflected in those men's unhappiness was, okay, I'm, I find myself in this situation that is not what society has told me a man is supposed to do. There's, this real kind of pain there. And so I think that some of our collective work is to reimagine, right?
[00:59:44] Allison Daminger: our possibilities for, okay, this is, you know, being a good dad can take all these different forms.
[00:59:50] Adam Fishman: I want to talk about solutions, which you kind of end the, the back part of the book is, is about like, what might we explore here? you also wrote a paper, I think you have a 2020 paper about, and this came up in the book about how couples kind of degender their decisions when they say things like, well, it just makes sense this way.
[01:00:09] Adam Fishman: and so if you are a parent or a couple that wants to change this story, what are some steps that people can take toward, I guess, like re gendering their awareness in a healthy way?
[01:00:22] Allison Daminger: Yeah, so I think that for a lot of couples they, they sort of viewed it as if this is a gender thing, then we have somehow failed.
[01:00:30] Allison Daminger: And for me, I find it much more helpful. you know, as I said, I'm, I'm married to a man, right? I, we deal with these same challenges, for us to say the system is, is sort of rigged against us,
[01:00:43] Allison Daminger: right?
[01:00:43] Allison Daminger: For heterosexual couples. We've talked about many of the, the reasons that the path of least resistance is to be woman led in a lot of ways, right? And so I think that starting by acknowledging that you can really have good intentions and yet find yourself here. So I think that for couples to acknowledge the reality of, you know, whether or not this was what we wanted, it makes sense that we ended up here. Right now we have a choice. So step one is, is really to say like. What is our current division? And then step two is to say, how does that map onto our values, our goals?
[01:01:26] Allison Daminger: Right? Do we have different values and goals, in which case maybe we need to do some negotiating and, and conversations to really try and find ways to reconcile them. but if we are afraid to acknowledge that gender is playing a role in our relationships, what happens is that it just goes underground.
[01:01:42] Allison Daminger: And when things are underground, you can't really address them in a thoughtful way. And so it feels hard and scary to bring these things to the light. But I think once you do that, you open up new possibilities for figuring out whether and how you want to change things.
[01:01:58] Adam Fishman: you just talked there about like a couple of the steps or the sort of process that people can and should go through if they want to change this. in your book, you talked about this as recognition, re-imagining and reduction. Can you talk about those sort of three, I guess I'd call 'em phases.
[01:02:16] Allison Daminger: So we can make any changes, we, we just have to acknowledge that this is work, this is work that is falling disproportionately on some shoulders more than others. and so part of, you know, what I hope to do with, with this book and with my research is to, to bring this to more people's attention. I said to you before we started recording that I'm, I'm so happy to be talking to an audience of, you know, primarily men because I think that part of this is really, conversations that we to be having, uh, across genders that men need to have with other men. So this feels like, you know, part of that work. step two then is, reimagining. So oftentimes, something is a, an ingrained pattern, it's the status quo. It's hard to see how it could be otherwise. And so I think part of what we need to do individually and collectively is to say, what if it looked different? Right? What if gender was not the best predictor of the amount or kind of cognitive labor you did for your household,
[01:03:14] Allison Daminger: what else could there be? So opening up new possibilities, recognizing that it could be otherwise. and then the third step is sort of reduction, right? This is a heavy load that is born disproportionately by women. And here we have options, and they're not mutually exclusive. I think the path that many people go to first is to say, well, how do we reallocate within households?
[01:03:36] Allison Daminger: How do we take more off mom's shoulders and, put more on dad? And I'm, you know, all for that. And if that's what works for a couple. I also think that we need to be recognizing that. of this work does not need to be put on families at all. Right? There's a lot of, work. Our standards for, for parenting continue to ratchet ever upwards, right?
[01:03:58] Allison Daminger: Our social supports continue to ratchet ever downwards. And so some of the, the work that needs to be done is saying, can we support households? How can we take some of this cognitive burden off everybody's shoulders it doesn't need to be divided at all? And I think that is kind of an under-explored pathway in some of these conversations.
[01:04:16] Adam Fishman: a lot of the people who listen to this show are company builders, so they're In the CEO seat or the founder's seat, or their executives at their company. thinking about balance and how do I strike it? But I'm wondering if those folks want to help drive some change.
