Agile4Parenting: Roles and Responsibilities
We entered parenting with a vision of an equally shared parental responsibility. As described in my previous post about sharing the parental mental load, we struggled with the realisation of this vision quite a bit. At the start we had no mental model on how we can equally share the parenting tasks or the responsibility over them.
Luckily we both had been working with agile development teams for awhile. So while searching for solutions we naturally fell back on the agile mindset. In this new situation, we tried to adapt the usual practices used at our daily work with agile teams to the problem at hand.
We are happy to share what we have learned so far, though we are far from wishing to appear as a perfect family who have figured it all out. We have not, our parenting collaboration is a work in progress.
Today we are sharing some best practices concerning the roles and responsibilities in our parenting team.
Parenting team
Our parenting team is a team of two. We define our roles as equal team members of a self organizing team. The team needs to take care of both planning and caring out the tasks. We want to avoid a “manager – reportee” distribution of parenting tasks, where one person holds all the parental mental load.
Being always on duty is exhausting. Prioritising the needs of two little humans over one’s own continuously is unnerving. For the sake of our sanity and as a loving act, we want to distribute this work of worry.
Our goal is to share the responsibility, however, not necessary sharing every task equally. We need to organise the workload and to include the possibilities to tend to everyones’ needs. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that benefits everyone equally, as every person has their very specific needs.
Our main KPI is the satisfaction of all family members, not the equal number of changed diapers or kindergarden drop-offs.
Respect the needs
Respect is one of the scrum values and generally the foundation of the agile mindset. Sharing the workload respectfully based on personal needs instead of traditions, gender privileges or power dynamics is a foundation of our agile shared parenting. We have learned that the important KPI of a good labor division is not the exact and fair devision of every task, but the subjective feeling of the individual family members that their needs are seen and met in the best possible way.
The personal needs cannot be negotiated. The needs are there if they are met or not. If a person, for example, needs to sleep in, this need is real. What can be discussed is how and on what schedule this need can be accommodated in a family routine.
Though the labor division at home can lead to heated arguments, we need to remember to stay patient and kind. We are trying to build a system of responsibilities in a complex environment and no one knows what is right or wrong for a family without trying it out. Allowing ourselves to experiment with the roles and remembering that love and respect are involved is how we deal with the ever changing family challenges.
Define who is NOT in charge
Though we are both equally responsible, we figured out that it is crucial to define who is and who is NOT in charge at specific moments. Simply doubling the number of people worrying about the same thing does not make one’s brain calmer. One needs to make sure that it is possible at times to give the responsibility to another person entirely in order to concentrate on a different task in hand, like professional work.
We rotate the responsibility for bringing & picking the kids up from the kindergarden on a schedule. The slots can be switched on a short notice to accommodate the appointments. We rotate the responsibility for the bedtime, so every parent has a possibility to have some free evenings. We also rotate the responsibility for the kids on weekend mornings, so one of us has a chance to sleep a little longer. The parent that is not currently in charge still can help out or spend the time with the family if they like it, but they do not have to. The kids know this and accept it.
Furthermore, we align longer times of absence such as business travels or weekends-off with friends beforehand. We try to provide each other the freedom without overwhelming another parent. It is important for us to be able to do things outside the home without resentment or parental guilt.
Involve children and other care-givers
Some tasks can be forwarded outside the core parental team to both children and other care-givers, like grandparents or babysitters.
Due to corona and moving to a different city, it was a struggle for us to build the social network that can support us as additional care-givers to our children. We learned to value this support network a lot. It is also very satisfying to see how our children make friends and create significant relationship with people outside of our home. Contrary to the popular narrative, that young children need the attention of their mother alone, we found out that other attachment figures are beneficial both for child’s development and for parental well-being. We learned that it is important to build trust and allow those additional care-givers to take over tasks and responsibilities.
On the other hand, an age appropriate involvement in both planning and executing the tasks helps kids to become independent and responsible adults while lessening the workload of the parents. As with any delegating it needs time investment, enabling and leadership. We feel it is totally worth the effort and use some of Montessori techniques and principles to enable our toddlers’ independency.
Stay tuned
In the next post we are going to discuss the best practices concerning the artefacts we use to collaborate in our agile parenting team. Stay tuned.