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The year is 1600. The sun has just set and you’re tucked up on your canvas sack on the floor.
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The school calls in the middle of the workday. Your child is sick. That means you have to leave the meeting, cancel the rest of your afternoon, and rearrange appointments for tomorrow. Research shows that when this happens to a father, he has a childcare problem. But when it happens to a mother, she can become the childcare problem.
That distinction explains something we don’t talk about enough when we discuss working parents. The inequality isn’t just about who spends more hours doing laundry, cooking dinner, or making appointments for the family. It’s also about which parent gets uninterrupted time to work and what happens when family life (inevitably) disrupts it.
It’s about more than hours
We usually assess the unfairness that occurs with working parents by looking at hours. How many hours is one parent spending over the other. Who makes dinner most nights? Who helps with homework? Who drives the kids to their orthodontist appointments? But another important aspect that gets overlooked is how much time you can devote to work without being interrupted.
Three hours of work is different than three hours of focus. Most default parents tell me there is often some family matter that requires attention during the day. Schedule the parent-teacher conference. Order larger cleats. Get a birthday gift. Fill out that permission slip. Wonder if your child’s rash is no big deal or will you be at the pediatrician’s office half the day tomorrow. Ok, now back to that quarterly report you are working on.
The problem isn’t really the number of minutes taken away from work. It’s the projects they interrupt. The tough assignment that gets broken up into smaller chunks. The good idea you have to abandon part way through. The project that is supposed to be done by morning that you now have to take home and finish after the kids go to bed. Yes, you can still get everything done on time and excel at your job. But you’ve had to work around interruptions that someone else may never have to consider.
A cumulative effect
None of these items seem too burdensome on their own. Which is the point. Nevertheless, cumulatively they can take up a chunk of your day. This is why I loved the book Fair Play by Eve Rodsky. Her argument wasn’t simply that women perform more household labor. It was that so much of family life involves noticing, anticipating, planning, and remembering.
In one study, researchers looked at 322 mothers with small children and asked them about common household responsibilities. They wanted to understand who did the task but also who did the invisible work of making sure it got done. Mothers did about 73 percent of the planning and organizing and 64 percent of the actual execution. So, your partner might take your son to the dentist, but you found a dentist that takes your insurance, made the appointment, added it to the family calendar, and reminded your husband to leave on time.
Uneven penalties
However, the consequences go beyond workday disruptions. A study published in Gender Work & Organization gave 975 managers in the United States hypothetical situations about mothers and fathers losing productivity because of childcare situations. They were both held accountable. But when asked if they would raise the pay of that person or promote them, mothers were penalized more than the fathers even when the scenarios were identical. Male managers gave dads the benefit of the doubt and still viewed them as capable, committed, and wanting to move up in his career. His issue was seen more as an unfortunate circumstance, but hers was more likely to become evidence of her inability to perform as expected.
What to do
Naturally I wondered, how do we fix this? Women (and surely all default parents) know how to manage the mental load. Probably too well. The better question is why do we expect one person to constantly handle everything that needs to be done?
At home couples should start sharing these tasks and be explicitly clear about who does what. If your domain is dental appointments, that means taking care of appointments, follow ups, phone calls, ordering that lost retainer for the third time. And not waiting for someone else to remind me. The Fair Play system is a great guide for divying things up equitably.
Employers should play a role too. They need to recognize that family responsibilities don’t change someone’s ambition or ability. Employees should be judged on consistent performance standards and not assumptions about which parent is supposedly more dedicated.
And for couples, it means recognizing that uninterrupted time is something both parents need and deserve. And I am not talking about catching up on work after everyone goes to bed. You should have real time to think, create, and concentrate. The real privilege isn’t just having fewer things to do. It’s having the freedom to devote your full attention to things that matter to you. And that freedom shouldn’t be a luxury given to just one parent.
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The announcement of a new AI model or feature fills me with a mixture of anticipation and dread. I’m excited to see what “new thing” I might be able to do, but I also know that some of my existing processes and systems might break as a result.
Every AI tool comes with the disclaimer that it can make mistakes. You might set up a workflow that is perfectly fine one day and perfectly awful the next.
It’s an ongoing challenge. Unlike traditional software, once an AI system is up and running, it’s not set-it-and-forget-it. Even a system that seems to be working fine needs an occasional check-in or fine-tuning.
The predictable AI failures
AI can stop working in some very predictable ways. Maybe it’s connected to an external tool (like your email), and the connection expired. Some AI tools require your computer to be on/awake for tasks to run. You might get an error message, or the output never shows up.
These failures are easy to address because it’s often clear what went awry. You reconnect and try again.
I rely heavily on AI scheduled tasks and have a notification system built in. If something breaks, I get an email telling me to review the process. That way, I realize immediately that something went wrong and can fix it.
The unpredictable AI failures
The harder failure is when an AI process runs as expected, but the output gets worse. Models and functionality change almost daily. You may have a well-crafted prompt that gave you what you were looking for last month, but the results are noticeably different today.
People in the industry call this “drift.” Most setups have no way to catch it, since technically nothing broke.
I use Claude and struggled with Opus 5.0. For the way I use AI, the output was “off” in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I found myself returning to Opus 4.6, which was the last model where I felt comfortable. (As an aside: the update to Opus 5.5 went much more smoothly.)
The most reliable way to catch drift is to consistently review AI output, no matter how long it has been working as expected. Give every review the same critical eye you gave it the first time you tested an AI process.
Drift is inconvenient, especially when the whole point of an automation is to save you time. But you can’t count on a model to behave the same way from one month to the next. I look at it this way: a 5-minute review is still faster than the 20-30 minutes it may have taken me to do the task manually.
Factor ‘AI maintenance’ into your routine
AI tools save me a lot of time. But keeping my prompts and processes working smoothly takes time, too. That time has to come from somewhere.
Some fixes can’t wait. When a notification tells me something failed, I often need to look at it right away. Depending on what broke, it can throw off my whole workflow until I fix it.
Other changes I have to set aside time to review thoroughly. When a new model is announced, I don’t switch over right away. A big change in output could derail an afternoon, so I take time to test it first.
Upkeep is part of the cost of any AI system you set up. And if a process takes more time to maintain than it saves you, it’s fair to ask whether it’s worth keeping.
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