Rockway Institute In the News

When Mom and Dad Share It All By Lisa Belkin The New York Times Magazine June 15, 2008

(Esther Rothblum, PhD, and Nanette Gartrell, MD are members of the Rockway Institute Scientific Advisory Board. The following is an excerpt. For the complete story, click here.)

There is one pocket of American parenting in which equality is the norm or, at least, the mutually-agreed-upon goal. Same-sex couples cannot default to gender when deciding who does what at home. How these parents make their decisions, therefore, sheds some light on why married men and women act the way they do. They are the exceptions that both prove and challenge the rules.

“Heterosexual couples can learn from gay couples about sharing housework and child care,” says Esther D. Rothblum, a professor in the women’s studies department of San Diego State University whose comparative study of the relationships of 342 couples — lesbian, gay, heterosexual — was published in the journal Developmental Psychology in January. “They are good role models.”

One standard research questionnaire for looking at the division of household labor has been a survey known as “Who Does What?” created by Philip and Carolyn Cowan, both emeritus professors at U.C. Berkeley.

Respondents are asked to rate “How It Is Now” and “How I Would Like It to Be” in dozens of household and child-care tasks. Created with straight couples in mind, it was adapted by Charlotte Patterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, for lesbian parents. The study found little of the inequity that shows up when heterosexuals fill it out. (There has not been the same research attention paid to gay men raising children because only recently have gays begun adopting or hiring surrogates in large enough numbers to support a study.)

Which is not to say that lesbian mothers do not argue often over child care. But, says Dr. Nanette Gartrell, a psychiatrist with the University of California at San Francisco who has been studying lesbian families for 22 years, the arguments among those in her study sample tend to be the opposite of heterosexual couples’. While “straight parents get into the blame game about who is shirking responsibility,” she says, “lesbian moms bicker about not getting enough time with the kids,” a dynamic that can be intensified in families in which one of the women gives birth to the baby.

Harlyn Aizley, mother of a 6-year-old daughter, describes the moment that her then-partner, Faith Soloway, first took their newborn in her arms in the delivery room. “Just moments after I gave birth,” Aizley writes in the anthology “Confessions of the Other Mother: Nonbiological Lesbian Moms Tell All,” “Faith scooped up the baby, cooed into her squishy newborn face and said: ‘Hello there. I’m your mommy.’ I wanted to kill her. Faith, that is. I wanted to be Mommy, the only Mommy.”

Where a birth mother can feel possessive, the nonbiological mother (or co-mother, eliminating the negative vibe) can feel left out. For lesbian parents, as with straight biological parents, breast feeding means one partner has an additional, intimate, way to bond. In Gartrell’s study, 64 percent of co-mothers acknowledged feelings of jealousy and competitiveness around bonding and child-rearing issues. “Whenever [the child] is tired or sick or cranky, [the child] wants the breast,” said one co-mother, quoted by Gartrell. “I sometimes get upset that I can’t soothe [the child] in the same way that [the birth mother] can.”

Aizley says that while she felt possessive, her partner in fact felt excluded, referring often to “the holy trinity — baby, Mommy, breast.” As a result, she theorizes, Soloway became “more like a working dad, and I was the default mom.”

Most lesbian couples work hard to return to equal balance, however, Gartrell says. And how do they do that? More or less the way Marc and Amy Vachon did. They trade off breast and bottle feedings, share bathtime and bedtime rituals and talk out the conflicts. “We talked, and we talked, and we talked, and we talked,” says Dorea Vierling-Claassen of feeling like the odd-woman-out when her wife, Angela, was breast-feeding their daughter, who is almost 2 years old.

“We developed a wonky theory,” Dorea says of all that talking. “You need a rabid N.G.P. — nongestational parent. The N.G.P. has to push if you are going to get an equal relationship.”

All this deliberate sharing means that 75 percent of couples in Gartrell’s study considered themselves “co-parents.” The other 25 percent said they consider the birth mother the primary parent, but that the day-to-day tasks of child care are nonetheless equally shared.

Who does what, lesbian couples say, is instead determined by personality and logistics. “Gaeta tends to be the soccer mom, the coordinator of the sports, while I am the coordinator of music lessons,” says Dr. Audrey Koh, an ob-gyn in San Francisco whose sperm donor was a close relative of her partner, Gaeta, so that both mothers would share a genetic link to their two children. “Gaeta keeps mental track of the children’s shoe sizes, shops for their clothes,” Koh says, “but when they are sick in the middle of the night, they come for me.”

Lesbian couples also have a more equal division of housework. Rothblum found that it is only heterosexual mothers who do the lion’s share of housework for the family each week — between 11 and 20 hours for her survey respondents. Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.

Both partners in lesbian couples seem to make equal professional sacrifices in exchange for this equality. That does not mean there are no “traditional” relationships — Koh works long hours and earns more money as a doctor, while Gaeta, a naturalist for the local park district, earns less and is home more. Similarly, Aizley’s partner worked full time while she was home with their daughter for several years. (The couple split up about two years ago; Aizley has gone back to work and says Soloway is still very involved in their child’s life.) But more common is the couple in which both women “typically work shorter hours or have declined career opportunities so they can be more available at home,” Gartrell says.

Their work schedules look far more like those of Marc and Amy Vachon or Jessica DeGroot and Jeff Lutzner than like a “typical” family. Patterson found that while heterosexual fathers work an average of 47 hours for pay each week and heterosexual mothers work 24, the average for lesbian mothers, both biological and nonbiological, is about 35. Added together, both sets of families are working a total of slightly more or less than 70 hours; they just divide the work differently.

It is not clear, however, why lesbian couples split parenting more equally. “Is it because you take gender out of the equation or because women are better at sharing or because parents of the same gender see things more similarly?” Gartrell asks. “We don’t know,” and won’t know, she says, until there is equivalent data on gay men who become parents.

In the absence of statistics, however, Rothblum’s informed guess is that it is the last of these reasons. “If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, it’s really a miracle that hetero couples manage to ever make things work,” she says.