Halving It All: How Equally Shared Parenting Works

By Francine M. Deutsch

Book Overview

The best way to have it all--both a full family life and a career--is to halve it all. That's the message of Francine Deutsch's refreshing and humane book, based on extensive interviews with a wide range of couples. Deutsch casts a skeptical eye on the grim story of inequality that has been told since women found themselves working a second shift at home. She brings good news: equality based on shared parenting is possible, and it is emerging all around us. Some white-collar fathers achieve as well as talk about equality, and some blue-collar parents work alternate shifts to ensure that one parent can always be with the children. Using vivid quotations from her interviews, Deutsch tells the story of couples who share parenting equally, and some who don't. The differences between the groups are not in politics, education, or class, but in the way they negotiate the large and small issues--from whose paid job is "important" to who applies the sunscreen. With the majority of mothers in the workforce, parents today have to find ways of sharing the work at home. Rigid ideas of "good mothers" and "good fathers," Deutsch argues, can be transformed into a more flexible reality: the good parent. Halving It All takes the discussion beyond shrill ideological arguments about working mothers and absent fathers. Deutsch shows how, with the best of intentions, people perpetuate inequalities and injustices on the home front, but also, and more important, how they can devise more equal arrangements, out of explicit principles, or simply out of fairness and love.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674368002
• ISBN13: 9780674368002
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.8" x 1.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Moms--wondering why you're doing it all? read this.

This is an excellent, pleasureable book by a sociologist/ mom who has taken on the task of trying to find the holy grail of truly shared parenting. The author is clearly following in the path blazed by The Second Shift, and examines what it means to be a co-parent by looking at case studies. These case studies are interesting peeks at families and how they function or don't.The detail is excellent. Wonderfully, she includes household management as part of what it means to be a co-parent. So housework is a big part of this story. My only complaint about this book is that it seemed to be more about housework than about actual parenting. There is very little info on typical parenting issues --it's really about the spouses and their relationship.The funny part is her catalog of male excuses for not pitching in--the Harvard lawyer who claims incompetence when it comes to laundry or dressing a five-year old. The excuse of lower standards, the brick wall, etc. All very familiar. Women also have excuses. Her gentle jibes will make you think twice about jumping in to clean something up because the man of the house doesn't do it "good enough."The scary part is how rare co-parenting is and how incredibly hard it is to achieve. But she does offer some good ideas on how to start thinking about it practically.This book will depress you if you think you've actually made a choice being an SAH mom because, maybe, you haven't really. She really puts the squeeze on the kind of thinking women do in these situations. You may not like this.It's a valuable read if you want to find ways to enhance cooperation in your family. It's valuable, too, if you want to enahnce the presence of each parent in your child's life, and offer better role models.This is not a how to. It isn't a self-help thing. This is a book that intelligently looks at some deepy feminist issues in a friendly and apporachable way and then holds up a mirror to your own family and asks you to take a good look --for yourself, for you spouse, and for you children.

A must read for working parents and social scientists.

I loved this book - finished it in a few days (including footnotes) and have been recommending it (via the information highway) to everyone I know. It is extremely well written and should appeal to a diversified audience - not only working parents, but also anyone interested in examining the dynamics of family life in contemporary society, and the impact of family life on individual family members. Halving It All provides an engrossing and richly textured portrait of families in which child care is equally shared. The author allows her subjects to speak for themselves, while skillfully parsing out and presenting the issues and paradoxes which are at play in the process of "halving it all." The result is a rare combination: a book which is enlightening, entertaining, and inspiring. I was struck by the way it illuminated the issue of fairness and equity in examining gendered roles and relationships in the context of the family. It seems to me there are remarkably few treatments of this subject which manage to be so even handed yet forthright in setting out a position. I hope this book will be read and discussed by parents, as well as utilized by academics in a variety of disciplinary approaches to the family and gender studies.

A must-read book for parents of the 90s

I'm not a person who generally reads sociological studies--mostly because the academic jargon does not seem reader-friendly. But Halving it All is a book I literally could not put down. I found the couples interesting, the problems realistic, and the commentary very helpful in understanding just why what seems an easy concept (equal parenting) is so tricky. A concept like unequal "economy of gratitude" (i.e., men get more points for doing domestic labor than women) really helped me understand something about the struggles in my own marriage--this is just one example. What I most appreciated was that this author did not have a "one-size-fits-all" approach for equal parenting. This is an area where there are no easy answers, but reading this book made me believe that equally parenting is not an impossible dream.

a great book for parents struggling to Halve It All

This is a great book. It provides concrete examples of how real people everyday are balancing the demands of work and child raising. It underscores the reality that if you want to have an "equal" relationship with your spouse, both of you have to make sacrifices. This book proves that shared parenting is possible. Halving it All might be threatening to some because it shows that shared parenting works when both parents take their parenting role seriously and don't look to their employers or government to solve the family/work dilema.This book offers helpful insights and affirmation for those already involved in shared parenting relationships and inspiration to those who desire more equality in their parenting/family situation. This book may not sit well with spouses who are not interested in doing their fair share since it handily reveals that shared parenting is indeed possible through detailed examples of many couples who are making it work.