512: Emotional Labor
Rose Hackman
Moms are feeling the unspoken expectation that she is on-call for the emotional well-being of everyone in the family 24 hours a day. What is that? It’s called “emotional labor” and it’s commonly unfairly distributed in a family.
Hunter talks to Rose Hackman about her book, "Emotional Labor", and how we can even the scales.
Ep 512: Rose Hackman
Read the Transcript 🡮
*This is an auto-generated transcript*
[00:00:00] Rose Hackman: You're going to enter into the world as a grown up in this patriarchy where you will be required to smile on the job, on the street, at home. You will be required to put your time and energy to work for the benefit and experiences and feelings of other people. And I guess that's the first time that as a performance, emotional labor, I remember it being marked explicitly.
[00:00:25] Hunter: You're listening to The Mindful Parenting Podcast, episode number 512. Today we're talking about emotional labor with Rose Hackman.
Welcome to the Mindful Parenting Podcast. Here it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. In Mindful Parenting, we know that you cannot give what you do not have, and when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clarke-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children.
I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting course and teacher training, and I'm the author of the international bestseller Raising Good Humans Every Day, and the Raising Good Humans Guided Journal.
Hello there. Welcome to the Mindful Parenting Podcast again. So glad you're here. If you did get some value from the Mindful Parenting Podcast, please do me a favor and help it grow by telling a friend about it. And in fact, you're going to want to tell a friend about this episode. This is a really powerful episode.
In just a moment, I'm going to be sitting down with Rose Hackman. She's a British journalist in Detroit and the author of Emotional Labor. And this is a fascinating episode, I have to say. Moms, but more and more now, Dads, too, are feeling the unspoken expectation that we are on call for the emotional well being of everyone in the family 24 hours a day.
Now, do you feel like that? Or maybe you have a friend who might feel like that. You may want to text them this episode because this is called emotional labor. And it's commonly, unfairly distributed in the family. I'm going to talk to Rose about her book, Emotional Labor, and how, what we can do to even the scales.
I have to say, having this conversation made me think differently about everything. It really saw a lot of Make me see things in a totally different way. And I know this may happen for you, too. Let's get to it. But before we dive in, I just want to let you know that the Raising Good Humans Guided Journal is out.
And if you have enjoyed Raising Good Humans, you're going to love this. This is the place to do the work of Raising Good Humans. You'll learn and grow as you write in this sort of safe place for you to reflect. It's really lovely. And we had great graphic designers who did it and everything. So I love this as a way to really get yourself to do the work, all those things I ask you to do in Raising Good Humans.
This is the place to do it. So go find the Raising Good Humans Guided Journal anywhere where books are sold. And now Join me at the table as I talk to Rose Hackman.
Rose, thank you so much for coming on the Mindful Parenting podcast.
[00:03:17] Rose Hackman: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
[00:03:19] Hunter: I'm glad to talk to you. And I've been enjoying your book, Emotional Labor, and I'm excited to talk about it. And I would, I love it if you could because sometimes I feel like this is a little bit of a nebulous, it feels, it's very it's not concrete, right?
It is like something that's emotional, so it's not so concrete. I was wondering if you could start us off with, you have a great story in your intro about your first instance of experiencing emotional labor, and I was wondering if you could tell us that story.
[00:03:49] Rose Hackman: Thank you. To be honest, it was, it's the first instance of identifying it probably as something that is part of a gendered process.
woman. As a young woman, I guess at the time I was 18 and I tell the story starting in the book about having a boyfriend who was having people over to dinner to his new place and he calls me as I'm on my way to dinner with my mom because I didn't have my driver's license yet. Very embarrassing.
She was going to drop me off and he calls me in a panic saying that he, guests are coming very soon and he hasn't really prepared anything and he doesn't know how to cook and what's going, he's in an absolute panic and he's being disagreeable to me, to be honest. And I listened to him, panic stricken tell me about the fact that he has nothing prepared for this dinner party that he's throwing for his friends back in Brussels, which is where I grew up.
And I know immediately that my task as his girlfriend in this moment is not necessarily to immediately find solutions to the cooking problem ahead, but is to calm him down. It's, I identify immediately that he is, honestly, now looking back on it, lashing out. And instead of being annoyed that he's lashing out, I try and get him to calm down.
I put my time and energy and skills to work to manage his emotions, to temper his emotionality. And my mom, famously, I never forgot it when I get off the phone after success. Wait,
[00:05:20] Hunter: wait, Rose. You have to share the detail about what the meal was that he's dealing with and that and your culinary or.
Eating choices at the time, at least, because that's just pertinent detail.
