Busy parents with full-time jobs are often told to outsource housework in order to save time. For many working parents, this is completely reasonable advice. Hiring a cleaning lady is standard, as is using grocery delivery services and paying someone to mow the lawn. Daycares or nannies are also a common childcare choice for full-time working parents. Most families also outsource at least some amount of their meal preparation: frozen dinners from the grocery store, meal preparation kits, or takeout from a local restaurant.
Nevertheless, the sheer amount of outsourcing that is now available to working parents (or non-working parents of means) might give us pause. USA Today reported on this trend in a special section for Mother’s Day titled: “Outsourced parenting: From toilet-training to baby stylists, there’s any service you need.” One mother quoted in the article outsourced toilet-training her toddler to a consultant. She explained: “I love working with an expert, and I didn’t have the time. My husband and I both work . . . I’m an expert in basically what I’m paid to do, which is my profession. Why wouldn’t I go to someone who understands?” Parents can also now outsource planning their child’s birthday party, picking out her wardrobe, homework help, packing for summer camp . . . the list is practically endless.
The rationale for this type of outsourcing is simple: it’s more efficient for a working mother (or father) to devote the majority of her waking hours to her job, and hire an expert to tackle difficult or unpleasant household or childcare tasks. As the mother who hired the potty training expert explained, she has a specialized career in marketing, and so it made sense to her to hire someone else specialized in potty training to accomplish the goal of teaching her child to competently use the toilet. This worldview fits neatly into the basic understanding of economics many college students absorb in “Econ 101”: the theories of comparative advantage and specialization indicate that a parent should rationally pursue career development while hiring out household tasks to others. Indeed, a pair of married Columbia economists with a newborn once explained to the New York Times that they “outsourced their way to success,” including: hiring a personal chef; using someone from the app “Task Rabbit” to put together their IKEA furniture; and even employing another person to sort through their family photographs to recommend which photos to keep and which photos to discard. The article explained that this kind of outsourcing is reasonable because “there is an opportunity cost for every hour consumed by these tedious, nonproductive tasks; there exists some higher-value activity you could be spending your time on instead.”
In other words, popular culture tells us it is often more efficient to outsource routine household tasks than do them yourself. This leaves an important question unanswered, however: efficient at what?
Almost twenty years ago, I interned as a college student at the now-defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers. My memories of that internship are a little hazy, but as I recall, the bank would pay for dinner for employees who stayed past a certain hour. A car service was also available to whisk home those who worked late. Company-sponsored happy hours and dinners encouraged staff to channel their social activities into forming connections with their colleagues. I think there was also an executive dining room, where the firm’s top brass (and their invitees) would eat together. Everything was extremely efficiently organized to channel the bank’s employees (i.e., its profit centers) into working as much as possible. For those employees, however, the nature of their grueling job made them inefficient at activities like reading lengthy novels, being a present and dedicated friend, or spending hours pursuing cherished hobbies. Investment banking was not for me, but I did learn one lesson that I still treasure: being extremely efficient at a demanding job may mean being less competent in other important areas of life.
What do we lose when we outsource domestic tasks that seem unpleasant or routine in the name of efficiency? One important downside may be the loss of warm connections with family members. Consider changing a baby’s diaper. This would not top most parents’ list of favorite activities. Child development expert Magda Gerber wrote the beautiful book Dear Parent: Caring for Infants with Respect, which argues that this task can provide an important avenue of connection between parent and child. Gerber writes that in the first few years of life, a baby may experience six thousand diaper changes. “We are all affected,” she explains, “negatively or positively by the cumulative experiences in our lives.” Along with feeding, Gerber points out, diaper changes are some of the most frequent care tasks that a parent and infant participate in together. Treating a baby with kindness and respect during diaper changes matters for how the baby perceives herself and the link between parent and child. We don’t yet have “diaper changing robots,” but if we did, Gerber’s philosophy would encourage us to reflect on the fact that outsourcing diaper changes means outsourcing an important way a young baby bonds with her caregiver during a crucial phase of human development.
In the same way, we might consider whether the tasks of caring for a home could be a means of connecting with the people who live in it. In the twenty-first century, we often perceive the act of creating a beautiful home as fundamentally directed toward impressing those who visit (or perhaps those who view it on social media). Watch home improvement television or scroll through Instagram, and you could be forgiven for believing that the primary purpose of a home is to invite over a carefully curated list of friends who will marvel at the wine bar or be awed by the expensive stove. For these purposes, it does not really matter who cleans, decorates, or organizes a home as long as it suitably dazzles visitors.
