Noted: While some families don’t mind dividing labor in this normative way, with moms controlling the scheduling, other hetero couples would prefer to make scheduling more egalitarian. So I called Allison Daminger, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who studies how couples divide labor, to see if she had any thoughts about how to divide this work.
Daminger suggested two potential ways to help divide scheduling. One is a shared family email address or calendar. The latter is a tool my husband and I use — he’s more proactive than a lot of dads, and has organized many a playdate, but I still do more than half of the scheduling. The other is dividing tasks by area. For example: “Partner A does the school stuff and Partner B does extracurriculars,” Daminger suggested. Or Partner A does the dentist appointments and Partner B does the pediatricians’ appointments. It might help to specialize because then you can build relationships and learn all the peripheral information you may need, Daminger said — you’ll know how long the dentist appointments take and how your kid responds to them, and you’re the one who always interacts with the staff.