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Divide and conquer at home
Dividing the roles
It is hard to excel at two things at once, so when the kids arrived, the couple decided it was time to divide and conquer. The wife, an entrepreneur who could have been raising venture funding and has invested in a ton of great companies, made career sacrifices and locked in on the household. The husband locked in on work.
What it allowed
That let him be overly obsessed with the work and then be present when he got home, without worrying about which preschool the kids attended or when music class was. The kids got all the love and attention they needed to thrive. It is a temporary sacrifice, and it has delivered great results.
Making it explicit
In his view, an arrangement like this only works when both people establish it clearly, because assuming it or hoping it will end up that way does not get there.
Why is doing two demanding things at once hard?
Switching between tasks carries a measurable cost. In a 2001 study, psychologists Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer, and Jeffrey Evans found that people lost time and accuracy each time they changed tasks. The loss grew when the tasks were complex or unfamiliar. They published the study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
How do economists explain splitting household roles?
Economist Gary Becker applied the idea of specialization to families in his 1981 book A Treatise on the Family. He argued that when one partner concentrates on household work and another on paid work, each builds skills that make the household more productive overall. Becker won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for extending economic analysis to areas of human behavior outside markets.
Why do unspoken expectations cause conflict?
Organizational scholar Denise Rousseau introduced the term psychological contract in the context of employment in a 1989 paper. It describes the beliefs each side holds about what they owe the other, even when nothing has been written or said. When two people hold different beliefs, each can feel that a promise has been broken without either having made one.