[00:05:34] Rose Hackman: Cherry on top of the cake. So he has chicken and he has no idea how to cook chicken. And I basically tell him I will be I'll cook it for him, once I arrive and I've got pesto with me and we can make it into delicious pesto chicken dinner.
He really hasn't prepared anything except for dessert, which is, might be infuriating. Why is he throwing something at the dinner party if he doesn't know how to cook? And I say that I will do it. Now, the, I guess the punchline or one of the pieces in the story that is part of the punchline is I'm vegetarian, at the time anyway.
I've been a vegetarian since I was eight, so I have no idea what to do with chicken. My mother, who's in the car with me, tells me how to cook chicken, but she's vegetarian too, actually. She's been a vegetarian for many years. So here we are doing something that's not at all authentic to what, to, to ourselves.
It's not even supposed to be our responsibility, taking on the responsibility of a task. Cooking, which is not an emotional labor task itself. But because I am doing it as part of not just calming her boyfriend down, but also creating a positive experience for him and his friends, that is one of many examples in the book of, in this case, very gendered emotional labour.
Of course, emotional labour isn't always gendered, it's not always women doing it for men, but the way in which we have cast emotional labour in our society, the expectation is, it's going to be put off onto women. As opposed to men.
[00:06:53] Hunter: Yeah. I think that's so fascinating. And of course your mother says good job managing, man managing, right?
Or miss. That's exactly.
[00:07:01] Rose Hackman: She said, she tells me I'm an excellent man manager and she couldn't be more impressed. And, that that's what I was gonna say stuck with me all these years. And at the time I didn't, I hadn't read about emotional labor in a sociology, academic context.
I didn't really know the term, but it stuck with me as I feel like she's impressed with me almost as a kind of a coming of age ritual for a woman. That was the summer I was turning 18 and she was applauding something in me that kind of, I hadn't really ever thought about before.
And of course, so many of us as we become women, we might not think that WIC's, it is. As girls, we might not be told explicitly, you're going to enter into the world as a grown up in this patriarchy, where you will be required to smile. On the job, on the street, at home, you will be required to put your time and energy to work for the benefit and experiences and feelings of other people.
And I guess that's the first time that as a performance, emotional labor, I remember it being marked explicitly.
[00:08:00] Hunter: Yeah, that whole required to smile, it's just always makes me think of my grandfather who'd be like, let's see your happy girl smile. And I'd be like it just drove me crazy.
And then he would say it to my children, my daughters, put on your, and I'd be like, grandpa no, they don't have to smile. It's okay, they don't have to do that. And we'll get back to that but how did you get interested in the idea of emotional labor? I'm sure I don't think it was specifically this chicken that you made as a vegetarian that drove you to do this work and write this book.
How did you get interested in it as an adult?
[00:08:40] Rose Hackman: So back in 2015, which is almost 10 years ago, crazy thing, I was working in New York as a features writer for The Guardian British newspaper, but has international coverage. And My editor at the time, a very cool lady called Jessica Reed, came bounding up to me one Friday morning as I was going to the office and said, I've got just the story for you, your next story, and it's emotional labor is the next feminist frontier.
She was extremely excited about this as a topic, and I am going to be very honest, I was very underwhelmed, which is ironic because here I am a decade later talking about it. I thought it was a really silly, petty kind of category of complaints that hyper privileged women living on the Upper East Side would complain that their husbands refused to pick up their socks.
What happened was I was proven wrong. I got going with the assignment and within a couple of months, I wrote it. I wrote the story in the Guardian, it did very well, but my whole way of understanding the topic and actually of understanding what I call systemic, the reproduction, the intimate reproduction of systemic inequality had changed and burst into Technicolor.
Emotional labor, I obviously, gave a kind of a, very gendered experience, example earlier with the chicken pesto story, but emotional labor a good way of thinking about it generally is the editing work of emotions someone will do on themselves in order to have an effect on the emotions of other people.
As we just mentioned, it's a smile that someone will give to a group regardless of whether they're feeling good inside, so they tweet those emotions. in order to make other people feel good inside. So in our society, this is a form of work that's incredibly feminized, sometimes racialized, because it's not inherently gendered at all.
It's often rendered invisible, we don't see it, it's devalued if it's valued at all, and why I argue in the book is this, in spite of the fact that it's one of the most essential forms of work out there, because it's the work It's the work that forges and reforges ties within families. It's the work that forges and reforges ties within communities.
And actually it's the backbone of our economy because it's the central, component of millions upon millions of jobs, especially in the service industry, the healthcare industry, and so much more jobs that automate, unlike obviously physical labor, which, we've seen huge waves of automation.
And actually what we now know, intellectual labor. If you can put it into a book, you can put it into a computer, that's highly, it's very easy to automate too. Emotional labor, the act of connecting the work of connecting humans to each other, making people feel good, forging senses of connection and love and community, that can't be automated.