[01:04:36] Adam Fishman: Again, it's primarily a male audience, although a surprising number of women listen to this show. when you think about from the perspective of a company builder, if we were giving some advice to somebody who's, who's doing that? what can a founder, a CEO, a company leader do when they're building their institution at their workplace to kind of help ease that cognitive labor burden for the people who work for them?
[01:05:02] Allison Daminger: so there are a number of pathways. I'll just name a couple. the first one that comes to mind is parental leave, That is huge. And I think in particular, paternity leave, So oftentimes, if you are the, person who actually gives birth to the child, right? You are given much more leave than the person who is, you know, the partner of the birthing parent. And what my research and other research shows is that that creates these early day inequalities where she's home for longer, often by herself. She becomes the expert in all things baby. And that is a pattern that is very sticky. And so there's a lot of good evidence to suggest that more paternity leave is associated with a lot of good outcomes, on a range of, of indicators including the division of labor. And I think giving paternity leave also for leaders to model actually taking that paternity leave. Right. And then encouraging. It's, it's not just the policy, it's how do you actually create a culture where people feel okay to do it, especially men. that is one avenue that I would love to, to see more company builders invest in. another one though is that okay, we, we know that the early days are really important, if we think about childcare as cognitive, as well as physical, what we see is that as kids age, the physical labor burden goes down, but the cognitive labor burden tends to go up. And so part of what I would love to have companies do is, think about. Not just how do we support parents of newborns, right? That's important. But how do we recognize that these caregiving needs, are going to continue throughout the life course? if you have, folks in kind of the sandwich generation, maybe they're also caring for elderly parents, right? And so understanding that, flexibility is important and predictability is
[01:06:56] Allison Daminger: really important,
[01:06:57] Allison Daminger: a lot of the, the trouble and a lot of, I think the reason that companies lose top talent, especially top female talent, is that they require a lot of kind of on call time. That is just really hard when you also need to be on call as a parent. So finding ways, whatever that looks like in your particular context, to build in flexibility and predictability for your employees, I think would be very helpful in retaining that top talent and especially that top female talent.
[01:07:25] Adam Fishman: Okay, so. Better parental leave for the non birthing parent. that's one. and then building in more flexibility and predictability into scheduling so that, folks can not have a lot of those conflicts that require a lot of mental gymnastics, to work around. I love that dads who are listening, founder dads who are listening, make that happen.
[01:07:48] Adam Fishman: okay. Let's talk about individual on an individualized level. So, what are some individual tactics that you'd like to see enacted or I guess, you know, put a better way? Like if you're in a household, what do you do differently? how do you get there?
[01:08:03] Allison Daminger: So one of the things that, you know, I think we, we miss in these conversations is not all tasks are created equal. And not all people experience all tasks in the same
[01:08:16] Allison Daminger: way. my husband and I, right? I'll give an example from the, the physical labor realm. He, you know, doesn't love doing dishes, but he doesn't mind doing dishes. I hate washing dishes. Your hands get all wet and dirty I find it very satisfying to put dishes away from the dishwasher, right. And putting them in their place and, and knowing where they go. And that is something that we didn't realize until we actually did an exercise where we made these columns and said, these are tasks that I actually enjoy. These are tasks that I. I really don't want to do, and these are tasks that I'm sort of neutral toward. And we were in the lucky position of a lot of my Absolutely nots were in his, yeah, I like this. Right. And so thinking about this objective experience of tasks, those are going to hit differently for different people for a variety of reasons.