But routine homemaking tasks are better seen as a kind of embodied affection for the home’s inhabitants. To take a small example, one of my children likes to come down from his bedroom in the morning and snuggle under a blanket on the couch for a few minutes before he is ready for breakfast. I usually leave a folded quilt in a nearby cabinet for him. If I forget, or absent-mindedly put the quilt elsewhere, he misses that little physical symbol of my love for him. Cheryl Mendelson, author of the classic housekeeping manual Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping Home, explains that earlier generations of women understood this concept well. For our foremothers:
[A homemaker’s] affection was in the soft sofa cushions, clean linens, and good meals; her memory in well-stocked storeroom cabinets and the pantry; her intelligence in the order and health of her home; her good humor in its light and air. She lived her life not only through her body but through the house as an extension of her body; part of her relation to those she loved was embodied in the physical medium of the home she had made.
This does not mean, of course, that a messy house is equivalent to a mom or dad who does not love the family. Busy seasons of life mean that housekeeping has to be flexible around the arrival of new babies, or when the stomach flu hits, or the impact of a million other variables. Still, it can provide some needed moral support to remember that the supposed drudgery of clearing off a kitchen table means providing a nice place for a family to eat. Perhaps the toddler has—for the fifth time today—scattered dozens of markers throughout the house. This is frustrating, but loving the toddler is also doing my best to patiently pick the markers up again (and maybe choosing a better hiding place for them).
In addition to losing an opportunity to connect with family members, outsourcing homemaking tasks may also mean coping with a product or experience that is inferior to the one you would have produced yourself. To take an extreme example: the most time-efficient way to feed a young child may be to pick up McDonald’s on the way home from work every evening, while packing Lunchables for school and giving her Pop-tarts for breakfast. This time-efficient process is also, when used too often, a recipe for childhood obesity and poor health. To be sure, our industrial food system is an almost miraculous answer to one of humanity’s oldest foes: starvation. That does not mean there are no downsides.
It takes quite a lot of time and energy to prepare three meals a day at home, including shopping for fresh ingredients and trying to accommodate the specific tastes and dietary needs of everyone in the household. I want to be clear here that this is so much work that I myself do not do it, and my children eat take out pizza every Friday before “family movie night.” Home cooking, however, is often a very important way to help ensure a family’s health and well-being. Indeed, some doctors even prescribe home cooking as a medical intervention for adults with health problems. As the Harvard Medical School’s Health Publishing initiative explains: “A growing body of scientific evidence supports teaching patients how to cook meals at home as an effective medical intervention for improving diet quality, weight loss, and diabetes prevention.” This is because “[t]he more people cook at home, the healthier their diet, the fewer calories they consume, and the less likely they are to be obese or develop type 2 diabetes.” If—like most of us—you can’t afford a personal chef, trying to find the time to cook at home as much as possible may have important positive impacts on family health.
Similarly, there are important quality trade-offs when it comes to efficiency and childcare. To again take an extreme example, in Victorian England many families engaged in the practice of “baby farming,” or sending their infants to a poor farmer’s wife to be cared for until they were older. Jane Austen, the famous English writer, was one of these babies. She was sent away by her mother when she was around three months old to stay with another family until she was an older toddler. Austen’s mother (who had a number of children) routinely sent her babies away to make it easier to run her household. She was tremendously busy caring for her husband, older children, and home, and so found it more efficient to completely outsource infant care. Claire Tomalin writes in Jane Austen: A Life that although socially accepted, this practice must have been very difficult for the baby: “A baby of fourteen weeks will be firmly attached to her mother, and to be transferred to a strange person and environment can only be a painful experience.” Tomalin believed that this early separation shaped Austen life-long, making it difficult for her to connect not only to her mother, but also to others as an adult. She writes that: “The most striking aspect of Jane’s adult letters is their defensiveness. They lack tenderness towards herself as much as towards others.” As an adult, Austen seemed to wear a “hard shell,” unwilling to share her real thoughts and feelings, and frequently attacking in writing those whom she saw as a threat. Because Austen was separated from her mother as a pre-verbal infant, her biographer writes: “[I]n the adult who avoids intimacy you sense the child who was uncertain where to expect love or to look for security, and armoured herself against rejection.”
Obviously, the modern daycare system is nothing like the Victorian practice of baby farming. Still, it is worth inquiring what trade-offs are being made when one or both parents outsource as much childcare as possible. Importantly, the impact is not only limited to mothers who work long hours—the work habits of fathers matter very much as well. One study found that sons whose fathers work more than fifty-five hours per week were more likely to exhibit aggression and have other behavioral problems. This trade-off between efficiency and quality is particularly worrisome when parents do not have access to good childcare. Low-quality daycares, which are unfortunately very common in the United States, can have both short- and long-term impacts upon a child. As the Department of Health and Human Services explains: “Child care quality matters, in terms of children’s everyday experiences, of their cognitive and linguistic competencies and school readiness, and of their later school achievement and social interactions.”