[00:11:23] Hunter: Stay tuned for more Mindful Parenting podcasts right after this break.
[00:13:31] Hunter: Those are like what we call the people skills, and it's interesting because I think about like in my family, my, my brother has incredible people skills. He runs a cafe, he has a minute he has a partner who does some of the other work, but his real skills, like really connecting with people.
But, it's interesting because it came in some ways, like it came from he had some trauma with his. father leaving him, my mom's first husband as a young child and wanting to, I don't know. I don't know if that's, but that's, I'm not drawing a direct line from there to there, I don't want to do that. I would say, but I would say this is, can you talk about it as being like a very kind of mostly a feminine thing, but then it has these. It is not inherently male or female, right? And it can come from these, all these different places, I'm sure, but it does seem incredibly important in a way that if we're talking about it mostly with women who are maybe listening and saying, oh my god, yeah, I'm doing this emotional labor, I'm doing this, but I don't know.
But sometimes it, it almost strikes me as I don't know A I have a lot of thoughts about this, obviously, Rose, sorry, hang on with me A, this is incredibly important, and maybe it's not that we shouldn't stop doing this, but men should be doing this too, but also B, there should be places where you're not doing this, and you're allowed to be.
And feeling whatever you're feeling as well, too, right? There's a little path between these two things. I'm sorry, I just threw a whole bird salad at you, let me just let you respond a
[00:14:58] Rose Hackman: little. No! I you're getting it exactly. I think that what's really wrong with emotional labor as it currently stands in terms of who does it and who doesn't do it, is the totally unequal distribution and expectation that there are groups of people, from a gender perspective, women, who are expected to do it chronically, and often in ways that can be harming to those women.
And then, and then men are not given they're Men are not expected to do it to the same degree. And, research in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, really show us, reveal that the ways in which traits form in us as people, some of it obviously I have two sisters.
As three sisters within the same family, we're all quite different in terms of personalities. But as women in the world, there are expectations that have been set onto us. There are stereotypes that if we don't adhere to, for example, being sweet and People Pleasing, and maybe Self Refacing in the right circumstance, and maybe, Inquisitive in the other circumstance.
All forms of emotional labor that are highly associated in our society with femininity. If we don't do that, there are going to be all sorts of subtle and overt ways in which we are going to You know, punished, policed I have been called angry by other women, for example, actually when when the book came out a little over a year ago I did a, I did one of my events, I was being interviewed by a woman she called me angry.
The reason I would argue she called me angry is because I am, I'm diverting away sometimes in my passion for a topic and my refusal to just be self effacing and demure about what I think is really important. I'm diverting from these kind of stereotypes of femininity. So this was a long winded way of saying that this policing and forced emotional labor that only falls on the.
some sets of shoulders is really what we need to start to unpick and confront. But yes, I totally agree with you. Emotional labor is an incredibly, important form of work that we shouldn't be doing ad nauseum, but we should certainly not relinquish doing. It's a question of spreading the load, getting our, male loved ones and friends to do it too.
And in the workplace, in white collar industries, We just have a new candidate for the pre we have a relatively new candidate for the presidency. A woman, as usual that woman is being, we're asking her, are you likeable enough? Are is your laugh something that we like or we dislike?
Are you a caregiver enough if you don't have children? All litmus tests that we absolutely don't put on to men and in white collar environments, previously male dominated white collar environments, women are expected to provide this extra emotional labor. It's actually set in place often to demean our position within this, within the set profession.
And then very quickly, in pink collar industries, service, oriented industries, small businesses like your, it sounds like your brother emotional labor is so important to doing the job well, so crucial, and yet so often underpaid and overlooked. If you think of a nurse doing her job, if she doesn't have a good bedside manner, if a home healthcare aide is not being, patient and thoughtful, with the person that they're helping, they're doing a really poor job.
But yet those crucial skills in teaching too. Those crucial skills. We continue to undervalue them as a society.
[00:18:23] Hunter: Yeah, we don't teach them. We have historically not taught them. Thinking about children and parents and things like that, this, this kind of generation of parents is part of a generation of parents who's oh, we're Wow, we actually have to teach our kids, like, how to regulate our emotions, and that's really probably a really good thing to do.
We can't just punish them for being angry or, or being upset. That's actually not that skillful. We're seeing this generation of parents is now seeing The value of teaching our kids emotional intelligence but this, but it's still it's still this evolving thing, right?
Like where it's we're not, parents may be valuing it a lot because we're seeing like, oh, it really is this. incredibly valuable to my own sanity, so I can help my kids soothe rather than read it out put them in a corner to scream, and but but yeah, we're not seeing that value out in the world so much and probably not in necessarily in individual relationships either.
