You likely know this feeling. You feel it in your bones.

So what can we do about this exhaustion?

I’ll make a confession that feels strange to say, but I know is important: Once a week, I stay in bed for a late morning. Not on the weekends—those are typically filled with kids waking up too early and starting dance parties. But during the week, I give myself permission to rest. It’s hard to do, especially for someone like me, who was trained in the corporate world where productivity is the gold standard.

Hustle culture teaches us that if we’re resting, we’re ‘lazy’ or ‘underperforming.’ We’re told to maximize every hour of the day, become more efficient, and pack our mornings with multiple habits to ‘win.’

Maximize all hours of your day, productivity experts shout.

Increase your efficiency and output, systems experts tell us.

If you’re not doing 5 things in your morning routine, are you even winning?

I learned, painfully, that if you push all the time, your body will demand rest. Constantly pushing ourselves leads to burnout, illness, exhaustion, and apathy. At some point, more coffee, cold plunges, habits, or routines won’t repair the 100+ hour work weeks that people do trying to balance parenting, care taking, life, and work.

The solution is to carve out rest in more unusual ways.

Good rest is the unlock to real productivity.

Our culture doesn’t prioritize rest. It asks people to push harder, and then replaces people when they burn out. In today’s world, prioritizing rest is a radical act.

The biggest fallacy of rest is the idea that it will happen later. Only after you finish this big project will you take a vacation. The problem with this thinking is that most of the time it doesn’t work. There’s always another project or deadline. When you finally get that big break or vacation, often people get sick — it’s shown that when people push themselves too hard for too long, their bodies collapse afterwards.

Rest needs to happen every day. It’s like earning money: sure, it’s nice to think about winning the lottery, but it’s almost always a better strategy to set up an automatic savings that happens in small, regular amounts.

This is where micro-rest comes in.

Micro-rest is the small, daily practices that help us recover and sustain ourselves over the long term. These practices don’t require big chunks of time, but they add up to better long-term wellness and productivity. What does micro-rest look like?

• Stretching after back-to-back meetings

• Taking a slow morning once a week

• Doing deep exhales and stretching your eyes every couple of hours

• Setting a timer to roll your shoulders back twice a day

• Doing a quick gratitude journal in the morning

• Pausing in your car for a few minutes of silence before or after meetings

• Taking a social media or news break for the day

• Enjoying a leisurely lunch

• No-meeting Mondays

The key to micro-rest is that it’s small enough to start today. It’s the kind of rest you can stack with other habits—like stretching while waiting for your coffee to brew. Over time, these practices help you feel better immediately and leave you less exhausted at the end of the day.

The mindset shift that need to happen

The hardest part of building this practice is breaking the cycle of constant productivity. When you're in "hustle mode," the brain tells you to keep going—"Just one more thing!" But the art of micro-rest is learning to stop, even for a moment. It’s about developing the muscle of pausing and checking in with your body before pushing forward.

Constant productivity is like an invisible “Dopamine Stairmaster” that gets a reward for checking things off the list. This monster tells you not to stop. It’s this moment, when you’re in the middle of the push, that you learn to pause and say, right now, let’s take two deep breathes. Let me check in with my body. This is the key practice. For many, this “rest muscle” is atrophied and out of practice.

This isn’t easy. The first 30 days are the hardest, but micro-rest becomes more natural over time. You’ll begin to notice that these small shifts add energy back into your life, instead of draining it.

Every time you push harder, you also need to rest.

• It means unpacking the scripts that we’ve been sold about hustle culture, working overtime, and pushing harder at all costs.

• It means testing and iterating to find the ways that we can rest effectively so that our capacity actually improves.

• It also means understanding the long game, and being honest about the real consequences are when you force yourself into overdrive for too long.

Tiny micro-shifts that add up

We are humans, not machines. Rest is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. And it’s not just for founders, entrepreneurs, or high-powered execs—it’s for everyone. Parents, caregivers, and those juggling multiple roles need to build rest into their lives as a non-negotiable practice.

For me, it’s about taking one midweek morning to rest and reset. After getting the kids off to school, I jump back into bed, sip tea, and relax. It’s a simple act, but it’s my way of resisting the pressure to constantly push. Rest doesn’t have to be a luxury reserved for vacations. Through tiny—sometimes rebellious—acts, we can make it part of our daily lives.

How do you carve out moments of rest in your own schedule? What are your favorite downtime practices, especially if they go against conventional wisdom? I'd love to hear how you incorporate rest and recovery into your daily life.

— Sarah K Peck
CEO & Founder

To read more about the seven types of rest we need, and why social time, creative time, and community activities matter, check out The Seven Types of Rest We Need →

👋 I’m Sarah K Peck and I’m the founder of Startup Parent, where we think about building businesses, lives, and families differently than the norm. My motto? We don’t have to do things the way they’ve always been done. Join me if you want to imagine (and build!) better futures for work, life, and parenting — I'm on LinkedIn, Instagram, Threads, and BlueSky.

​

✍️ Essays, stories and insights on parenting and life on Substack​

👾 Founders with Kids — We help tired parents make friends. Apply here​

💜 The Wise Women’s Council, our leadership incubator​

🎧 The Startup Parent Podcast, listen everywhere.​
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As a mother who loves her kids and her career, she points out how there are obvious answers …

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I couldn’t tell you what someone like Esther was doing at this awful conference, but I’m thrilled she was because now I get to tell you this story.

At the end of her round table chat, one guy raised his hand to ask how he could be a better partner to his pregnant wife given that her “brain was changing and she had all these hormones controlling her. And she gets… you know.”

Oh boy.

Suppressing my inclination to scream at the top of my lungs, I let Esther handle this one. Also, I wasn’t allowed to “handle it” as I was not the speaker.

The eloquence with which Esther ripped this guy’s question to shreds made us all sit up a little taller in our seats. With dignity and grace, she said, “Listen, your wife’s brain is fine. She’s not broken. Use your empathy and perspective-taking skills. Ask her what she needs and she’ll tell you. Remember she’s pregnant, not an invalid. Her brain is working fine, in fact, it’s working overtime building a skeleton, muscles, organs, and a full. on. nervous. system. This is a dumb question.”