[01:09:04] Allison Daminger: And so that is a piece of this where you can ask yourself or ask your partner, what are you currently doing that you hate? And if one partner hates it less, right, that's an opportunity to, to really, you know, use comparative advantage, to work for you. Another thing that I, I really try to tell couples about if they're trying to make changes is you kind of have to think about these things as, long-term processes rather than overnight transformations because of the dynamics we talked about where one partner has gotten a lot of practice. They've built skills, they've built preferences and patterns and relationships and knowledge. That is not something that you can flip a switch and change. And so if you are trying to do something differently, then I think you have to to give it, you know, a good trial period depending on the task. Maybe that's a few weeks, a few months, whatever the case may be. Don't expect it to be without some initial friction. both of you have to kind of like buckle up for a little bit of a bump ride. And one of the ways that you can set yourself up for success is to start with tasks that are a little bit less, stressful for one partner to give up. So I usually recommend that you start with more kind of internal facing tasks like meal planning or, you know, something with finances or home repairs or whatever. because if you start with planning the kid's birthday party or you start with, you know, communicating with the extended family, oftentimes there's a lot of anxiety. Through that handoff. Like, did it get done? you did it differently, right? And so if you can kind of set yourself up for success and get some proof of concept with the more, you know, stress-free, uh, handoffs, then you can work your way up to some of those, you know, harder ones.
[01:10:48] Adam Fishman: Yeah, we talked about on the show, when we talk about giving kids the opportunity to make mistakes and sort of build to more complicated decisions. This is the same thing in the household. Like, moms in the women led household. Like allow the, your husband to have maybe a, a slightly less visible, slightly less big stakes, you know, role in the cognitive labor stuff and, and more inward facing at, at first, and then build up to the Chuck e Cheese birthday party or whatever.
[01:11:16] Adam Fishman: So, One of the things that you mentioned going through this exercise with your, with your husband, it sounded a little bit like Eve Brodsky's Fair Play System, which I'm sure you are intimately familiar with. you know, is that something that you recommend couples do, but many people have talked about this on, on the show and having this sort of like, division of, physical labor at least.
[01:11:36] Adam Fishman: but I don't know. Does, does Eve Rodsky stuff also cover cognitive decision making? I, I, I can't remember.
[01:11:43] Allison Daminger: does. She, she calls it slightly different things. so she calls it like conception planning and execution, right. Or her kind of. Three categories, but that's usually if, if people are like, we're both on the same page, we just need a good system. That is what I, recommend people pick up because, you know, you'll find ways to customize it for you, but I think it does the best job of, really sort of making things concrete and making it not just about the physical chores, but also bringing in that mental component. if, there's other couples where they're not aligned in terms of what they're going for, you know, they don't have a buy-in, then that system is not going to solve that for you. But if, if you're, challenge is really, we just need a system. And then I think Fair Play is a good one. my husband and I do our own kind of like custom one, but it
[01:12:34] Allison Daminger: has a lot in common with the, the Fair Play system.
[01:12:36] Adam Fishman: I wanted to ask you, I'm hoping this is a slightly optimistic question, but have you ever seen, or did you come across in your research couples who have successfully rebalanced in the direction that they wanted to, so like, acted on some of your advice and we're able to do some of the shifting of cognitive load?
[01:12:58] Allison Daminger: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it is often an uphill battle, And for many couples it's sort of going from 90 10 to 70 30, it's hard to, especially if you are, you know, in the stage of life where you've already been together for a decade, you've got two kids, you're, you're busy. but I have seen couples oftentimes this, this comes from, they've reached a, a sort of breaking point and she has said like, this is not sustainable for me. I'm unhappy.
[01:13:28] Allison Daminger: And he said, oh, no, that is not what I want. Right. And, and they've found a way to kind of make shifts. kinda going back to the, balanced couples, there's not one formula, right.
[01:13:40] Allison Daminger: I think that each couple sort of finds their way to it. Sometimes it looks like a radical re-imagining of their careers. Sometimes it's just, we started doing a weekly meeting, right? My husband is really into notion and so we, we set up this notion database and, we translated this into terms that he could. Connect with
[01:13:59] Allison Daminger: like a system that he felt bought into, right? And so that the actual pathway is different for each couple. But I, I do think that, you know, unfortunately it's often, as I said, after they hit breaking point. But, sometimes beautiful things come out of that.
[01:14:12] Adam Fishman: the husband who is very into notion sounds, uh, a man after my own heart. So, okay. Last thing, for. This part of the episode. if I were gonna change or add a question that I should ask dads on, on Startup Dad to bring more awareness to this, to help, make progress, make us societal forward progress on this, what's a question that you think I should be asking guests about?
