Metrics details. Many young couples are planning to share paid work, childcare, and housework equally between each other. This return has potential negative effects on mental health, physical health, and relationship satisfaction. Those were analyzed via qualitative content analysis, which is systematic, rule-guided, and based on the criteria of validity and reliability. Individual participants used 23 success strategies on average. Examples include having a regular coordination appointment with the other parent, planning foresightedly, flexibility, reducing cleaning, optimization of routes, or moderate split-shift parenting.
Some of these strategies seem opposing, e. Those seemingly opposing strategies were well balanced by the participants, which was an additional strategy.
Parents can use the success strategies relatively independently of external circumstances. This behavioral perspective extends prior theories, which have focused on explaining unequal gender role distributions with external circumstances.
Peer Review reports. This article studies an egalitarian gender role distribution, where parents share the three domains paid work, childcare, and housework equally between each other. This means, one parent spends the same amount as the other on each of these three domains. Nonetheless, parents achieving its implementation are a minority [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ].
This is a novelty, as previous research has developed important explanations for the unequal gender role distributions but has lacked in providing parents strategies on how to implement more gender equal role distributions. Not all parents are dual-earner parents and even if they are, most do not share the three domains paid work, childcare, and housework equally. Zooming in on groups of dual-earner parents with nearly equal distributions, mothers still take on the larger share of unpaid work across many different high-income countries [ 3 , 5 , 6 ].