Okay fine, she did not say these things exactly, but it sure felt like she did. That was the essence.

The pièce de résistance was at the end when, in her signature nondescript accent, waving her hands, she asked, “What is this with you Americans and the ‘change your brain?’ you ask about.” It was as if she was posing an existential question for us to clarify for her as representatives of America.

(She used American similarly to how my immigrant family uses it: to mean, “You idiot.”)

Esther continued. I’m paraphrasing, but this is what I remember: “Everything changes your brain all the time. You look at a flower and your brain changes. You listen to me and your brain changes. Change isn’t negative, but you say it like it is. What do you think ‘change your brain‘ means’?”

Excellent question, Esther.

Her point was that we falsely equate “change” with bad.

Our brains are neuroplastic. It’s an asset, not a liability (See:  Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain ).

What Esther wasn’t saying, but I will, is that this kind of rhetoric (masquerading as “helpful”) is suppressing his wife. 

In psychologist Darcy Lockman’s book,  All the Rage, she interviews neuroscientist Lise Eliot about the least controversial topic in the world: gender and brain development. They talk about the whole “natural mothers” fallacy. Or is it a fallacy? That is the question.

I have been told by everyone in the world that motherhood comes naturally to women. My own mother regularly informs me that when she was in graduate school they taught her that a woman’s love is unconditional, but a man’s is conditional, and that that’s just science. Yikes. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Ooof.

My ex-father-in-law “warned” me that “the baby will come and you won’t notice anything else. You’ll see.” I don’t think he realized how much of his own experience he was revealing to me. I did see, I saw that he and everyone else were wrong and very very bad at what they called “science.” As well as seeming to know me.

Like most cis-het women, I was deluged before I could speak with all the ways in which I did not know anything about the world unless I was a mother. Self-actualization is only possible if you are a mother! Because until you are a mother, you don’t know who you are, what you want, what matters to you, what matters in life, and what it really is to love.

We love using “motherhood” as a way to disqualify other ways of being a woman or even being valid as a human.

You’re not a natural at parenting. You get good at it. You learn it. It is a learned skill.

Remember that time when I wrote about how psychology was founded on the denial of women’s experiences? This, my friends, is an extension of that.

Neuroscientist Eliot says it more eloquently on page 88 of All The Rage: 

“It’s bullshit. Our brains get good at whatever we’re faced with doing.”

As in, you’re not natural at parenting. You get good at it. You learn it. It is a learned skill. Read the book to find the overwhelming amount of data that supports this.

The people who want you to believe that motherhood comes naturally to women are the people who don’t want to do the work themselves.

The part that I found most astonishing, namely because I did not know this part, was this bit of data from Bar-Ilan University in Israel (pages 90-91, All The Rage):

“The researchers concluded that the differences between the three groups were not so much a function of biological sex or genetic relatedness to the infant, but rather, of how much time the subjects had spent in intimate contact with their babies.

They write: ‘Assuming the role of a committed parent and engaging in active care of the young may trigger [a] global parental caregiving network in both men and women, in biological parents, and in those genetically unrelated to the child. Such findings are consistent with the hypothesis that human parenting may have evolved from an evolutionarily ancient alloparenting substrate that exists in all members of the species and can flexibly activate through responsive caregiving and commitment to children’s wellbeing.'”

Translation: There is no such thing as “natural” motherhood. If you spend more time with your kid, you get your alloparenting substrate activated. BOOM.

Bolding above is mine because 🤯 [head explodes]. It makes so much sense. Women died giving birth constantly. Men had to take over. So of course we have the same brain structures. They just needed to be activated and the mitigating factor was (drumroll please) time spent with child.

A natural mother is an invented idea.

A natural mother is an invented idea. The person who spends the most physical time with the kid gets the “instincts” (aka has the necessary brain circuitry turned on). Men are not inept, quite the contrary. They’re merely absent, thanks to the myth that sits next to the Natural Mother myth: Be a Good Provider.

The men are “providers” myth is as corrosive here, especially for the men who (almost all) cower under the weight of their responsibilities and later hold it against their wives and children, and so often maintain that “they are the real victims,” (see my piece on abuse).

Because in many ways they are victims. No one wins in this system.

When we say it is, “men’s duty to provide,” but narrowly define “provide” as money, house, and food, we rob men of the opportunity to connect with their kids and develop their “instincts” and we rob ourselves of the actual partnership mothers need.

I’m so sad for all the children who’ve grown up without a father providing actual co-parenting, co-partnering, and fathering.

Mothers don’t need to be provided for. They need partners.

Mother’s Day was this weekend and my feed is drowning in well-meaning attempts at “supporting” and “appreciating” mothers with things like candles with puns on them, sparkly jewelry, fluffy socks, and, for some reason, a very expensive sky-blue tea kettle.

Much like the confused boy at Dr. Esther Perel’s roundtable, these gifts are not how you support mothers. You support mothers by objecting to the systems that diminish their freedom to be a person in the world. And you reject the idea that “motherhood” is a woman’s thing.

Celebrate parenthood by actually supporting systems that support parenting.

• Push back on schools ending at 3PM.

• Stop valuing office “face time” over bedtime.

• Reject two paid weeks of mat leave and take 12 to 24.

• Campaign for paid family leave at your organization (hire Sarah she can help).

• Pass common sense gun laws (don’t )

• Don’t say “She’s not working,” when someone is on family leave. They are very much working. They are simply not getting paid.

Be the guy who calls out the school when they call his wife first because they assume he’s at work and she’s available. Shame your friends who openly cheat on their wives. Especially if those wives are sitting at home with their kids. Stop normalizing neglect from men and calling it “work.” And for the love of god if you’re a dude reading this and your wife sent a Mother’s Day gift to your mom – you can celebrate Mother’s Day this year by growing up.

