Photograph: Leigh Prather/Alamy View image in fullscreen Photograph: Leigh Prather/Alamy Saved for Sunday Life and style Why millennial motherhood can feel like rearranging chairs on the Titanic Have you ever experienced the Sunday spirals, where you wake up and within a few minutes it feels like the day has already been sucked away by a whirl of responsibilities? In today’s newsletter Kate Lyons and I will talk about that feeling of overwhelm, and why the juggle feels particularly impossible for millennial mothers.
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View image in fullscreen Illustration: Millie Chesters/The Guardian Alyx: Between your piece this week and Georgie Dent’s National Press Club address , there’s a lot of talk about the pressure on parents. Why now? Kate: It’s a combination of a crazy economy, that means that families have to have two full-time incomes or very close to it in order to make things work, and not taking our foot off the pedal when it comes to domestic labour. For the first time in history, more Australian families have two full-time working parents than any other configuration. So there’s more paid work, but care work – the amount of time we spend parenting – has gone up too. We’ve dropped a little bit of housework, which is great. More power to that. But care work’s gone up and paid work’s gone up. And there’s not really space to pull back.
Alyx: Time use surveys suggest people spending more time parenting than they used to. And what I want to know is: what were parents doing before? Kate: I went to multiple experts to sense check this, asking: “This feels wrong. Is this wrong? Can it possibly be right that we’re doing more hours of parenting every day than parents did in the middle of last century?” But the numbers in Australia and across the world track upward from about the 80s. There’s been an increasing tendency towards intensive mothering – the idea that it requires more input from us if we want our kids to get the best out of the world. Whether that’s reading to your child, or talking with them, helping them to emotionally regulate, or being very present and intentional in the way you parent. There has also been a big increase in supervisory care. So in previous decades, it might have been that you’d say to your kid, “Walk home from school by yourself” or “Go play with your friends by the creek.” Now there’s more anxiety on a couple of levels. One is to do with stranger danger and the other is to do with road safety, and the way our cities are built, which makes it unsafe for kids to wander unsupervised. And that’s both good and bad. It’s obviously got that helicopter parent edge – the lack of resilience and freedom for exploration. And yet on the flipside, there are times when parental anxiety is appropriate. The good old days actually had a lot of dangers in them. I’m definitely not saying millennial parents have got this balance right, but I think that’s the space they’re playing in, and it does have an impact on how much time kids c…