[00:19:22] Rose Hackman: Totally. And I think, when you think about parenting, it's hard to not think about Not just the impact in the short term of helping your kids with emotion literacy, emotion regulation, motivation, but the medium to long term impact on the way in which they then will learn to be resilient, will learn to deal with difficult situations or actually difficult people, and understand how they can, calm themselves down and show up in specific ways, and show up in specific ways to forge, relationships with future loved ones as they go through life.
And I think that's one of the, there are so many, I think, pressing, urgent aspects of talking about emotional labor, but one of them is obviously thinking about, the loneliness crisis that we are in thinking about deaths of desperation that are disproportionately male, what leads people to feel isolated is often an inability to maintain and foster deep connections with other human beings.
What makes us really powerful, what makes us as mammals on this planet in many ways, what made us able to thrive is our ability to be in community with each other. We are all communal creatures, regardless of gender.
[00:20:34] Hunter: Yeah, okay, so you were saying that there's, what's the pro, the big, one of the big problems with emotional labor is the unequal distribution of it, that we're seeing it's mostly fostered on women and women are expected to maintain.
the emotional equilibrium of the workplace or whatever is happening. Can we trace that back to, obviously we're in a patriarchal system, that has to do with it, but can we trace that back to, probably, I imagine it can be traced back in some ways to the way we deal with boys and girls differently in the system.
Can we talk about how this, it is, if it's a systemic inequality, how is it reproduced? You
[00:21:17] Rose Hackman: know, one of the biggest, I think one of the biggest forms of harm that we have done when it comes to the gendered patriarchal world we live in is really cast men as just uniquely rational and women as uniquely emotional.
When so many of us, obviously, all of us, have both the ability to be rational, both, and the ability to be emotional. There is nothing exclusionary. There's a kind of a Cartesian, actually, separation of these two forms of attributes that are distinctly human, again not gendered. that we have doubled down on, especially I think in Western culture.
And it's fascinating to me because one of the contradictions at the heart of emotional labor is we will lord the people who are doing it. So we will, the kind of little value that often goes with emotional labor is like, Oh, what a self sacrificing mum, or, Oh, look at how thoughtful and kind this person is.
You might remember at the beginning of the pandemic. The pot banging for the healthcare workers, but yet we are so comfortable at the same time with basically not actually valuing those people. Healthcare workers never did get a federal raise the way that we all were talking about, the fact that they should.
Mothers continue often, Or primary parents that are often sadly still expected to only be women, depending on the family dynamic, but obviously that's slowly changing. Primary parents are like, we do not live in a society that really caters to really help parents who are parenting, who are doing that vital job of rearing the next generation.
Of Americans in this country, or just generally of citizens worldwide. So to me, that hints to a foundational principle within patriarchy, which is we actually value women only so far as they are working for the men and for the group. We pretend to value them and their time and their work, but we actually, when you look at the facts, don't.
We expect them, again, to work for the group. And I think this is a quote by Heidi, can't remember her last name, anyway, famous feminist and it's at the beginning of the book, it explains that one of the foundational principles of patriarchy is extracting labor from women for free.
And what great way of extracting labor from women to for free, what greater way than to basically tell them and tell the rest of society that they're not working at all.
[00:23:47] Hunter: Kidding. Oy. And yeah, so we're saying that the, yeah, this emotional work, this you know, caregiving work, which is highly emotional labor, is literally not valued.
It isn't. It literally is not valued. Yeah. Yeah there's
[00:24:05] Rose Hackman: and I do remember this other person's name, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, who's, I think, at Berkeley. She writes about the way in which labor has evolved. within our culture over the last, let's say, couple hundred years. And around the end of the 19th century, our way of understanding labor went from being overwhelmingly status driven to overwhelmingly part of exchanges between people.
So someone will go to work, they will experience Expect in exchange for that work to be paid or within a barter system, not in the formal workplace, someone will do a favor and put, their time to, put time into cutting down a tree for the neighbor because they know how to cut down a tree and they've got the saw for it.
And that will be seen as a kind of a favor that could be part of an exchange of an open ended mutuality, potentially. Emotional labor. The core work at the heart of care continues to be status driven. We expect people purely based on their status as women, and actually we haven't yet talked properly about race, let's say also as part of a minority race, to provide emotional labor for the majority, in power groups.
It's not really seen as something that is part of a fair exchange. It's just you woman, you're on the street, you should be smiling for me and making me feel good. That's not, I'm not gonna give anything in exchange to that woman. We're expecting her to know her place and therefore do emotional labor.