Get yourself a copy of All The Rage . It’s a clickbaity title for a very serious book. Binge-listen to Where Should We Begin? and read Mating in Captivity (the TED talk gives you the gist ). Listen to Anne-Marie Slaughter.  Hire Sarah K Peck to talk to your organization about paid family leave. Ask yourself sincerely why it’s “bad” that your son is playing with a baby. For real. Why.

That’s what I would like for Mother’s Day.

No more candles. Some accountability and systemic reform, please.

And that tea kettle…

— Margo

Last week, we explored what it means when women ask women, “So…do you work?”

We geeked out on the devaluation of domestic labor. And asked, “WHY IS THIS QUESTION BEING ASKED?!” Especially from women to women. But also AT ALL!! WHYYYYYYYY.

We have answers and awesome discussions which you can find and join here.

Today, we’re going to do an activity. I want you to list out everything you do that you don’t consider work. And then we’ll go back and examine that list.

I want you to list out everything you do that you don’t consider work.

In the comments ⤵️

Sarah and I challenged the Startup Parent community to do this a few years ago and it was EYE OPENING 😳. If you’ve ever gotten to the end of your night, unable to form a sentence, but you think to yourself, “But I didn’t *DO* anything today?! Why am I SO EXHAUSTED?! What is wrong with me?!”

The answer is: it is everything you’re doing that you “don’t count” as labor but is labor. Those activities are sucking up your energy, resources, brain power, and patience.

Many parents are working the equivalent of 17 jobs and only counting the activities that provide financial income or a tangible outcome as “real work.” Domestic workers, spouses, parents, and undocumented workers are doing the invisible labor that the world gaslights them into thinking is unimportant, “natural so they want to be doing it, she loves it! Trust me!” or not valuable.

I’d like to change that.

Starting by making the “invisible” visible.

So we’re gonna make a list. We started making one in 2022 and I’d like you to add your list in the comments. Below, please find the list the Startup Parent community put together when we were still in the thick of COVID.

Add yours below.

“I feel so seen with all of these responses.” - A.J., 2022. US TOO.

What Things Do You Do Regularly That Don’t Count As “Work”?

Here are the answers from 2022, please add yours in the comments below.

• Drive the child to daycare or school before work

• Pick up the children at 3 PM (or pay extra to pick them up at 6 PM)

• Maintain relationships with parents, in-laws, siblings, and cousins (which involves time, effort, and energy – texting, calling, FTing, coordinating trips + travel) 

• Keeping track of and enforcing the child’s schedule (when is bedtime, when school starts, when it’s time to take a bath, when it’s time to go to soccer practice, to nap, or to leave to attend the tennis tournament)

• Holiday gifts (choose + wrap): Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, Grandparent’s Day and other misc gift-giving holidays

• Birthday Gifts for your spouse, cousins, grandparents, your children, children’s friends, aunts, uncles, mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother and sisters-in-law (and their spouses) (and their children)….this list gets LOOONG.

• Misc Gifting: Teacher appreciation gifts, anniversary gifts, baby showers, weddings, bridal showers, employee gifts, and hostess gifts (when you go to someone’s house for dinner, remembering to bring something or if you’re attending something and expected to gift your host like for a baby shower)

• Acknowledge receipt of gifts and express the appropriate level of gratitude for receiving gifts (thank you cards or texts or video or a FT) 

• Choosing schools (visiting schools during working hours – missing anywhere from 4-5 workdays)

• Keeping a mental tally of which kids prefer which snacks in your household (ensuring you have adequate amounts of said preferred snacks and maintaining a consistent inventory)

• Knowledge of when and where soccer practice is + being responsible for transporting soccer kid to soccer practice + being responsible for figuring out what to do with other kids while the soccer one is at soccer practice

  • *Replace soccer with softball, baseball, basketball, dance, field hockey, and other sports designed to turn you into a professional Uber Driver and coordinator of chaos (where your cleats?! What do you mean they don’t fit?)

• Knowledge + awareness of when kid(s) needs a new winter coat and noticing in August. Researching and forecasting are necessary here for determining what freaking size this constantly growing human will be in 4 months

  • Switching out the kid’s clothes (and shoes) when they get to a bigger size and figuring out if they need anything once in that new size

  • Managing all of the things required for seasonal changes in our household. From switching out the clothes in the kid’s closet to be seasonally appropriate to make sure we have enough air filters for fire season NOW before everything is sold out because the fires are here.

• Schedule, coordinate, and attend playdates, birthday parties, dances, and other social activities kids cannot do on their own yet

• Cleaning the house (bathroom (monthly) kitchen (daily), make beds, etc). Even with a housekeeper or cleaning service if you have one, YOU’RE STILL ALWAYS PICKING STUFF UP

• Laundry laundry laundry laundry laundry

• Researching items necessary to own at each developmental stage, then determining which to purchase. Determining which are necessary and which are just “nice to have” ex: bottles, sippy cups, Tupperware, utensils, straws, and stroller (and purchasing new ones as the child(ren) reach new developmental stages) + toys + games + books + activities + responsibility charts +AND MORE.

• Researching how to not destroy your kid: how much TV or screen time are they allowed? How much can you get away with before others judge you? When do you get them their own iPad? Is that rash something to worry about or can you just wait it out? How many days is TOO many days without a bath? Can you live without brushing your kid’s hair? How do you get playdough out of hair and carpets? What happens if/when they swallow playdough? When do you teach them how to put their stuff away? When to discipline and when to let it go? What playpens won’t kill your kid? What toys have (not) been recalled?

• Being available to leave work at any moment if your kid gets sick or in trouble and needs to be picked up 

• Being available to leave work at any moment the school decides they should have a PTO meeting or school show at 8AM 9AM 10AM 11AM or literally any time during working hours

• Remembering which days are show-and-tell, ballet, baseball, or swim and making sure the kid has all the items for that activity 

• Signing your kid up for extracurriculars (as well as school) by the deadline – schlepping them to-and-from the activity and ensuring they have all the appropriate items to participate 

• PAPERWORK. WHY. IS. THERE. SO. MUCH. GD. PAPERWORK.

