You might find that the person you are supporting doesn't recognise they have a problem and/or refuses to seek help. It's understandable to feel frustrated, distressed and powerless as a result of this. But it's important to accept that they are an individual, and that there are always limits to what you can do to support another person. To be fair to us, men do a lot more housework than in 1949. But women still do a lot more than that. So now both sexes have grounds to resent how much of their lives they spend with Toilet Duck in While it might sound like common sense to some of our younger readers, the notion of sharing housework among both (all?) members of a relationship is a relatively new idea. As news site Vox points out, the rise of women working in the 1970s resulted in a change in how Western families viewed housework. High blood pressure, diabetes and other maladies that is associated with obesity. Psychologically and physically, obesity is an issue that can be resolved with a simple increase in activity and awareness. 4. Education Disparity Education is important. Few people would dispute this well regarded fact. However, it is possible to face certain issues that you might not be ready for. You can get surprised and frustrated at the start because of these issues but the best thing to do is to face those issues and resolve them right away. It is the wisest thing instead of leaving the workplace. 3. Emptiness Pay cash wages of $2,400 or more in 2022 to any one household employee. Withhold and pay social security and Medicare taxes. The taxes are 15.3% 1 of cash wages. Your employee's share is 7.65%. 1 (You can choose to pay it yourself and not withhold it.) Your share is 7.65%. vaxZ. Working from home is traditionally seen as an option for new parents, or a luxury earned through many years of commuting. However, thanks to the growth of flexible working and self-employment among young people, the typical image of a middle-aged former manager reclining in the home office of their detached country house is on its ways home business owners are just as likely to be single young professionals in their twenties and thirties. Unlike those who make the choice after years of career success, most younger home workers struggle financially and don't own their own homes. Running a business from home can be challenging enough, let alone for those sharing a house with near-strangers, or moving back in with semi-retired immediate downside to house sharing when you work from home is housemates' lack of experience and empathy. For those who associate home with leisure and relaxation, it can be hard to understand that it is someone else's work space, especially when you're working a freelance writer in a house share, whose housemates are all in office jobs, says her biggest problem is getting them to recognise her work as a legitimate and positive choice. "People rarely ask me how my day has gone because I work on my own, and therefore nothing interesting could possibly have happened." Complaints from housemates about working long hours followed by "but it's alright for you" can common problem is the expectation that your are able run errands for other people, take deliveries, sort out problems with landlords, or entertain tradespeople. If you live with family, they may need to adjust to you as a working adult recognising, for example, that an internet outage at home stops you earning, not just playing computer games or socialising. Lack of empathy can work both ways, too. Anne, a writer and sub-editor, once accidentally interrupted a housemate's lie-in on his day off by conducting a loud phone interview outside his shared living isn't always a grudging necessity. Some home business owners can find communal living more of a blessing than a burden. Cleo, 36, who runs an outdoor events business in rural north Wales, let her parents move in with her when they returned to the area after selling their house and going travelling."Living together has its ups and downs," she says. "Obvious ups are the support with the business and domestic stuff. We often disagree on things, especially business-related. They have a wealth of life experience, and I have a pinch of marketing and business knowhow; sometimes opinions can clash. But mum is definitely a driving force behind my success, and I've learnt to take on board her constructive criticism. Their advice and opinion is always welcome, if not always correct!"Tips for home-worker house-sharingKeep your work space as professional-looking as possible You may have a damp-smelling box room rather than an art-decorated study and an espresso machine, but make your working area look as decent as you can. If you're still in your student house or back in your childhood bedroom, redecorate. It's hard to take conference calls seriously while you're staring at a Homer Simpson to your housemates about your work Telling them about your daily routines and what you're working on is likely to make them more understanding. Similarly, when work is slow, be very clear that quiet time means worry, not leisure