[01:14:38] Adam Fishman: Cognitive labor in their household?
[01:14:41] Allison Daminger: one question you could ask is, you know, what, Area of your household's life or your, your parenting, do you kind of own end to end? Right? What's, what's the thing that you are on top of? 'cause a lot of times, you know, most of the men I interviewed, they did have some aspect, right?
[01:14:58] Allison Daminger: I, I met with some dads who were really passionate about kids' sports, right? And they're, you know, on the lookout, they, they wanna coach the team. They wanna like work with their kid and they wanna coordinate. for others it was, you know, I feel really passionate about our home technology setup, like, I'm the one who owns the, the it for the household sort of asking like, what are you excited about?
[01:15:19] Allison Daminger: You know, what do you own end to end? What is your specialty? I think would be a good one to sort of normalize that. Yeah. Like there are some things that are, you got it right. Your wife is just sort of, tuned out.
[01:15:31] Adam Fishman: I love that I'm gonna find ways to work some more cognitive, labor questions into the show. So,
[01:15:36] Adam Fishman: okay. I wanted to ask you just a few kind of personal things since we spent so much time on your, on your book. And then of course we have a very short lightning round. So, is the first one for you is like, how did you get into this field of, of study?
[01:15:49] Allison Daminger: I think I have the opposite path for a lot of people. You know, the, the usual story is I became a parent and so then I wanted to research
[01:15:56] Allison Daminger: parenting.I was single. I had no dependents, you know, human or furry, or I didn't even have a car, you know, I didn't have a mortgage.
[01:16:06] Allison Daminger: it really started from kind of some of the questions I had about what was possible for my life, what I was seeing in many of my peers. spoiler alert, I now do have a child, but, uh, at the time I didn't know if I wanted kids. I didn't know if that would be compatible with, you know, what career ambitions I had. I was watching friends get into these relationships with men and, and sort of downgrade their ambitions and their plans for their
[01:16:32] Allison Daminger: lives. And so part of that was just wondering like, why does that happen? How does that happen? Is there a way to prevent that from happening if that's not what you want? and part of it was a little bit of, indignation, I, I was in my first year graduate classes and reading a lot of classic texts on gender inequality and family life. So Arlie Hoho is the, the second shift is the book that really kind of galvanized me. I was like, wait a minute, this is still true, right?
[01:17:00] Allison Daminger: This is, this is how my parents do things. This is how many of my friends do things. And I really was kind of frustrated, right? I had been, you know, I, I grew up in the kind of girl power, you know, boss lady era of, of feminism, and was like, wait a minute. I, I thought these were problems that were solved. So it was a little bit of like curiosity. What could this look like? You know, if I go down these paths and a little bit of anger at what I was seeing in the data, that so many things that I thought were problems for my mom might still be problems for me and for my gener.
[01:17:35] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I look around even in my neighborhood now and I live in a very liberal part of the country, and, with many parents who are of similar age to me and, and see the same issues, prevailing here. it's really interesting. We, we've made some progress, but maybe not as much as, as we'd like to.
[01:17:52] Adam Fishman: We'd like to think, So you did mention that you have a kid, you now have a daughter, six months old, congratulations. and you have a partner. and as an aside, I think before you were married, uh, maybe when you were dating, you wrote, a Subsect article called what's it like to date a gender scholar And you interviewed him.
[01:18:09] Adam Fishman: your husband's name is Eric. so you interviewed him, which I read and it was awesome. he seems like fairly progressive, uh, husband, so that's great. but I wanted to ask you, you know, obviously you started a lot of this research well before you had a family as you just mentioned.
[01:18:24] Adam Fishman: Has your view of your research changed at all since you've become a parent? Or are you more, critically aware of this stuff or, or have your thoughts on this changed at all?
[01:18:34] Allison Daminger: Yeah. So the biggest thing that I think has shifted for me is, is just I feel a lot more compassion and empathy for the couples that I studied. You know, and I, I tried to do that throughout, but sometimes, you know, I had moments where I'm like, oh my goodness, why? Why are you doing it this way?
[01:18:51] Allison Daminger: now I just feel very viscerally how much it's not just about what you and your partner want.