• Feeding your child(ren) breakfast, lunch, dinner, and endless snacks. Trying to find clever ways to encourage your kid to eat something that doesn’t cause heart disease and tooth decay but mostly just wanting them to eat…anything. 

• Getting your kid(s) out of the house involves changing underwear, putting on pants, a shirt, socks, shoes, and a jacket; brushing teeth (and sometimes hair), eating breakfast, and making sure you have the right stuffies and snacks

• Homework: enforcing structure around doing homework, being available to help with homework, realizing you don’t know how to do long division so now YOU have your own freaking homework

• Enforcing bedtime + creating a consistent and stable bedtime routine

• Reading with the kid every night

• Feeling guilty for how you didn’t read with your kid last night or the night before or….you’re never reading with your kid so now you have to expend energy LYING about it so the teacher and other moms don’t shame you.

• Managing YOUR emotions so you can help your kid navigate THEIR big feelings

• Anger management, conflict resolution, and communication skills

• Noticing if (and when) your kid is upset, happy, sad, shy, outgoing, etc

• Having awareness about who your child is, what they need/want, and how to adjust your parenting to meet their personality, needs, and wants

  • Do you enforce a boundary now or do you let this go?

  • What hill do we die on?

  • Is enforcing this lesson worth the next 2 hours being a complete disaster inside this grocery store?

  • Am I making a decision that’s best for my kid or am I thinking about what that woman at the park would think of me right now?

• Nothing your kids idiosyncrasies and adjust your approach to them accordingly (when you have more than one, this item exponentially explodes in effort of noticing)

• Managing your temper when they throw their shoe at you while you’re driving (OR you secretly think it’s funny, but know it cannot happen again so you have to modulate your tone to communicate this behavior is unacceptable and dangerous but also you’re holding back laughing)

• Teaching your kid life skills for being a decent human, like sharing, being polite, and not throwing shoes at people

• Teaching your kid how to recognize the feeling that something is about to come out of them, then training them to run to the bathroom when they notice that feeling, and excrete whatever feels like it wants to come out in the potty (then, again, how to do this at night, at school, at a restaurant, at a friend’s house, at the movies, at the park, and practice 100000 times WITHOUT deploying shame)

• Resist the urge to punch a child, spouse, or wall

• Telling your boss, manager, clients, customers, and constituents that you need to leave a meeting/trip/dinner/work to pick up, have dinner with, or put to bed your kid – and endure the whispers and assumptions that you’re lazy, cutting corners, not “really” working, not working hard enough

• Endure well-meaning friends and family’s “advice” about what you could be doing differently or better because they’re “just trying to help, I’m not judging you, really”

• Maintain relationship(s) with your child(ren)’s friends’ parents (even if you don’t like them or have anything in common) so your kids can hang out with them 

• Teach and MODEL for your kid clear + direct communication, asking for what you need, identifying emotions, managing emotions healthily, metabolizing feelings, conflict resolution, and repair (even tho, who of us can do this as adults??)

• Teach and MODEL self-love, positive self-talk, and body positivity

• Repair. Repair. Repair. Repair. like when you invariably blow a gasket, you take responsibility for your behavior and apologize (for the behavior).

• Letting your kids have their own experience of the world even if it’s wildly different from yours or what you had in mind or what you “think they’d like” - letting them figure it out for themselves

• Teach and model being kind and not hating other groups that don’t look like you. Exposing them to different ways to being in the world (ex: buying books + toys that are representative, introducing media that is representative + inclusive, ensuring your kids are socializing with kids who don’t look like them or come from different family structures or backgrounds, races, religions, or countries; introduce your kids to foods, languages, or places that they may not recognize (eg: there is no “gross” food – only food you don’t like or do like) etc)

• Constantly scan for behaviors that might indicate something is wrong or deserves more attention or support (avoidant attachment, acting out, attention-seeking, anxious attachment, trouble reading, not meeting expected developmental milestones, punching, hitting, throwing, not socializing, inability to calm down, etc)

• Modeling respectful communication with your co-parent and partner

• Booking doctor’s appointments, attending doctor’s appointments (taking time off work, taking the kid out of school, taking them back to school)

• Keeping track of immunization records, sign-up sheets, deadlines, baseball Little League supply checklists, consent forms, credit card authorization forms 

• Knowing where my kid’s favorite blanket is at all times and making sure it gets washed occasionally

• Mentally knowing how much ketchup or flour or cereal or any other food we have at all times

• Making sure we schedule regular maintenance, inspections, and registration for our vehicles

• Knowing what is or isn’t needed at daycare daily (sidebar from Margo: THIS IS THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE with elementary school. I feel like I get more homework than my kid does. “Bring a white shirt on Friday! Don’t forget Tuesday is bring a photo of your dog from 1973 day! Canned Soup Drive ends on Wednesday, did you bring your soup cans in?”

• Household admin:

  • Being responsive to school requests

  • Filling out forms

  • Keeping track of the cat food

  • Making sure camp is registered for

  • Health forms are submitted

  • Buying birthday cards

  • Sending holiday cards to family

  • Making sure the COVID form and temp are taken each morning.

• Managing developmentally appropriate toys for the kids and holding perspective on what books send a good message and which perpetuate expired systems in subtle ways

• All of the food fussiness for my toddler and making sure we have variety to offer at any given meal

• Taking a message from daycare and translating it to the required household conversation (basically initiating everything)

• Ooh, now let’s add Covid on top of it…

  • Monitoring the school announcements for which kids have tested positive this past week and how close they are to your kids

  • Ordering masks and lanyards

  • Washing masks (we. are. constantly. washing masks!)

