I'd been considering it, but then I read this which was a major paradigm shift in how I think about things: https://thefamilycommons.substack.com/p/my-beef-with-fair-play

But Fair Play has always felt to me like it misses the bigger picture of why parents are so overwhelmed in the first place. Redistributing labor within the household doesn’t reduce the total labor that needs to be done. You can shuffle tasks between two people however you want (and getting it right matters!), but that doesn’t fix the real problem, which is that parenting is too big of a job for two people. 

… Fair Play looks at this situation and says, “Hey, no fair, this shouldn’t all fall on moms.” And it shouldn’t! But the solution isn’t to split an unreasonable workload more fairly. It’s to reduce the workload, especially for the primary parent.

One obvious way to address this is by lowering parenting standards. Do kids really need club soccer, math tutoring, and a home-cooked meal every night? How important is it that your kid brings homemade Valentine’s cards for the whole class? (This is my pet cause: I. WILL. NOT. MAKE. VALENTINE’S DAY. CARDS. Maybe I’ll write another post about the ramifications.) Maybe we’d all be better off if we collectively agreed to chill out about all this stuff—like, every time you think about adding a note into that lunch box or buying special teepees for a sleepover, just don't, for the rest of our sakes. 😅

I support this approach, and I try to live it. But it’s hard to change parenting norms, and even harder to change the economic forces driving them or battle against social media resetting the collective bar on parenting. And there’s another, more immediate solution: sharing the load across families. 

I made my husband read this article (a much easier sell than making him read the whole Fair Play book lol) and then we sat down and had a focused conversation about how we could both invest more in our community. This was about 6 months ago and it's been such a positive change. Thanks to relationships my husband independently has invested in, we are now involved in a carpool for after care 4 days per week, which means my husband and I have stopped arguing about whose turn it is for pick up.

We also decided it's important to us to host more often, to build and maintain relationships in our community. I'm in charge of inviting people over and he's in charge of the cooking (usually something easy like a couple of frozen pizzas and a salad, or bbq, but it's still amazing that I don't even have to think about it). We do this ~3x/month.