[01:18:59] Allison Daminger: So to give you one example, when I was pregnant, I started fielding all these texts and phone calls from extended family about the registry and about the shower and I was like, wait a minute. If I don't say something, I'm going to be the liaison for
[01:19:14] Allison Daminger: all of these, you know, matters going forward. we didn't ask them to, to reach out to me, you know, we didn't like say, okay, this is an Allison thing. and so that was just a, a moment of like, oh, this is sort of just kind of inertia will take you in this direction.
[01:19:30] Allison Daminger: And it is exhausting to push back sometimes.
[01:19:34] Allison Daminger: Right? In the, the early newborn phase when we were sleep deprived, my husband was actually a lot better about this than I was in the sense of saying, Hey, I've read your stuff. I know that we are setting important precedents and patterns for ourselves. Do we wanna do it this way? You know? And I would be like, I'm too tired. I just want to do whatever is is easiest.
[01:19:56] Allison Daminger: he was the one who was really good about saying, we need to be strategic. Because it's hard to change patterns. It's much easier to set them the way you want them from the beginning.
[01:20:06] Adam Fishman: in setting them from the beginning. how did you approach that conversation or how did you and Eric approach that conversation with each other? certainly I have a ton of people who are what I would call parenting curious on this show. and I think also a lot of people listening to this show are wondering like, well, how do I make all this work when I have a career and a lot of dual working, dual income households listening to this show?
[01:20:29] Adam Fishman: you were at a slight advantage because this is your field of study, and he knows getting into a relationship that this is your field of study. but were there any, any ways that you discussed it or, or talked about it in the runup to starting that family that helped you maybe get closer to the path that you wanted?
[01:20:47] Allison Daminger: Yeah.
[01:20:48] Adam Fishman: I.
[01:20:48] Allison Daminger: a lot of conversations, and conversations at all different levels. Conversations at the sort of nitty gritty of, okay, you know, what are we gonna do for leave? he's an entrepreneur, as I mentioned, right? So, his leave was really up to him. I, you know, am an academic and so I had a lot of flexibility there as well.
[01:21:08] Allison Daminger: And, and so it was like, okay, do we wanna overlap entirely? Do I wanna take longer leave? because that was, you know, one example of the kind of granular conversation of what would be the implications, right? If we did it like this, like that. how do we. Make sure that both of us are, are getting time and practice in, in building skills, developing a relationship with this baby. and then we also have had a lot of, of ongoing conversations about the big picture. You know, and like, what are we going for? Like, what would a, successful combination of work and family life feel like for us? You know, how much do we want to be able to,focus on our careers?
[01:21:48] Allison Daminger: What, what time do we want to be sort of off limits from work? how do we envision that changing over time as our daughter grows? And so these are, you know, not necessarily the kind of conversations where you come away with, okay, here's our 10 year plan, but more of just like, what are we thinking about and what do we, what do we want?
[01:22:06] Allison Daminger: What would good look like? And then you can kind of work backwards and, and check in periodically to say. How are we doing on this? How does this feel? the other thing that, you know, we think a lot about is, hopefully our lives and our relationship are, are long and, you know, many decades. And so we are not necessarily going to be 50 50 every single
[01:22:30] Allison Daminger: moment. Right. I, launched a book this fall, right. That was a big career moment for me. And, and Eric really stepped up and did some solo parenting while I was traveling for book events. I think some of his travel will ramp up in, in future and, and that'll be when I will step up. So really, kind of saying like, this is something that is, constantly renegotiated and revisited. it's not really a set it and forget it kind of thing, much as I would like for that to be, you know, as our daughter ages and has new needs and patterns, we're gonna have to keep revisiting and talking about these
[01:23:05] Allison Daminger: things.
[01:23:06] Adam Fishman: Yeah. As I heard two things there that you said. One, and I'm gonna very overly simplify here, but one is to just be clear on your goals. What is it that we want? If we know what it is that we want and we're on the same page there, then you can work backwards to figure out what do we have to do to get to those, those goals.
[01:23:24] Adam Fishman: It's almost like building a product. We think about that, uh, in, in my line of work. and the second thing that I heard is that like. These are seasons of life, as you mentioned, your kids have different needs and, your daughter's, needs and expectations and schedule and everything else will change.