  • Ordering double-masks when the school required them, and then figuring out how to donate or discard the double-masks when we didn’t need them anymore

  • Finding the other half of the lanyard when it goes missing

  • Taking on the mental load of figuring out just how safe a social event is at any given point in time

  • Texting a health check to friends that we’re meeting up with, the emotional burden of asking the same / fear of it being too much

  • Taking temperatures

  • If temp is elevated, figuring out how to get a PCR test for kids, which also involves having a photo of your insurance card (front and back!) saved somewhere handy

  • Taking time off work to go get said Covid test and keeping the kids at home while you wait

  • Monitoring your email at 6am in the morning when the Covid test comes back, hopefully negative

  • Ordering rapid tests and having them handy when you need them

  • Finding, researching, coordinating, training, and paying childcare. One of the most difficult things about being a working parent is finding good childcare that works for your family.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

The more we see these things in black and white, the more, I hope, you will begin to give yourself and others credit for this labor. Instead of saying, “Well it’s just what you do,” “it’s no big deal.”

It is, in fact, a very big deal.

One you should be giving yourself more credit for.

A labor of love is still labor. And should be regarded as such. And IMO compensated for but that’s for another essay.

A labor of love is still labor.

So. Please, tell us: What are things you do that the world does not consider work, but expects parents to do (specifically women) without complaint or compensation?

For more cultural diatribes from , head to www.thatseemsimportant.com and get on her email list.

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here, back with your weekly dose of awesome insurrectionist delight.

[Reminder: I’m Sarah’s Friend, and I took over her Substack last year when she was out recovering from spine surgery.]

This week, I’m pulling a piece from the vault. It’s a piece I wrote in 2022 about what people mean when they ask if you work and why no dudes ever get asked this question.

ALSO, what the heck is supposed to be my answer?

Rhetorical. I have an answer, and I used it on my PCP who asked me if I worked with children when she saw I had the latest flu-de-jour. I said, “Yes, but unpaid.”

She did not laugh so she’s fired now.

Below is the full story of how a simple “just being polite” question turned into a social awakening for me. It is one thing to intellectually understand devaluing domestic labor. It’s another thing to actively participate in the devaluation, while elevating “not working for money” as a low-key status symbol of socioeconomic privilege.

[LOTS TO UNPACK THERE YALL]

I wanna hear your thoughts, but first, read the piece.

- Margo

Since we’re busy and clicking out is a lot of work, here’s the piece in full <3

When Other Women Ask Me “So, Do You Work?”— Here’s What I Need To Say

I remember where I was the first time it happened. We were in someone’s backyard. Our kids were playing together on swing sets and slides. We were engaged in small talk when she said it. I honestly think I froze in disbelief because it was 2021 and the last question I anticipated hearing was:

“So… do you work?”

My face looked like that emoji where your eyes are busting out of your head. The person asking me this was my age. She was my age! Once I got over the initial shock of impropriety, I became curious: What was she actually asking?

The next time someone popped the “do you work” question, I was prepared. This time the woman volunteered that she had three children and did not work herself, which is why she was asking. I looked at her sideways and began my inquisition.

[clears throat]

I asked her who keeps the mental tally of which kids prefer which snacks? Who knows when and where soccer practice is, and who transports the soccer kid to soccer practice? And who is responsible for figuring out what to do with the other two kids while the soccer one is at soccer practice?

I asked her who is aware of when kid #2 needs a new winter coat?

I asked who writes thank you cards, buys presents for birthdays, and keeps up with grandparents.

Who notices that kid #3 is afraid of rain and kid #1 is struggling with reading?

Who schedules doctor’s appointments (and who attends them)? Who RSVPs for playdates? Who notices when food is running low? Who keeps tabs on whether there is clean underwear in the closet and everyone has brushed their teeth?

In my experience, these tasks are rarely shared equitably between partners in homes that maintain a “traditional” structure, where one parent makes money and the other parent manages the domestic sphere. My suspicion was confirmed when this woman answered, “Me. I do all those things.”

“How is that not work?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“I mean, it is, but it’s not like I’m going out of the house and making money.”

“I’m not sure what that has to do with work,” I replied.

Devaluing domestic labor is an American cultural relic I naively thought only men did. But this question was coming from women my age with an alarming frequency that had me wondering what exactly was going on.

What do we mean when we ask other women if they are working?

Are women trying to find solidarity or belonging in finding other women who “aren’t working?” Are we asking about that person’s socioeconomic status? (Probably.) Do we think we’re being polite? Or (my personal suspicion) are we still living in a confusing and outdated view of what work is?

The Second Shift—the seminal book by Betty Friedan about all the extra unpaid work that women do in the domestic sphere—was published in 1989. Countless other books have demonstrated domestic labor is labor. Mental labor is labor. Emotional labor is labor. Psychological labor is labor. Relational labor is labor. These types of invisible and unpaid labors are well documented, proven, and acknowledged in the literature. But not, it seems, in the zeitgeist.

Which is a problem thanks to “white feminism,” the breed of feminism that suggested that women “be just like men.” Women have been trapped in this type of “equality” ever since. Instead of accounting for all of the invisible household labor and childcare that women do, women continue to measure their worth by metrics that do not apply to them or the type of work they do.

Domestic labor is labor.

What, I believe, was supposed to happen was we were going to rally for why women should be afforded the choice to pursue their lives as they wish, with the freedom like men to decide whether they will opt into domestic life or not. To be entitled to an education, a vote, rights to property, and the right to work.

But what actually happened— was a complete EFFING DISASTER. They put down what was traditionally women’s work and placed “paid work” (aka: men’s work) on a pedestal.

[ This is not to ignore the ongoing battle between “stay-at-home” moms and “career moms” for first place in the Best Type of Mom Competition. It’s to say that this is why the battle exists in the first place and it’s a profoundly stupid and dangerous battle. ]

While we’re fighting against each other, we are missing the bigger picture.

Paid work was seen as real work. Legitimate work. Fulfilling work. It’s right here in this sentence: Women should be able to do “more” with their lives than “just be a housewife and mother.”

Paid work was seen as real work. Legitimate work. Fulfilling work. It’s right here in this sentence: Women should be able to do “more” with their lives than “just be a housewife and mother.”

Therein lies the problem.

Whether you choose domestic labor or opt out of it, you are certainly not better than it. What white feminism failed to do that it should have was elevate the domestic sphere. In trying to “prove” women can “do anything men can do,” white feminism inadvertently promoted the very ideas it sought to dismantle.