time. Talking about your work regularly also enforces the idea that you are working from home and not free to sort out everyone else's admin or do their share of a house diary and calendar A calendar pinned to the wall in a communal space for everyone to keep track of when others are busy or have days off can avoid misunderstandings, especially if you often work outside usual office hours or go on work-related noise-cancelling headphones when you need to concentrate A good pair will prevent out of the house regularly Even when you're living with other people, it's important to break the monotony and leave the house from time to time. Dog-walking or babysitting can help you do this, as well as raising your spirits and bringing in extra money during slower work periods. Getting out will also prevent the turf wars that can sometimes arise when you want relief from your bedroom but your housemates have taken over the you're living with parents or relatives, make sure the terms are clear Agree ground rules on how much you're expected to contribute to the house financially and practically, such as rent, housework or having dinner with the family. If they're helping you out while you grow your business, give them regular updates on how things are progressing, and a set time when you plan to be independent. It's best to discuss these things as soon as you move back home rather than wait until conflicts and setbacks you're really struggling at home, look for a more sympathetic arrangement While most house-sharing situations can be resolved with good communication, some people are beyond understanding. Living with eternal undergraduates, or with more than two or three people, is just not a good idea for home-workers. If housemates' lack of consideration is having a serious impact on your business and talking to them isn't helping, consider house-hunting with others in a similar situation who will understand your needs feel too weighed down by your situation While your living circumstances aren't something you need to advertise, they shouldn't make you feel inadequate either. Any would-be client who is surprised or thinks less of you because you don't have your own place is probably someone very out of touch with reality you'd have problems working for up to become a member of the Guardian Small Business Network here for more advice, insight and best practice direct to your inbox. I was just pulling up to the departures gate at LAX, where I was catching an early morning flight to my one-day business meeting up in Seattle, when I got the following text from my husband, Seth Some guy left his jacket and beer bottle on our lawn. Weird. Gross. And, more importantly, what am I supposed to do about it from the road? When I returned home 16 hours later and long after the sun had gone down, I’d forgotten about the text until I pulled into my driveway, and there they were sitting in the dark — some guy’s jacket and beer bottle on our lawn. Seriously? I began to seethe. As I unlocked the front door, I quickly tried to work out why. I was reminded of the many girlfriends who had described “the text” and its spiritual cousin, “the email forward,” as trigger issues in their marriages — a correspondence comes through to both you and your partner from your child’s school, coach, music teacher, doctor’s office or the DMV, and your partner forwards it to you. The implication I don’t have time to handle this — it’s on you. That night, standing in the doorway to our bedroom, I understood that my husband expected me to put down my carry-on, grab a trash bag and a pair of rubber gloves, walk outside, pick up the jacket and beer bottle, throw them into the bag, walk the whole thing to the bin in the alley and return home. When I did just that, I made note of how long it took me to do this 12 minutes. Of my time. That I’ll never get back. I briefly considered these 12 minutes multiplied by thousands of “this is on you” instances required to get through each of my days and began to understand acutely why so many women are running against the clock from the moment we wake up. What might not be so clear, because it wasn’t to me that night, is Why was this on me? Why domestic work falls to women The answer came to me 12 minutes later when I returned to our bedroom after cleaning up the mess in the front yard, still wearing rubber gloves Seth was not valuing my time equally to his. In my day job, I’m a Harvard-trained lawyer and mediator who works with families. But at my own home, I realized, I wasn’t cutting a very good deal for myself. Like so many women — whether they work outside the home or not — I was picking up more than my fair share of the slack in the running of our household. In heterosexual partnerships, women still do the bulk of childcare and domestic work — the National Survey of Families and Households showed that as recently as 2010, married mothers like myself and many of my friends did about times the housework of married fathers. It turned out that my husband a good guy and progressive in many aspects of our life together — really! took