[00:25:27] Hunter: It's true I've definitely, as a young person, walked in a city street and been like, gotten the, where's your smile, why aren't you so angry, or just saying, people saying smile, does every, it's this is a thing we all get. Is it still happening? Oh my god. Yeah, it seems like
[00:25:44] Rose Hackman: it's, it is.
It's, the amount of double standards that are baked into, our language and culture. Resting bee face. There is no equivalent that we give, give to men. Men get to be authentically passively thinking without having to convey, sweet, passive kindness, which is really the feedback.
I'm someone who, when I'm, if I'm, my face is at rest, if I'm not thinking about it, people have always told me that I look, I have resting tragic face. I have I look like something's just happened to me, which it's not. I'm just like, in my head I'm thinking, but a lot of people will give you feedback.
about your emotional expression as a woman in the world. That's true. Constantly.
Yeah. And that's a way of enforcing this, this this expectation of chronic emotional labor.
[00:26:26] Hunter: So I imagine when we're, say a man and a woman are, are married or are together and they're wanting to have kids, this whole idea of the this, if the woman is, wanting to create an emotionally pleasant space in the house, which ends up being kind of emotional labor, and he's, this is all completely unconscious stuff, right?
That is happening. And then I imagine when, a child comes along, or people are wanting to have a child, there's a whole bunch of things that are also completely unconsciously happening, where, maybe it's the mom who's getting up at night, or maybe it's her who's doing all the laundry, or I don't, there's also like household labor too that's unconscious, but you're saying that, or sociologists are saying that.
That this is because, in so many ways, that woman in that relationship is, in this system, we all, women and men alike, consider her lower status, especially if she's doing the labor of staying home with the child. Tocity,
[00:27:31] Rose Hackman: one way of thinking about emotional labor is is the expectation, more broadly, that our time should be put to use for the positive experience of other people.
And I think, when you think about the household domestic labor, obviously not a lot of it isn't actual emotional labor. You're not, when you're tidying a home, you're not necessarily doing it to regulate the emotions of yourself and the people around you. Actually, a lot of the acts tied to domesticity are about someone being in charge of communal well being.
And being in charge of communal being and catering to the well being of the loved ones, let's say, in a domestic setting, that means that a lot of You do a lot of actions like you're gonna maybe, cook people's favorite moods. Try and maintain a kind of an orderly house so that people, feel calm when they come through the door.
Keep, keep tabs on exactly the laundry, doctor's appointments, school meetings, etc. Those are not necessarily emotional, in their, in, in their specificity as tasks. A lot of the time, Women, having been trained from a really young age to cater to the group, to put their time to use for other people, are going to do it for the general benefit of the group.
The expectation that women should take the high road, take one for the team. Those are all sexist expectations that are highly tied to emotional labor.
[00:28:55] Hunter: So interesting, because I feel like one of the things that I helped, that is just letting people know that you, yeah, like you're taking care of yourself is the foundation for any kind of, emotional regulation, which is so funny.
Cause that's also an emotional labor. I don't know, this whole thing actually is making me think about all the words the work that I've done, like in the book Raising Good Humans and things like that, to regulate my emotions. And that feeling, it actually makes this idea that the feeling of failure I had, It puts it in a new light, like I may have been underscored by this idea and this expectation that I should be able to cater to the group.
And because I was struggling with my temper and my anger, maybe it was doubly felt shameful because as the mom in the house, I should be the like sweet, calm, Loving one, and I wasn't. And I don't know if I ever was, though. I don't know if I got the message from a really young age to cater to the group.
And then when I was a teenager, I was punished for that from my father. But as a young kid, I, it was like, oh great, you're a little tomboy, that's great, be independent, do all these things, you're, whatever. But then as you got, as I got to be a teenager, it was like why are you not catering to my emotions as The volatile male in the household.
I don't know, there's a lot I'm having realizations about here, Rose. I feel, it sounds like
[00:30:26] Rose Hackman: you're getting through what I went through those first few months after I was given this assignment. It's oh, I thought this was boring. This is actually blowing my mind. And all of these, the more I dig, the more I I'm like having these aha moments.
Yeah. You mentioned volatile tempers. That's, that's one of, One of the ones that I find the most heartbreaking because domestic abuse is and I'm not saying this is at all what you were referring to, but just generally speaking, domestic abuse sadly is still a huge part of the private lives of millions of people.
mostly women, not just, but it is overwhelmingly women. And, learning to manage volatile tempers and male moods is part of that really negative emotional labor that so many of us learn to do, honestly, as a way of survival. And there are all sorts of consequences about that kind of survival.
emotional labor that feel, specifically unfair because we're in some ways being asked to modulate the impact of trauma that's being inflicted on us. But in some ways, the emotional labor ends up being a way in which we participate in this. And I'm absolutely not facing blame here, but it often does make these very complicated, difficult cycles.