In trying to “prove” women can “do anything men can do,” white feminism inadvertently promoted the very ideas it sought to dismantle.

There are very rarely people who don’t work. But there are an enormous number of us who aren’t paid for our work.

We see this effect in action today when we boast of girls who are into Legos and schools that have STEM programs. It is ok for “girls to be into boy things,” but it is not ok for boys to be into “girl things.” The second anyone socialized as a (cis het) boy begins to love musicals or wants to play with a kitchen set, we are “worried” about him. Boys are supposed to enjoy toys that are violent, traditional, and masculine—things like cars, trucks, guns, alligators, rocket ships, trains, and dinosaurs. They are NOT to debase themselves with things like dolls, unicorns, cooking, or cleaning.

This is not equity.

This is a division by sexes, with one sphere on a pedestal.

Until our children are shown that cooking, cleaning, and caregiving are on par with economic work, and respected as much, we are not fixing this problem. Boys who are not allowed to play house or with babies and dolls, grow up to be a parent who doesn’t either.

A boy who is mocked for cooking and cleaning grows up to be an adult who treats these things with contempt.

We cannot move forward if we continue to devalue what is traditionally considered women’s work and insist it is not work but “a labor of love” that a “good mother” does willingly and voluntarily, as penance for “being supported by my husband.”

That isn’t a partnership. That is extortion.

Even if you love what you do, and you feel fulfilled by it, it does not mean it should be invisible or free.

In 1870, the United States decided to shift our census from households to individuals. As part of this change, alongside the movement of men to work in industrialized factories, men’s (but not women’s) work was now tallied and accounted for—making the family’s money now his money alone. By 1900, women and children were newly classified as “dependents.”

When the system of GDP was created, the men in charge debated including women’s labor and work. They determined it was “too hard” to account for the work of the home, and purposefully excluded it from our economic tally. As a result, virtually all of women’s work was dismissed as irrelevant and made invisible [See: Ann Crittenden’s work and every other historian on this topic].

The primary units of our economy are skilled, productive workers—precisely the things that caretaking creates, because children become these skilled workers when parents bring them into society. As it stands, women create the backbone of the economy, raise them, perform labor for decades, and are never compensated.

To reiterate: our GDP is a made-up number to estimate how much we work as a nation. From the beginning, we willingly ignored the work of the home and of raising children. This was not an accident or an oversight. For more on this, read the incredible book by Ann Crittenden: The Price of Motherhood.

Saying “I don’t work,” isn’t accurate. It’s a form of cultural gaslighting.

Until we treat domestic labor with the same reverence as we do “real work” we will remain in this cultural culture-de-sac we inherited from our predecessors. For as long as we believe mental, emotional, relational, familial, and psychological work is not “real work,” we will continue to perpetuate the very status quo we seek to dismantle.

Until we treat domestic labor with the same reverence as we do “real work” we will remain in this cultural culture-de-sac we inherited from our predecessors.

So, to the next person who asks you if you work - please hand them this essay. Remind them that there are very rarely people who don’t work.

But there are an enormous number of us who aren’t paid for doing our work.

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This piece was originally published on Startup Parent.

For more cultural diatribes from , head to www.thatseemsimportant.com and get on her email list.

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This belief is deeply-rooted in internal systems, too. I hear mothers that say “As a working parent, I feel like I’m never around,” and “Oh, I don’t want to have someone else raise my kids,” or “My kid has the rest of her life to be in school, shouldn’t they they spend more time playing at home?”

There are so many mothers made to feel guilty for getting basic childcare support.

I’m going to skip past the problematic roots of these statements (I’ll rant more on that later), and instead start with something that I love, and that’s math.

Math? Yes. Stay with me. In this piece we’ll look at three components of a parent’s life that don’t add up:

1. The actual week itself

2. The length of a weekend, and

3. The reality of school schedules.

Let’s do some parenting math.

There are 168 hours in a week.

If I put my kid in daycare or any other form of childcare from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on weekdays, they’re in childcare forty hours a week.

We’re going to use 40 hours as a baseline for most of the following scenarios, but swap in your scenario, whether it’s sixty hours or twenty hours.

However many hours you’ve signed up for childcare support—I’m going to use 40—the first thing to remember is that this number only happens on a mythical perfect week.

These forty hours happen only if (iff or ↔ for my math geeks) childcare is open every single day of every week of the year. PSA to anyone thinking of having kids: daycares are not open every weekday, for some centers it’s not even close—get the school calendar when you tour new spaces. You’ll get 40 hours of coverage only on weeks when they don’t close early, and only during weeks when the kid is not sick.

Given the fact that kids catch every cold known to humans (and then some), they’re probably in daycare an average of 30 hours a week, practically speaking. This accounts for the weeks when you get zero hours of coverage because your kid is home for five days straight for the flu, or hand-foot-mouth disease, or norovirus, or any other germ. (The frustrating part of this is that it’s not terribly avoidable—it’s either preschool or school, but living in society as it is today comes with a lot of germs.)

But let’s go with the perfect number—40 hours of childcare—to start. Even in the perfect world where they attend every single hard-earned day of beloved forty-plus hours of childcare support, there are still one hundred and twenty-three hours remaining in the week.

If my kids go to childcare 40 hours a week, that means I’m still with my children 128 hours of the week.

This is the math that doesn’t add up. For all the shame and guilt parents (mostly mothers) are given about not spending time with their kids, there are plenty of hours in the week that they are caring for kids. A whopping hundred hours every week, to be specific. Adjust this number as you need if you’re pulling longer work hours or if you’re using less coverage to fit your life.

“But Sarah, they spend most of that time sleeping—that doesn’t count as quality time,” some parents might object.

Sure, a lot of that time is for sleeping. Let’s say the kid sleeps 11 hours a night (oh what a gift, kid, if you sleep 11 straight hours for me). That’s 77 hours of sleep time. If we somehow don’t “count” the sleep hours as time with our kids—then even subtracting sleep time, there are still 51 hours a week with your child while they are awake (168-40-77=51).