The final benefit of “insourcing” homemaking and childcare tasks is the hardest to describe, but also possibly the most important: personal sovereignty. In Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road, Matthew Crawford argues against what he sees as an encroaching technological monopoly that would place most human activities in the “safer” control of machines. He writes: “Qualities once prized, such as spiritedness and capacity for independent judgment, are starting to appear dysfunctional.” He argues that retaining the independence to drive (rather than outsourcing all driving to self-driving cars) is essential to retaining personal sovereignty. I would argue that dedicating serious time to homemaking can also provide a kind of shelter from this monoculture in which advanced technology and large corporations dictate the order of so much of our days. The job of a homemaker is in many ways very humble, but it remains almost completely self-directed and fairly low-tech. There’s not much advancement in mop technology, and the feather duster in my closet is not too different from the one my great-grandmother might have used. The most useful tool I have in dealing with a toddler throwing a tantrum, or with how to cook three dishes needing different temperatures in one oven, is not an app or a gadget—it is my own brain. Perhaps most importantly, unlike when I worked full-time as a lawyer, I now order my own days as a homemaker. To be sure, they are ordered with reference to the family members in my life: children and babies come with a lot of demands. But fundamentally the responsibility is on me (not a corporate leadership structure) to make decisions about the structure of our home, our days, and much of our lives. Indeed, I find the process of caring for a home to be so important that I try to make sure to involve my older children. This prepares them to become adults, but it also means that they get to have the experience of being what Crawford calls (quoting Pope Francis) “artisans of the common good,” “concretely expressing their love” by small acts of caring for our home and each other.
To be clear, I am not saying that childcare and housekeeping should never be outsourced. Indeed, a frequent problem for working mothers of young babies (which also affects mothers who are primarily homemakers) is that they are not able to outsource tasks enough. Our society often fails to prioritize the need of postpartum mothers to recuperate from childbirth and bond with their babies. Many mothers face the postpartum period essentially alone, without family or friends to cook, clean, or help hold the baby. As Erica Komisar writes in Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters:
Often family who come to help a new mother leave after two weeks—just when your baby is waking up from his birth experience and is becoming active and demanding! . . . When everyone leaves the party is when you feel most alone.
This cruelty of this problem becomes even starker when compared to the support available over 200 years ago to many English-born postpartum mothers in the American colonies. Richard and Dorothy Wertz, coauthors of the fascinating book Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America, explain that during this period, “[m]anaging a household with children was simply so difficult and exhausting that the last stage of pregnancy, delivery itself, and the postpartum period would weaken and even kill a woman if she also had to continue her chores without help.” As a result, colonial society developed special “social childbirth” practices which “permitted the mother to ‘lie-in,’ to keep to her bed for three or four weeks, sometimes longer, while others took over the responsibility of the household.” This permitted the postpartum mother to “rest, to regain her strength, and to initiate her nursing and care for the new child without interruption.” It is sobering to contrast this eighteenth-century cultural practice by female English colonists to provide their postpartum family and friends with a month of support against the supposedly more enlightened twenty-first century American society, which often leaves new mothers to grapple alone with the enormous job of caring for an infant and home.
Outsourcing homemaking tasks is sometimes both necessary and good. The appropriate balance of what to outsource and what to continue to do at home is a difficult question, one that must be carefully weighed with consideration of family finances, the needs and wants of the adults and any children, and many other factors. Still, it is wise to remember that outsourcing homemaking activities usually comes with some downsides (in addition to the obvious benefits).
In thinking about this problem, we might consider some lessons from The Odyssey, one of humanity’s oldest stories, about a warrior’s twenty-year quest through countless dangers to return home to his wife and child. At the end of the epic, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is trying to determine his identity since she does not immediately recognize him after his long absence. She asks her servant to move their marriage bed outside the bedroom so Odysseus can sleep in it. Odysseus responds that moving the bed is impossible since he personally built the bed into the trunk of an old olive tree: “My handiwork and no one else’s!” He explains that when their house was built: “I laid out our bedroom round that tree, lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.” After cutting off the trees leaves and branches, he “hewed and shaped that stump from the roots up into a bed post, drilled it, let it serve as model” for the other bedposts, and he “planed them all, inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory and stretched a bed between.” Then, reunited with his wife, the epic tells us:
Now from his breast into his eyes the ache
Of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for
As the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon’s blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Would we be as moved by this scene of a husband and wife coming back together after a twenty-year separation, but with an Ikea bed assembled by someone paid $15/hour from the TaskRabbit app as the central reference point? I think not. Efficiency is good, but it is not the most important thing. When it comes to making a home, there are other virtues that matter far more.
Image by Halfpoint and licensed via Adobe Stock.