It's much more, much harder to disentangle and make sense of because we become part of this dance of high temper, motivating energy, for example.
[00:31:49] Hunter: So as you started to do this work, what did you mind sharing? What did you realize about yourself and in this whole cycle?
[00:31:56] Rose Hackman: So much, one of the, one of the things that was really foundational for me as I got going with the book, was really understanding that this was not about gender, this was about power.
And a great way in which I try and illustrate that to people who might not immediately see it, is if you think of an amorphous corporation, It would make sense that, for example, the person at the very top doesn't really have to regulate their emotions. They can be, do whatever, say, they can laugh, they can cry, they can shout if they want to.
It's their company. But as you go down let's say a senior associate will maybe not have to do as much emotional labor as the intern, but they'll certainly have to be deferential and thoughtful to the person above them, their boss. And then the intern is really not going to be able to do much, authentic, unfiltered emotion dysregulation if they want to.
They're going to probably have to do a lot of emotional labor. But if you complicate that kind of, very overgeneralizing structure and you put gender and race and class, orientation, ability, ability slash disability into there. If you complicate it with that, you're going to see that the power comes out in different ways.
So a senior associate who, let's say, is a black man is probably almost definitely not going to be able to get away with the same kind of unfilteredness. that a male white colleague is going to be able to get away with. And so from a personal perspective, I started off this book in many ways very privileged to have this book deal, to have been working for a newspaper like The Guardian, and it forced me to really contend with the complex identities that I am at the intersection of, and understand that I am writing a book as a woman, but also as a white woman, as a white British woman.
I live in Detroit, which is an overwhelmingly black city. There's a lot of ways in which I have to do emotional labor for some people, but a lot of people around me are going to feel like they have to do emotional labor for me. And, I think that's the complicated, those are the complicated conversations that we so need to have, I think, in this country, in this world.
where being maybe victimized in some sense by an inequality in one direction doesn't absolve you from taking accountability for maybe how much space you're being given for no good reason in another space and how other people think that they should defer to you. because of the color of your skin, or actually in my case, I get a lot of I get a lot of really free kudos that doesn't make any sense for my British accent in the States.
Of course, yes. It's very high status to have your British accent. I'm like, the people are like, I love your accent. I'm like, 70 million other people have it, but I, thank you. Yeah, talk about unearned privilege,
[00:34:33] Hunter: right? I just grew up in a place and I sound like this.
[00:34:38] Rose Hackman: To be honest, I grew up thinking the American accent was really cool because of course, we grew up watching American television and, Hollywood and, Full House and the Cosby Show and so for us it was like, wow, we were looking at the, this incredible America from abroad.
So I think the American accent still, to me, sounds really sophisticated and cool.
[00:34:58] Hunter: Oh good. Then we both think each other sounds like really cool right now. That's great. It's mutual admiration. Oh my goodness. There's so much here, and I imagine to your listener that you're taking some of this in and thinking about Oh, okay, where am I, where do I stand in this?
What kind of emotional labor am I doing? Are the people around me doing any emotional labor for me? Are they doing enough emotional labor for me? Are they doing more than my, my, more than their share, for me? Yeah, for me, it's really interesting to think of my husband, he is a people pleaser, and I'm more the I'm a little bit more the volatile one, and, stay tuned for more Mindful Parenting podcasts right after this break.
[00:36:31] Hunter: For people who are having these realizations do you have any thoughts on what it means for us individually, but then also when we think about this and how we're raising our boys and our girls, any thoughts on that as well?
[00:36:48] Rose Hackman: I think that because I'm imagining your listeners might be more thinking.
Oh my gosh, how much have I taken on because this is a parenting oriented podcast. Very like list, yeah. And I think I would invite people to be kind to themselves as they, if they are having sets of realizations or if they're on a journey as they do, disentangle what's been forced onto them versus what they've chosen to do.
But also take great pride in how much value, so many of us, so many of you out there are creating that value might not be systemically always marked, but it's still there and a lot of us know it. And part of this journey to me in terms of finally really giving emotional labor its visibility and its due.
is by, seeing it, admitting it's real. Emotional labor, just like every other form of work, takes time, effort, and skill to be performed. You talked about regulating your kids emotions, or the act of regulating kids emotions. That takes time. At the beginning you were saying this feels a bit abstract, and it did to me too at the very beginning too, but once you start understanding, it from a perspective that it takes time, effort, and skill, just like every other form of work, that it's creating value just like every other form of work, arguably more, even as, especially with automation, you're actually marking this form of work as real, as valuable, and therefore you're marking what your experience through this world as real and valuable.