But why isn’t sleep quality time? You don’t leave your kid when they’re sleeping. It’s not like you put the kids to bed and suddenly you get to jet off to Las Vegas and frolic around unfettered for eleven hours and then pop back in at the moment they’re going to wake up. This is not “free time” by any stretch of the imagination.

This also assumes that any parenting dealing with night wakings, nighttime nursing, potty training, bad dreams, cuddles, or sickness in the night doesn’t count that as quality time being there for your kiddo. In my book, having the security of someone around at night is a big deal. Who else is responding when the monsters come?

In fact, you have multiple jobs to do during those night hours: your job is also to figure out how to get the grown-ups enough sleep while providing space for your kids to get sleep and comfort, too. That’s a lot of work.

If I was a lawyer and I told you I worked 123 hours a week, you’d be flat-out impressed. You might even tell me I work too much.

But PARENTS? We tell parents that no matter how much time they dedicate, they’re not spending enough time with their kids.

Despite the fact that we live in a country with zero support for having children, despite the fact that parents, majority mothers, are staying home 120+ hours a week holed up with their children, despite the fact that most social programs like community childcare and library services disappeared in the pandemic, despite the fact that motherhood is one of “the hardest jobs in the world,” (another cliche that’s used as a cultural excuse to turn a blind eye to the enormous amounts of work done by parents), we still tell parents they should want to stay home with their children 24/7.

If a mother dares to get any form of structural childcare support—especially if she makes it visible, or speaks of said childcare—we tell her it’s basically a personal failure of a lack of love and dedication to her children.

By “zero support,” all I mean is that this country offers no universal paid leave, that most women return to work still bleeding, and that there are no government-supported childcare options until kid turn five—think of old Uncle Sam tossing you a kid and cackling, “you’re on your own, kid, until you turn five and we finally recognize you, but not your parent, as an actual person!”

A brief rant on zero support, aka, the dollars and cents of motherhood.

Let’s look a little more closely at the lack of social support and what it costs parents, mothers specifically. Ann Crittenden’s book The Price Of Motherhood lays much of this out, but when women become mothers in a society that offers zero support, it also costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars in many different ways.

In addition to the immediate failures of what’s known as “caretaking infrastructure,” or basic social support for bringing new people into our society during the acute periods of birth, death, and sickness, there are also the massive economic losses that women suffer by becoming parents.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

1. Pregnant people who get discriminated against and fired for being pregnant, resulting in lost immediate wages and income from lost jobs,

2. Mothers who are penalized for having kids both in being rejected during the hiring process and refused promotions at work (while some fathers get a “fatherhood bonus,” for the same children),

3. The massive wage gap between working moms and working dads—the majority of the gender pay gap is actually in large part between women who have kids and women who don’t have kids, resulting in an average of $17,000 in lost wages for mothers every year. This is way worse for Black moms, non-white mothers, and single mothers. (Fatherhood can actually boost men’s earnings, by comparison.)

4. Mothers who then suffer long-term career losses for “taking time away from work,” to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost career earnings in a lifetime. When a woman has one child, her lifetime earnings are 28% less than childfree women; each additional child reduces lifetime earnings by another 3%.

5. Plus, none of the statements above consider the costs incurred for actually supporting the children.

6. Then, to rub salt in the wound, there are more older women are in poverty precisely because they don’t get to accrue social security points when they’re home parenting because “they’re not working,” and so those years are docked from our system of support for old age—only people who do “real work” will receive benefits from the government in the narrowest eyes of economists. Women who have one child receive 16 percent less in social security benefits (with the exception of those eligible for the social security spousal benefit, which women are much less likely to receive today).

We can go deeper into this, but when our culture says that you should “stay at home with your kids,” because it’s “what’s best for everyone,” because it’s what “superhero moms” do—but you live in a country with zero support for working mothers, it’s important to know all of the costs involved.

This country benefits from having mothers at home, unpaid, profiting off of your free parental labor—and then it’s actually going to deduct benefits from you in the future, too. You won’t get basic government support systems that are readily available in every other wealthy country in the world, you’ll lose jobs and money, and it’ll dock your social security benefits in old age.

This is why telling parents they should “just spend more time with their kids” and “not miss milestones,” and “savor it while it lasts,” is so deeply problematic.

When parents work 100+ hour weeks, people turn around and tell them that they’re not spending enough time with their kids.

The culture we’re swimming in likes to tell parents that they’re not dedicated enough. That you should be sure to stay home with your kids if you have them. That you shouldn’t have had kids if you were going to just “leave them with someone else.” That working—if you’re a mom—is selfish.

We tell parents that leaving them in daycare is BAD. (Great daycares can be wonderful, finding great daycares can be incredibly hard.) We load mothers up with guilt and shame by telling them they’re bad moms for wanting to do anything else within the 168 hours of the week. The bad mom trope is a tool used to keep mothers in line.

Now, if you’re a parent that stays home with your kids and you love it, and you chose it, and you have a set-up that works for you (there are so many amazing at-home parents that take their kiddos to music class and library sessions and out to the playgrounds and the parks), I want to make sure to say under no uncertain terms that you are a wonderful parent.

This is not an essay to shame at-home parents. You’re doing an extraordinary job, you work your buns off, and I happen to think that you should be recognized, celebrated, and paid for the work that you do. The math applies to everyone who has kids and caretaking duties: the week has a LOT of hours in it, and you deserve support, rest, and time off just like anyone else. We are on the same team.

In fact, if you’re an at-home parent and you feel like no one sees how much work you do, and you feel like you need more help from a spouse or friends or babysitters, I hope this essay supports you in making the case for taking a break on the weekend and in the evenings if you’re able to.

{To listen to Kathleen Shannon and I talk about how much we love daycare, and how important it is for our mental health and wellbeing, listen to Episode #051 of the Startup Parent Podcast.}

Getting childcare support and taking breaks are reasonable requests in the face of an enormous job.

