Home > Work > How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids
1 " I keep in mind what Ann Dunnewold told me: when a mother takes care of herself, children absorb important lessons. “Both boys and girls learn that mothers have needs, too, which is also very important if they have children of their own,” she says. If you must conquer guilt, she adds, tell yourself, ‘When I take time for myself, I come back and I’m more the mother I want to be. More patient. Less reactive. "
― Jancee Dunn , How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids
2 " doing everything ourselves isn’t heroic—it’s toxic. "
3 " Expressions of gratitude were the “most consistent significant predictor of marital quality. "
4 " all the ways you can say yes, and sprinkle them throughout your daily marital interactions: Yes, that’s a good idea. Yes, I’m totally on board. Yes, that looks fun. Couples who make a practice of doing this, he has said, are much more likely to go the distance. "
5 " fathers who regularly do household chores, according to a University of British Columbia study, have daughters who are more likely to aspire to less stereotypically feminine careers, instead voicing an ambition to be an astronaut, professional soccer player, or geologist. When girls see fathers pulling their own weight, they receive a direct message that they are not—and should not be—destined to shoulder all the tedious work by themselves. "
6 " I feel like he’s a guest at the hotel I’m running. I’m constantly taking a silent feminist stand to see if he’ll step up and lend a hand. The scorekeeping never ends. "
7 " I’m so tired of asking Andrew to do things around the house. No one has to ask me. You know why? Because I just get on with it. "
8 " One of the most insidious and probably profoundly dangerous coping mechanisms that we have absolutely glommed on to as a culture is staying busy,” she tells me. “And the whole unconscious idea behind it is ‘If I stay busy enough, I will never know the truth of how absolutely pissed off I am, how resentful I am, how exhausted I am from juggling everything. "
9 " Finally, many experts tell me that the best—some say only—way to teach one’s husband to learn the ropes and appreciate the volume of work you do is often the technique that is least used: leave the damn house. "
10 " an avalanche of research shows that happy marriages can boost your health and wellbeing. People in positive long-term relationships have lower rates of heart disease, live longer, and are less likely to develop cancer. "
11 " Verbally cherishing your wife with compliments, for example, is a good thing for her, good for Sylvie to see, and a good thing for Sylvie to expect from her guy or gal when she grows up. "
12 " If you’re in a constant state of Self-Righteous Angry Victim, you’re fucked. It’s over. You’re not a victim. So knock it off. "
13 " In his book, Payne advises cutting back on toys that are too complicated (elaborate, joyless “educational” toys), too fixed (ones that require zero imaginative input, such as a huge furnished plastic castle with a cast of thousands), or too commercial. The more a child can use their imagination with a toy—initiating the action, rather than having it prescribed for them—the better. "
14 " Clare Lyonette of the University of Warwick in the UK says that when she and her colleagues did a study on the division of labor between parents of young children, they discovered that while the women were frustrated at doing the bulk of the housework, they were mollified by their belief in what Lyonette calls “the myth of male incompetence”—that men were lousy at it, anyway. "
15 " a Pew Research Center survey found that sharing household chores ranked third in importance on a list of nine items associated with successful marriages. "
16 " Children benefit, too, in surprising ways: research has shown that when men share housework and childcare, their kids do better in school and are less likely to see a child psychiatrist or be put on behavioral medication. "
17 " girls with more involved dads develop greater self-esteem. "
18 " that couples often fall into a pattern of demand and retreat—most often, the woman demands and the man retreats. This dynamic has arisen, she says, because men have less to gain by changing their behavior, while women are more likely to want to alter the status quo—which means they also initiate more fights. "
19 " Even when they are asleep, infants as young as six months react negatively to angry, argumentative voices, as University of Oregon researchers discovered by measuring brain activity of babies in the presence of steadily rising voices. Babies raised by unhappily married parents have been shown to have a host of developmental problems, from delayed speech and potty training to a reduced ability to self-soothe. "
20 " They found that the day after a parental skirmish, most moms were able to compartmentalize and reported a quick recovery, and even an improved relationship with their child. But fathers had a much greater tendency to let the negative marital tension spill over into the rest of the family. Insidiously, the conflict from these parental fights would resurface on the first or even second day after the fight, in the form of friction between father and child. "