on less housework after our kids came along, just as a 2015 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family showed is common. I determined to find out why even men like him assume that domestic responsibilities should be so unevenly stacked. In my interviews and conversations on this topic over the last several years with more than 500 people — women and men in straight and same-sex relationships and from all Census categories in terms of ethnicity and socioeconomic status — overwhelmingly expressed a related idea that contributes to the same outcome the notion that men’s time is finite and women’s time is infinite. And while women’s time is known to be treated as less valuable in the workplace see the ongoing battle to achieve equal pay, according to my research, this mental discrepancy where men’s time is guarded as a finite resource like diamonds and women’s time is abundant like sand can feel even more stark at home and after kids. So what’s the solution? In an attempt to make visible all the invisible and often unacknowledged work it takes to run a family, I created a document I proudly called the “Sh-t I Do List” that included every single thing I did day-to-day with a quantifiable time component. Tallying every brain-zapping, time-sucking detail of my domestic responsibilities was no small feat, but when I was finished — with the help of women all over the country who wrote in with their own list items — I’d enumerated and categorized 100 household tasks with 20 subtasks that totaled over 1,000 items of invisible work from laundry to pet care to meal prep to birthday presents that kept our happy home running smoothly. When I sent my master list to Seth one triumphant afternoon, expecting a pat on the back or at least a little recognition for a job well done, he’d texted me back a single emoji 🙈. Not even the courtesy of the full trio. Regardless, I got the message — he didn’t want to see, hear or speak of it. My husband is a smart, caring guy. So why was it so hard for him to understand and appreciate how much extra work I was doing to benefit our family and the home — and the eventual burnout effect it was likely to have on me? Then it hit me lists alone don’t work; but systems do. How I fostered more fairness at home For more than a decade, I’ve consulted with hundreds of families in my professional life by providing my expertise in organizational-management strategy. What if I applied these strategies in my own house by creating a new system in which every task that benefits our home is not only named and counted but also explicitly defined and specifically assigned? I began to fantasize about what my life and the lives of all of my friends would look like if — in partnership with our spouses — we brought systematic function to what was currently a sh-t show of family dysfunction. I couldn’t think of a couple out there who wouldn’t benefit from a practical plan of action to optimize productivity and efficiency, as well as a new consciousness and language for thinking and talking about domestic life. The result is a system I termed Fair Play, a figurative game played with your partner, where each partner holds certain “cards” that correspond to domestic tasks. Here are my four easy-to-follow rules that set you up to play. Rule 1 All time is created equal. Both partners need to reframe how you value time, and then commit to the goal of rebalancing the hours that domestic work requires between the two of you. The reality is that many straight couples, the mental load will continue to fall on the female partner as the list-maker/planner/household manager until both recognize that time is a limited commodity. You both only have 24 hours in a day. Only when you both believe that your time is equally valuable will the division of labor shift toward parity in your relationship. Rule 2 Reclaim your right to be interesting. When your time and your mind become fully focused on the tasks required to run a household, it’s easy to feel like your personal passions aren’t priorities. Both partners deserve to reclaim or discover the interests that make you each uniquely you, beyond your roles as wonderful parents and partners. And Fair Play requires you both to demand time and mental space to explore this right — and to honor that right for each other. Rule 3 Start where you are now. You cannot get to where you want to go without first understanding Who am I? Who am I really in a relationship with? And what is my specific intention for engaging my partner in renegotiating the household workload? Ask yourself Am I seeking more acknowledgment of everything I do for us? More efficiency so I can have more time for myself? Less resentment and a greater sense of fairness? When you have a clear sense of what you want, you’re more likely to get it. Start the conversation by laying it all out to your partner. Rule 4 Establish your values and standards. Take stock of your domestic ecosystem and choose what you want to do in service of the home based on what’s most valuable to you and your partner. Just because you’re