And as for the boys, at the very beginning of the book, really in chapter one, I wanted to do this at the top of the book. I, my husband's here the top of the book, I really wanted to make sure that I unpacked a lot of, stereotypes that people have about women being emotional and men not being emotional.
And I bring in so much, so many studies from neuroscience and psychology. that really point out that as humans, we all have the ability to, we actually all experience our emotion, the world through our five senses, through our emotions. We all have the ability to be empaths. Actually, we have equal ability to be empaths.
We're just not rewarded in the same way, and we're not policed or encouraged in the same way. So as, people are parenting girls, boys, I think what's important to remember is the skills, the abilities are all there. It's just one gender is getting a lot of negative feedback for being emotional in our society, and that's not fair on the boys.
It's not fair on the boys that we expect them to suppress all their emotion, that we only really let them, maybe be silent and stoic or angry. And it's certainly, it's wonderful on the girls that we let them be, have their full emotionality in some ways. But they certainly should not feel from a young age that they should be carrying the weight of their world on their shoulders.
[00:39:38] Hunter: Yeah, they don't have to smile for Grandpa. No, unless they want
[00:39:43] Rose Hackman: to, grandpa's gotta earn that smile. Hey, is he smiling though? Yeah,
[00:39:49] Hunter: he was. He was smiling. He was happy to see them, but that's nice. Yeah. I think that's really important to underscore. And, it's interesting because, dear listener we had Ruth Whitman talking about what boys need on the podcast, talking about how In fact, boys are, in some ways need more emotional intelligence and, et cetera, as young, as babies, toddlers, and preschoolers than girls do, right?
They may need even more And, yeah, I love this for girls are, and this is a question we can ask ourselves am I expecting my child to be nice all the time? My, especially my girl, right? Am I expecting my girl to be the peacekeeper or et cetera? And I think these are really important questions to ask ourselves because Yeah, those expectations, even unspoken, if we're not aware of them, they're coming out through us, in one way or another, I imagine.
[00:40:48] Rose Hackman: Definitely. Absolutely.
[00:40:51] Hunter: Yeah. Okay. And what do we think about conversations? Do we have you had some difficult conversations? Have you heard about people having some difficult conversations with the people around them? After reading your book? Yes,
[00:41:05] Rose Hackman: I will say and actually This is one of my husband Andrew's lines is he says to his, to when we meet couples where the woman is reading this book, he's the equivalent of a bomb has gone off in your family in terms of understanding the world and you just got to be patient as, as your wife moves through this.
The truth is, I think that There's been an interesting kind of difference generationally, I would say. A lot of women from a lot of different backgrounds have gotten in touch with me over the last year and a half to say thank you for making basically a kind of a nagging deep sense of unfairness and inequality make sense and bringing all of these different strands together because I think emotional labor brings so many different strands.
From our personal lives, our professional lives, being out in the world as women, as well as being, at home and in fact with family. And it seems like for a lot of people that has been incredibly helpful and validating, I will say that sometimes I hear back from older women and it's just, and I hear back that it's tough.
It's very tough because I think to have a form of work marked as valuable, but also extracted and then to reflect back maybe on many decades of unfairness and extraction can obviously be quite confronting, but I am very hopeful, and I, as much as I try and be unflinching in this book and in my research, generally, I am very hopeful that there is so much possibility for change, so much possibility for transformation.
We know one of the best things, really, from the neuroscience is Unlike what they say about old dogs and new tricks, you can teach humans to grow and evolve and not just see things in a different way, but develop new skills. There is so much possibility, I think, for better relationships that are not extractive, better relationships that have open ended mutuality at the heart of them, including, straight relationships.
Between men and women. There's a whole chapter in the book about, what's about the men, which is it's actually called What's About the Men, about boys and men. And it's called that because I used to get so many comments when I did write about gender in The Guardian from men who were like it's not easy for us either.
And of course it's not, this current system, is not fair on women, but it's certainly not fair on men either. And there is a lot of possibility for positive growth better connection, higher quality lives for men, willing to grapple with the realities of emotional labor, not just women.
[00:43:37] Hunter: Yeah. I could see all that. Absolutely. It's interesting because in Mindful Parenting as a year, it occurred to me that for a lot of For a lot of moms and some dads, one of the things I teach them is a mantra, which is not my problem. And I guess that's a way of helping them put some boundaries around having to intercede in every single issue their kids have, basically do the emotional labor for their kids.
And to, and it's really hard for some people to do that. But then on the converse side, we're teaching also ways to respond empathetically. to people. Others regulate their emotions, but when to do what is that's the discussion we're having a lot in Mindful Parenting.
It's really fascinating.
