COVID: Time with small children? Priceless. Time away from small children? PRICELESS

By Steph Bridges

Since entering lockdown 39 days ago, I’ve read two really great articles about parenting in the time of coronavirus. Both were clear-eyed, funny and full of humility about the many, many things that have become messy, difficult, imperfect. Both were written by men.

I am not surprised.

There may be equally excellent articles out there written by women. I have not looked. In a house that, like one of these author’s, has “two kids, two jobs and zero childcare,” my media consumption is, at the moment, reactive. If someone texts me an article, I will read it if I can without my 3 year-old seeing and screaming “Play bubbles! Get off your phone! See me!” or my one year-old clutching my pant leg and screeching in agreement. Maybe at night, if I am not asleep, but I do love sleeping.

Both of these articles written by men gained enough traction to come to the attention of other women, equally busy, who found time to read and forward them to me, where they sat on my phone for awhile before I read them. So really, they passed through a serious filter of time and attention.

Obviously, they also required time and attention to be written in the first place.

Right now, time and attention are things that I am mostly giving to my children. When you’re watching little kids, you’re not doing much else. Or you are trying to do something else and everyone is screaming. A female friend and I commiserated recently: it’s hard to complete a thought while caring for little kids; it’s like having a worm in your brain, hollowing out the centers of thoughts, concepts, sentences.

When the shelter-in-place order came through for San Francisco, I was in the lower paying, more flexible job within my household, and so I’ve abandoned projects and absorbed all the caretaking for kids and pets for which my husband and I normally rely on external support. This is practical. Nominally, it is for the good of the whole family.

Worldwide, in ordinary times, women spend an average of 4.5 hours doing unpaid domestic work, while men spend two. That is similar to how my family’s weekdays normally look. But right now, I am the primary caretaker nine hours a day and my husband is for three.

I am writing this now while my one year-old takes his morning nap, for an hour if I’m lucky, having put my three year-old in front of an iPad, something I don’t like to do until the afternoon, if possible, because as soon as he gets his hands on it, it will be the only thing he wants to do for the rest of the day. Which is to say I am feeling rushed and like a bad parent, and am forging ahead because to write this was the suggestion of a good friend of mine, who is also a great cheerleader (gendered expression, but top of mind so it’s getting used) for me protecting my own interests, and to whom I am embarrassed to admit that I cannot find the time.

I am, at the moment, preoccupied with time: how it’s used, how it’s negotiated. 

This preoccupation is a luxury, I know, because it means that so far I have been spared the fear and duress and grief with which so many people are living. People are ill or lonely or in mourning. Domestic violence has increased at alarming rates. Financial insecurity is a new reality for many. And those are the big stories of this pandemic, the important stories. But in the small isolated world in which I’m living, time is protagonist (bedtime is wonderful), antagonist (it’s only Wednesday) and, most of all, commodity. 

And by time, I mean, time when I’m not caring for small children. 

Living far away from family, my husband and I understood the monetary cost of time away from our children. Date nights, working hours, weekends away – we paid x$ an hour. Sometimes we were willing to pay, sometimes we were not. It was always a factor.

But it is different now. Time has become priceless: we cannot pay for it. 

In the past few weeks, every couple I know with small children has had to negotiate, and renegotiate this question of who will be doing what when. When do you watch the kids? When do I? It is fraught. It feels like a love test.

When there is disagreement, the winning hand seems to be: who earns more. By this logic, in 71% of opposite-sex married households in the US, the losing hand falls to women. But in households in which the woman is the higher earner, studies have shown that, in ordinary times, a different logic is applied, one in which she still undertakes more of the unpaid labor.

In a world in which this virus is likely to recur, in which a second or third wave may force future lockdowns, it’s a dangerously self-reinforcing way to make the decision. I earn less now, so I work less in this extraordinary circumstance. I work less in this extraordinary circumstance so I achieve less so I earn less in ordinary times. And on it goes.

In other words – and it feels ugly to admit it – there is an opportunity cost to the time I spend with my children. And unless I’m mistaken, unless myself and my friends are not representative of how labor within a heterosexual household is being divided in these times, women are more likely to be paying it. Men too, but not as much. 

This pandemic is a thing outside our control that has happened to everyone. It is scary, it has done great damage to people and their livelihoods, and it has wrought huge changes to daily life. But in the microcosm of my household, it has been mostly good for my spouse – no commute, no travel, same work hours, more time with our kids – and mostly bad for me. It’s not a great feeling, that the same things happens to us both, and on balance it’s good for him and bad for me. 

I am conscious of the things that I am not doing, things that require time and attention and have a monetary value in the broader world in more ordinary times.

There is a story of gender playing out in many households these days. It is an old story that, like many other old stories, has been put under new pressure by the pandemic. It is playing out in tight spaces, with a fixed cast of characters. It is ripe for drama.

What if this lasts for years? What then?