in the habit of doing a task doesn’t mean it’s a task that absolutely needs to be done. Maybe you value cooking a homemade breakfast for your child each morning — or maybe, when you and your partner consider what’s most important to you, you decide you’d rather have a few minutes in bed to check in before you start the day, and fruit and yogurt to-go are perfectly fine. After you and your partner determine what “cards” — tasks that must be done because they hold value to your family — are in play, you must mutually agree on a reasonable standard for how those tasks are handled. It’s not enough for your spouse to say he’ll be in charge of the “baseball” card — he has to pack the sports bag with all the necessary gear and snacks, arrange for pick-up and drop-off from practice, make sure all the games are on the family calendar and then show up on the right field at the right time. The more you invest in unpacking the details, the more you will be rewarded. It didn’t happen overnight, but starting with Rule 1, attitudes started to shift within our home. After the drunk guy’s jacket incident, my husband began to notice and appreciate that we both have the same number of minutes in a day. The “All Time Is Created Equal” sign that I posted on the bathroom mirror did help to hammer home the point. It hasn’t always been easy; a shift in thinking takes deliberate effort. Whenever Seth and I would revert to our old, familiar dialogue like, “I don’t have time… so, can you?” or “I don’t have time either, but I guess this is on me,” I’d attempt to reframe the conversation with words that honor and respect how we each choose to spend our finite time. I finally understood that how I’d spent those particular 12 minutes picking up the drunk guy’s jacket and beer bottle was really irrelevant. I wasn’t interested in keeping a minute-by-minute scorecard with my husband; I simply wanted both of us to begin to value our time equally — and to act accordingly. From FAIR PLAY by Eve Rodsky, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright c 2019 by by Unicorn Space, LLC. Contact us at letters Housework can be a point of contention for many couples. Perhaps you feel that you do more than your fair share of the cooking, or that you constantly have to ‘nag’ read ask your partner to do simple tasks like picking up their dirty laundry. All these little annoyances can build up to make you feel irritable and resentful. Sound familiar? Thankfully, it doesn’t always have to be this way. There are steps you can take to communicate with your partner, change your mindset, and come up with useful arrangements to ensure you balance the housework fairly. The result? A more peaceful home, less arguments, and – hopefully – a stronger, more loving first, it’s important to acknowledge that you’re not alone. When writer Sally Howard was researching for her book, The Home Stretch Why It's Time to Come Clean About Who Does The Dishes, she found that 78% of cohabiting respondents said housework caused relationship tension. This is perhaps unsurprising, as according to Howard, women in heterosexual relationships contribute more, on average, to the domestic load “men contribute 18 hours to women’s 26 hours per week,” she such a big difference? “Our domestic arrangements are based on centuries of sex-based roles, with man as the provider, and woman as ‘angel of the house’,” she explains. So although women being ‘providers’ and having our own successful careers has been normal for some time now, the household labour side of things hasn't quite caught up. When you’re busily working the same hours, and taking on more of the housework, this can be doubly exhausting – and frustrating. “Many men were raised by parents who didn’t expect them to do as much around the house, so this is very deeply engrained conditioning,” explains intimate relationships expert Susan Quilliam. “Whereas, women are often trained from a young age to look after themselves, and to measure cleanliness – of both themselves and their homes – as a measure of self-worth. This can also lead to different standards of criteria, meaning women might become more uncomfortable, viscerally, when something isn’t clean and tidy, while their partner might not even things are changing, and this certainly isn’t true for all couples. Yet, even in many relationships where chores are technically divided up equally, Howard warns that women often still disproportionately shoulder the ‘mental load’, otherwise known as ‘emotional “This is the household organisation and chivvying that often falls to women,” says Howard, including organising the shopping, planning kids’ calendars, remembering birthdays and replacing the soap when it runs probably not surprising that these issues and imbalances might be feeling even more pronounced during lockdown. “For one, spending more time in the house means more housework,” says Quilliam. “Secondly, being locked down with your partner is likely to cause more irritation in general, as there aren’t many places you can go to release stress and cool off, so you might be noticing