[00:44:21] Rose Hackman: Totally, and I think that's actually what came up when you were talking about, your own journey grappling with this as a topic. One of the amazing aspects, I think, of saying emotional labor is visible and has value, once you render it real, visible, and value, a form of work that takes time, effort, and skill, whether it's being remunerated or not.
You can see that you can treat it as finite. So much of why we're hard on ourselves, or we're hard on women generally as a society, is because we think that they should be infinitely putting their time to work for other people and anything less than infinite than 24 hours a day is not enough.
Is, you are on call emotionally for the people reliant on you 24 7 in a world where we don't see or value emotional labor and yet we require it constantly, from so many women, right? But once you actually see it as real, you can start to share it. You can also say, this is the limit, I'm not taking, I'm not going to be waking up in the night, tonight, because I am not infinitely at the service of our children.
Ideally you can take one life like that, or whatever it is for whatever household makes sense. And so then, ideally, once you've placed boundaries on the way in which you are going to be providing emotional labor, then when you are providing emotional labor, you But, you're really good at it because you've actually refilled some of your tank.
You're not just constantly running on empty. Yes. Yes, sister.
[00:45:51] Hunter: All right. All right. This is awesome. This has been such a great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Rose Hackman's book is “Emotional Labor: the Invisible Work Reshaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power”. You can find it anywhere books are sold. Rose, thank you so much for coming on the Mindful Parenting podcast.
If people want to reach out and find you or if you have any last words hit the listener with it right now.
[00:46:19] Rose Hackman: Oh, I'm @rose.hackwoman on Instagram, because @Rose.hackman is on Instagram. Was taken when I thought that sounded cool, but I am on tiktok @rose.hackwoman I have a newsletter that is about to be resuscitated, which is EmotionalLabor.substack. com. Thank you so much for having me, it's been such a wonderful conversation.
[00:46:37] Hunter: It's been really powerful, I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Did you discover that you're doing a lot of emotional labor in your family? I discovered that I do, actually the emotional labor in my family is pretty, I think it's pretty evenly distributed. I think I do some emotional labor for my daughters, but my husband does a lot of emotional labor for me, which is really interesting.
But then I discovered that I end up doing a lot of emotional labor in other relationships, which is so interesting. So I know this episode, can give you a lot of food for thought. I do recommend text this episode to a friend who could use it. And if you like this episode, you can check out episode number 457, Mom Enough with Rachel Marie Martin.
And, you also may like episode number 407, What Are the Signs of Burnout with Mara Glatzel. And, yeah, thank you so much for listening. I hope this was helpful for you, and I hope you have a good week. Next week, we will be back, as always, in your inbox with an episode with Leonie Ackendore about being a high achiever to becoming an anxious mom.
So be sure to tune in to that episode and I will be here again for you. And we're going to have an awesome re listen in the interim as well. So check those out and I hope this podcast is a great resource for you. I hope it helps you water your good seeds, and I hope it helps you make your family grow better, more at ease, and more peaceful.
All that stuff. Wishing you all the best, and I will talk to you again real soon. Thanks for listening. Namaste.
[00:48:34] Mindful Mama Member: I'd say definitely do it. It's really helpful. It will change your relationship with your kids for the better. It will help you communicate better. And just, I'd say communicate better as a person, as a wife, as a spouse. It's been really a positive influence in our lives. Definitely do it. I'd say definitely do it. It's so worth it. The money really is inconsequential when you get so much benefit from being a better parent to your children and feeling like you're connecting more with them and not feeling like you're yelling all the time or you're like, why isn't things working? I would say definitely do it. It's so worth it. It'll change you. No matter what age someone's child is, it's a great opportunity for personal growth and it's a great investment in someone's day. You can continue in your old habits that aren't working, or you can learn some new tools and gain some perspective to shift everything in your parenting.
[00:49:37] Hunter: Are you frustrated by parenting? Do you listen to the experts and try all the tips and strategies, but you're just not seeing the results that you want? Or are you lost as to where to start? Does it all seem so overwhelming with too much to learn? Are you yearning for community people who get it, who also don't want to threaten and punish to create cooperation?
Hi, I'm Hunter Clarke-Fields, and if you answered yes to any of these questions, I want you to seriously consider the Mindful Parenting membership. You will be joining hundreds of members who have discovered the path of mindful parenting and now have confidence and clarity in their parenting. This isn't just another parenting class.
This is an opportunity to really discover your unique, lasting relationship, not only with your children, but with yourself. It will translate into lasting, connected relationships, not only with your children, but your partner too. Let me change your life. Go to MindfulParentingCourse.com to add your name to the wait list so you will be the first to be notified when I open the membership for enrollment. I look forward to seeing you on the inside. MindfulParentingCourse.com
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