[01:23:40] Adam Fishman: she's probably in the potted plant phase right now. She's about six months. Oh, she crawling.
[01:23:46] Adam Fishman: Oh no, you didn't even get the potted plant phase. Oh, I'm so sorry. but, you know, revisiting the conversation, revisiting even the goals, do we still want the same end goal? Do we still want to achieve the same thing?
[01:24:00] Adam Fishman: And so it sounds like those two and kind of also just comes back to like conversation. Like this is a conversation that never ends. It's very circular. Keep doing it. okay. So. I wanted to ask just a couple more things, you described just now and, and I think at the very end of your book, I was wondering the entire time, I'm like, I wonder what kind of household Allison has,you used the word balanced, uh, towards the end of your book and you describe your partnership as as balanced.
[01:24:31] Adam Fishman: does that mean, are the two of you striving for a balanced cognitive load household?
[01:24:36] Allison Daminger: We are. Yeah, I mean, I think that. Both of us have big career ambitions. Both of us also really care a lot about how we show up for each other and for our daughter. I have nothing against folks who decide to specialize, but for us, like we both really want to be kind of equally invested in both domains and. We have, realized that, you know, that means that we have to be thoughtful about how we're dividing both the cognitive and the physical labor, and it's a constant work in progress. I think, the research would support me that, the transition to parenthood is, is a tough time for a lot of couples.
[01:25:13] Allison Daminger: It's a time when gender inequalities tend to widen.
[01:25:17] Allison Daminger: And so I think we're in a moment where we're really sort of like trying to swim upstream. I think we're doing a pretty good job. We just sat down last weekend and kind of revisited our division of labor and talked about how we were each feeling and, you know, whether we wanted to shift things and what were we gonna do with all these new responsibilities that are coming up.
[01:25:34] Allison Daminger: it kind of goes back to what I said a minute ago, that it's, it's not set it and forget it. This is a conversation that we have pretty often. I think both of us feel. Empowered to speak up when it's not working for us.
[01:25:47] Allison Daminger: You know, my husband said something, we had been sort of trading off on when we got to sleep in, and then he was like, okay, the way that we're doing this is no longer working.
[01:25:55] Allison Daminger: Right. And it was sort of, okay, how can we revisit it? What are your needs? What are my needs? You know, how can we be creative about it? And so it's something that I think both of us have to, trust that, you know, our needs are important to the other, and that no one's needs are, you know, going to automatically take precedence.
[01:26:12] Allison Daminger: It's gonna be a conversation. And, and how do we, make it sustainable and pleasant for both of
[01:26:18] Adam Fishman: Yeah, you went through a bit of a recognition and re-imagining step there. Uh, I love that. Okay. I could talk to you for probably 10 hours as I mentioned before, but I do have to let you get back to your life. Um, and so I wanted to ask in parting, before lightning round, how can people follow along or be helpful to you, in your journey, your research, or anything?
[01:26:42] Allison Daminger: the best way to, uh, kind of follow along is on my website, allisondaminger.com. You can learn more about my research, you can sign up for my Substack newsletter where I write about many of these issues. that's one thing. you can buy the book, What's On Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life.
[01:26:59] Adam Fishman: Got it right here.
[01:27:00] Allison Daminger: there it is. Yep. then the third thing that I, I'll just put out to your, uh, listenership is. I am fascinated by the way that AI is potentially changing, you know, family dynamics. I hear from a lot of, entrepreneurs and builders who are, you know, building these, these fam tech products.
[01:27:21] Allison Daminger: and I really want to study them.
[01:27:23] Allison Daminger: I'm, I'm very curious about, well, how are people using them? the mental load in households? Can they be tools for reallocating it more equitably? And so if there's anyone listening who's like, oh, I have some data, or I have a way that, you might be able to study it, that's, that's something that I'm looking to do in the future.
[01:27:40] Adam Fishman: Awesome. I love that. and I've got some people that I can introduce you to probably. So, cool. Are you ready for lightning round?
[01:27:48] Allison Daminger: Yes.
[01:27:49] Adam Fishman: Okay. here we go. What is the most indispensable parenting product you've ever purchased?