the frustration building more than the good news is that this period of intense time at home can actually be a great opportunity to overcome any issues surrounding housework, and come up with a better set-up that works for both of you. Here’s how to do it…Divide and conquerHave you ever actually had a proper conversation about who is responsible for what, when things need doing, and how they should be done? No? You're not alone. But it's so important to sit down and really work out your plan of action. Set aside time for a conversation to unpack any issues you're having and work out solutions in order to balance household your own, clearly-defined, separate tasks and responsibilities can be a really useful starting point for many could begin by thinking about the things you each actually enjoy doing, and then go from there,” Susan Quilliam recommends. “Perhaps you feel a sense of satisfaction from doing the laundry, while your partner prefers cleaning the kitchen. Starting on a positive footing is always Howard recommends avoiding dividing tasks into traditionally ‘pink’ female and ‘blue’ male chores. “’Blue’ jobs – mowing the lawn or putting out the bins – tend to be occasional, compared to the daily and necessary ‘pink’ tasks, such as rustling up meals against the clock with a toddler screaming at your feet,” she think about which tasks are most unpleasant, which ones take up the most time, and which happen most frequently. It could be helpful to write these down in different categories, so you can work out how to create an even ImagesGet it in writingBoth Quilliam and Howard advise against tick-lists and rotas, as they say this can exacerbate the ‘emotional labour’ being carried by one person and can also result in point-scoring, which can give you more reason to argue. But Quilliam says that when you’re forming a negotiation, it really helps to write down what you’ve can refer back to it, so you don’t forget,” she says. “But also, don’t be afraid to suggest making adjustments as time goes by. If you’re finding a task particularly exhausting or difficult, calmly suggest renegotiating, rather than carrying around simmering resentment. You might find that your partner is happy to come up with an easy solution to benefit you Listen, understand and compromiseWhile you negotiate, ask them what it is about housework they struggle with. Rather than assuming the worst – that they’re just lazy or disrespectful – find out what is really going on, says Quilliam. “Work out whether there are certain times you both prefer to do housework – maybe you always like to do things in the morning, while they prefer to set aside time in the evening,” she says. “Explain your point of view, listen to their point of view, and prepare to negotiate and make some Make it funSome couples might find that dividing tasks into set responsibilities doesn’t work for them. It could be that you actually prefer to take on some tasks, like cooking, together. “Find ways to make it fun, so you can turn monotonous household chores into quality time,” suggests Quilliam. For example, you might want to play your favourite songs and dance while you clean – you might find you both enjoy it!“Or you could set aside time in the evening to do a blitz of the house, and ensure you reward yourselves by snuggling up on the sofa to watch your favourite box-set,” she says. Having some kind of reward or motivating factor - for both of you - can be really your battlesOne common sticking point in couples, says Quilliam, is that your partner may be happy to take on their fair share of the housework, but the way they do things isn’t up to your standards. “Keep one or two things for yourself if you know it would make you feel comfortable,” she recommends. “For example, if they always goes shopping and come back with the wrong items, you might want to make the shopping one of your 'things'. But with other chores, it can be easier to think, ‘does this really matter?’ For example, if they stack the dishwasher wrong, can you choose to let it go? This doesn’t mean you should keep sweet and never raise your opinions – it’s just about choosing your battles so you can both feel happier and more Remember housework isn’t proof of loveAccording to Quilliam, one of the most common reasons arguments occur in relationships, as a whole, is that you often have ‘I want’ vs ‘I don’t want’. “The problem is that this often tips over into proof of love,” she says. “So you might say, ‘if you loved me, you would do this’ while they might say ‘if you loved me, you would stop pushing me to do something I don’t want to But if you view certain actions or inactions as proof that they don't love or respect you, it intensifies the problem and can worsen the way you feel about Ultimately, having individual desires, needs and preferences doesn’t mean you love each other any more or less. You just have to find some way to meet in the middle, says Quilliam, by maintaining communication and Susan at this article? 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do you have any problems with sharing housework