To all the moms out there patching together work in between naps and half-time childcare and partial babysitters because people are “should-ing” all over you about being home with your kids, if you are miserable and exhausted and in need of time for yourself, that is a reasonable ask.

It is not unreasonable to need a break if you’re doing 128 hours of parenting and 40 hours of working in any given week. Any other job, we’d call this a human rights violation.

But for mothers, we gloss over it by tossing words like “superhero” over to her as a consolation prize, reminding her that motherhood should only ever be a labor of love, warping our stories around motherhood to describe it as not labor at all, and then telling women that they don’t deserve recognition or support because “um, actually you chose this.”

[Nevermind the fact that 30% of pregnancies are unplanned, or that abortion rights are being stripped away from people so fast that the number of people who don’t want to be parents and have to be is about to skyrocket. Read Abortion, Every Day by Jessica Valenti for news on abortion rights and access.]

I want to write this on t-shirts and post a sign outside my office that reads:

I WILL CLAW MY HANDS TO 40 HOURS OF SUPPORT EACH WEEK OF MY CHILDREN’S LIFE AND I WILL LOVE THEM EVEN MORE BECAUSE OF IT.

Okay. What’s the next math problem?

The next math puzzle: that thing we call the weekend

Do you know how many hours are in a weekend?

From five o’clock on Friday afternoon until 9 o’clock on Monday morning there are 64 hours in between. That is sixty-four intense hours of parental work and house work and minivan driving and nap coaxing for any parent with small children. Multiple small children increases the complexity level of the game.

There are 64 hours in a weekend.

Any job that’s 64 hours would also be seen as an achievement in our productivity-oriented culture. But not parenting.

When I put this together, it became abundantly clear to me personally that I would need three to six hours of babysitting and alone time on the weekend to not be a complete disaster come Monday morning. I need these hours to take a brief break in the form of a walk, to throw some heavy weights around at the gym, and to slowly re-assemble my brain so that I can hang on to my own sense of self.

These weekend support hours don’t spontaneously arise. This is also where parenting gets really personal and individual. As someone who interviews parents for a living and builds community for working parents, I know how different the lives of families can be.

Some folks have kids that nap for four hours on the weekends until they are seven years old (BLESS THOSE KIDS), some people have youthful grandparents with a spring in their step that happen to live around the corner and take the children for weekly overnights (These unicorn grandparents do exist, I’ve heard!), and some folks have set up systems where they share housing with other single parents to help lessen the demand load of individual parenting.

Other parents have kids that may require more hands-on support. They may have special needs, they may have a spicier personality, they may be going through a challenging growth phase, and so much more. I know parents who have immunocompromised kids who can’t use germ-filled daycares, I know single moms, military moms, and parents who have lost their own parents struggle deeply with the weight of the work in front of them.

“I remember the first work meetings at our all-hands after we had kids,” one dad told me. “Everyone asked how the weekend went, and people talked about going on ski trips, reading books, working on building a house, and I tried my best to keep my face neutral. They had no idea what I’d been through the last 64 hours.”

When someone tells you that their day job is the easiest part of their lives, that’s saying something. Parents, you work a 64-hour job from the end of Friday to early morning Monday. That’s why it can feel like a relief to go back to work on Monday.

Alright, the last math puzzle: school math.

“When the kids go to school, I’ll finally be able to get some work done.” It sounds like a such a dreamy time, right?

There are 365 days in a year.

For any given school, there are approximately 180 school days in the calendar year. That means that there are 185 days when they are not in school.

Now, this isn’t quite the right math—we need to break it down by weekends and weekdays. In a calendar year with 365 days, approximately 260 of them are weekdays. Since school days land on weekdays, the difference is how many weekdays are not covered by school (260-180=80).

That leaves eighty (80!) weekdays when the kids just don’t go to school.

Because not only is school only part of the year, the days are not structured anything like a typical workday. School ends between 2pm-3:30pm most days, and then it also comes with half days (where your kids are sent home early, around 12pm).

In addition, there are super-early dismissals, late starts, and parent-teacher conference days. Just the other week, our kids had school from 8:30am-10:45am. The school day was over at 10:45am. This doesn’t include days missed for snow or rain or illness, either.

180 days of school is wonderful, but it does not line up with the American expectations of work in any way.

Here’s the takeaway:

• There are 168 hours in a week. Using 40-50 of them for childcare is a reasonable baseline, especially given the likelihood that you’re going to have 120+ hours of parenting work ahead of you each week.

• There are 64 hours in a parenting weekend. From Friday night to Monday morning is more than most full-time jobs. If you need support on the weekend, congratulations, you’re just like us.

• There are only 180 days of school in any calendar year. That includes half days.

Why do I bring all of this up?

The other day I was talking to a parent that was waxing nostalgic about how little time they’d have with their kid when they went to school. In my personal opinion (and everyone’s allowed to have a different opinion, you do you) there is actually plenty of time with the kiddos, it’s about how you spend the time. Moreover, it’s about not shaming parents for needing basic time off, and it’s about not buying into the massive guilt trip shoved on the shoulders of working mothers.

It’s not about reducing the number of days they’re in school or the number of hours in childcare. It’s about recognizing that the hours of school and daycare are actually severely limited, and the idea that sending them to after-care or childcare somehow makes you a bad parent is frankly ridiculous. In my experience, increasing my quality time is more important than increasing the quantity of time.

So when someone tells you that you’ll miss this time, or that you’re a “bad” parent for putting your kid in daycare, or they don’t understand why your kids keeping being out of school, send them this essay.

Getting full-time coverage (which is only 40 hours) for your children in a 168-hour week can be an immense challenge as it is. Explaining to people that you’ve started working 168 hours a week can feel impossible.

In spite of this, we gaslight parents and tell them that wanting work hours or personal time is “bad parenting” with the underlying assumption that if you wanted to have kids, you should devote all hours of all days exclusively to parenting. Telling people they should feel guilty for getting barebones support is just plain mean. We do this mostly to moms, if we’re being honest.

If you feel like you’re struggling and you need more childcare, you probably do.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

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