[01:27:56] Allison Daminger: that would be our love to dream swaddle. that was the only thing that got my daughter to sleep in the first few months.
[01:28:03] Adam Fishman: Love a good swaddle. I know the feeling. what is the most useless parenting product you've ever purchased or was purchased for you?
[01:28:10] Allison Daminger: my husband actually found a giant swing on the street, and up about half our living room, but our daughter only lasts five minutes in it.
[01:28:21] Adam Fishman: Yep.
[01:28:21] Allison Daminger: of, you know, square footage to to use ratio is, is quite poor.
[01:28:26] Adam Fishman: it's probably going back out on the street sometime soon. Okay. This may be a better question for Eric, but, true or false, there's only one correct way to load a dishwasher.
[01:28:36] Allison Daminger: I say false. There are multiple correct ways, but some are more correct than others.
[01:28:41] Adam Fishman: Okay. Uh, what is your signature mom Superpower.
[01:28:46] Allison Daminger: I think I'm really good at calming our daughter when she is really upset.
[01:28:52] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[01:28:53] Allison Daminger: she recently had some, some vaccines
[01:28:55] Adam Fishman: Oh,
[01:28:56] Allison Daminger: out and, you know, those are the moments when I'm like, I just feel like I can connect with you and, help soothe you in those
[01:29:01] Adam Fishman: oh, that's, that's nice. And man, yeah, the six month old vaccines not fun for anyone. what is your least favorite parenting task?
[01:29:10] Allison Daminger: middle of the night wake ups.
[01:29:12] Adam Fishman: Woo. Brutal. Yes. Which is the crazier block of time in your house. 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM or 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
[01:29:20] Allison Daminger: Usually 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM Especially now that she's eating solids that
[01:29:24] Adam Fishman: Oh
[01:29:25] Allison Daminger: you know, opened up some new, uh, cleaning tasks,
[01:29:28] Adam Fishman: yeah. She's eating and painting with solids. so she cannot talk yet, but when you're six month old is old enough to talk, what is one word that you think she would use to describe you?
[01:29:38] Allison Daminger: Silly.
[01:29:38] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is your favorite kid's movie?
[01:29:43] Allison Daminger: Oh, I love a good Disney classic. I feel like I grew up on the Disney princesses, so, let's say a Little Mermaid.
[01:29:50] Adam Fishman: Oh, awesome. Uh, what nostalgic movie can you just not wait to force your daughter to watch when she's old enough?
[01:29:58] Allison Daminger: I think it probably same answer, right? those Disney classics that she's gonna reject because they're not bright and flashy
[01:30:05] Adam Fishman: Yes.
[01:30:05] Allison Daminger: know, up to, to standards. But I'm hopeful that she'll, she'll hear me out
[01:30:09] Adam Fishman: Okay. Final two questions. How long can a piece of food sit on the floor in your house and you will still eat it?
[01:30:17] Allison Daminger: 30 seconds.
[01:30:18] Adam Fishman: Okay. You do have a dog? I think so. Uh, as we heard in the
[01:30:22] Allison Daminger: doesn't get to that long.
[01:30:23] Adam Fishman: Right. Right. And then finally, what is your take on minivans?
[01:30:28] Allison Daminger: You know, I'm not a very good Parker and so I prefer my cars to be on the small side.
[01:30:34] Adam Fishman: Yep.
[01:30:35] Allison Daminger: so minivan for now, not on the the table.
[01:30:40] Adam Fishman: Alright. No minivan. Okay. Well Allison, thank you so much for taking all the time that you took today, uh, to join me. Thank you for writing this book and the years of research that went into it everyone should get the book and then subscribe to the Daminger Dispatch, which, uh, I am a huge fan of.
[01:30:57] Adam Fishman: It's awesome writing. So I wish you and your family all, the best and uh, all the best on your continued research as you go forward.
[01:31:06] Allison Daminger: you so much, Adam. This has been such a fun conversation and uh, I've loved connecting with you.
[01:31:11] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Allison Daminger.
[01:31:16] Adam Fishman: You can watch and subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse all my past episodes. Thanks for listening. See you next week.