We’re thrilled to announce our latest venture: The Family Dinner Project Podcast! In each of our 30-minute episodes, Content Manager Bri DeRosa and Executive Director Dr. Anne Fishel will talk through tough topics related to family meals. Pull up a chair and grab a plate — we’re serving up real talk about family dinner! You can get caught up on older episodes here. 

On this episode of The Family Dinner Project Podcast, Bri and Annie dive into the difficulties of domestic labor — who’s doing what, who bears the brunt of making family dinners happen, and what can be done about uneven distributions of labor in our households.

Taking on the cultural criticism of family meals as anti-feminist, Annie points out that the role of The Family Dinner Project has always been to try to encourage people not to create perfect, retro-style family meals that require women to spend hours in the kitchen doing all the work. Instead, the goal is to create meaningful and joyful experiences where everyone contributes, and we work towards building families where the kids will grow up with the ability to take ownership of dinner-related tasks — regardless of gender and outdated expectations.

Bri remembers speaking with fatherhood expert Dr. Anthony Chambers about the shifting roles of men in two-parent households, and she and Annie discuss whether there is a new trend towards men sharing the load. They agree that while the face of domestic labor has changed, and men are definitely contributing more than in generations past, there’s still a lot of ground to cover on the invisible labor front. Annie shares thoughts on how couples might navigate discussions around more equitable division of household chores, while Bri points out that help can be found in many places — kids, friends, neighbors, and creating a broader “village.”

They finish the episode by recommending listeners check out this list of “no-fail” dinner ideas that can be delegated to other members of the household; these grocery store scavenger hunts for both younger kids and teenagers; and the graphic below, with helpful prompts for couples who want to plan for a more egalitarian household routine.

Episode Transcript:

Bri DeRosa: Welcome back to The Family Dinner Project Podcast. I’m Bri DeRosa. And joining me as always is my colleague, Dr. Anne Fishel. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Good morning. Great to be with you, Bri. 

Bri DeRosa: Great to have you back, Annie. And I, I am so excited for this conversation. This is one that– I feel like you and I have had this conversation a lot over the years, kind of behind the scenes.

And today we’re going to air it out. We are going to talk today about the division of household labor, and the idea that seems to be persisting out there that family dinners are sort of a tyrannical, patriarchal, anti feminist kind of thing. There’s a lot swirling around this, and I want us to clear the air, basically.

So let’s start with the fact that, Look, it’s back to school season, and this is exactly the time of year when this kind of thing really comes up for people. And right now, parents are having to really plan and get back into the idea of a strict calendar and organization. And people really tend to take this on as we need to get family dinner set up for the year, right?

And who’s doing, in most households, who’s doing the majority of that thinking and planning?

Dr. Anne Fishel: So, that’s a, I know that’s a rhetorical question. 

Bri DeRosa: But… 

Dr. Anne Fishel: So I want to, I want to kind of plant a stake here on behalf of The Family Dinner Project. Because Yes, while it’s true that women still bear the brunt or do the lion’s share of family dinner planning all the, all the invisible labor– and we’ll talk more about that– it’s really been important to me as, you know, for the last 15 years being involved with The Family Dinner Project, to say that The Family Dinner Project is not a nostalgia project. Like we’re not trying to go back to the days of yore, when women were in the kitchen and men were just expected to show up for dinner. When women, you know, the portrayals of women in the kitchen was a spotless kitchen and spending hours making a roast brisket.

You know, that ship has sailed and we’re very much about thinking anew about family dinner. So that the labor is shared as much as possible, and there’s lots of labor to go around. You know, it’s not just the cooking, but it’s the planning. It’s the grocery shopping. It’s the keeping up with how kids’ tastes change from week to week, from day to day.

It’s you know, telling the dog to stop begging at the dinner table, it’s telling jokes, it’s, you know, cleaning up, it’s serving. There’s lots to go around. So, you know, I think that’s been a big part of The Family Dinner Project is trying to involve everybody and also to make it a lighter lift for whoever is doing the main, the lion’s share, which it continues to be women, even though over the last 30 years men have doubled the amount of time they spend cooking and helping out and, you know, being involved in family dinners. I think the invisible labor, even in the most egalitarian families, tends to fall on, on women. 

Bri DeRosa: You know, invisible labor has been part of the the rising conversation over the past several years, certainly. I call it the brain hamster, right? The little guy who runs on the wheel all night when you wake up at 3 a. m. And you can’t get back to sleep. That brain hamster is going, and it’s all the stuff that the brain hamster is generating, right? 

So it’s, it’s not just kind of what are we having for dinner? That is, you know, thinking about and planning what are we having for dinner is one thing, but thinking about and planning, you know, what are we having for dinner? And then like, what, what is the leftover situation going to be? And will the leftovers translate well to lunches for the family? Will the adults in the family be able to take those leftovers or do I need to plan for buying something else for those adults to bring to work for lunch, right? Or to heat up while they’re working?

Or will the kids take those leftovers in a thermos or a lunchbox or whatever? And is that even something that they like or that will translate well to school lunch? Okay, and then what do I need to buy to fill the gaps? And to your point, will the five year old still like this dinner that I made? What do I need to have to safeguard against the five year old deciding that this favorite dinner is a no longer eaten dinner?

And you know, do we have all of the clean dishes that we need to make that dinner? Did I unload the dishwasher? Do we need to, oh, you know what? Do we have dishwashing detergent? I need to make a list. I need to run to Target. When am I going to do that? I can do it during soccer practice if this lines up right. All of that stuff is the invisible labor. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. And I would just add a psychological piece to that. Which is when things don’t go smoothly, when you wake up and there’s no milk in the refrigerator for cereal, it’s the mom usually who gets blamed for that. Or mom who feels, Oh gosh, I fell down on the job.

Bri DeRosa: Yes, you know, it’s so funny you say that, because literally this, this past spring I dropped my older son off at his violin lesson and I was chatting with his violin teacher very quickly before, you know, you know, before I, I walked away and I had my work bag over my shoulder because I was going to be sitting in the lobby doing catching up on work, right? Catching up on emails and things while he was doing his thing. 

And I said to my son in front of the teacher, okay, but if I’m not here when your lesson ends, just wait patiently because I have to run to Target because we ran out of milk unexpectedly and Target’s around the corner. So I’m just going to go do a quick run. Grab some milk. And do you need anything else? Did you need school supplies? I know you said you were out of pencils, right? Did that whole thing. And the violin teacher looked at me with this tiny smile and she said, The family’s out of milk, and oh, of course that’s your job, too. And I thought, oh, okay, you got me, right?

It’s not– and it’s not that my husband is not involved, right? It’s not that he’s, like, some bad guy who’s not trying. It’s just, I think the the nature of the mental load is that it tends to sit in the province of one person because it is so iterative, right? It is so… everything follows on one thought after one thought after one thought, so unless you very deliberately work together to architect a different way to do this, It’s going to kind of live in one person’s brain.

We talked to a few years ago, during the pandemic or right after the pandemic, we talked to Dr. Anthony Chambers. He is a fatherhood expert. He’s at the Northwestern Family Institute. That was a great conversation that I had with him. And we wrote it up on our blog and I’ll put the link in the show notes for people.

But we asked him, can he kind of orient us to the big picture around how COVID especially changed the role of fathers, right? How that role has been shifting over time, because it has been. And we asked him about, you know, it seemed that there were men in many households who were stepping into different roles and different responsibilities related to domestic life, including the meal planning or the shopping or the cooking or aspects of the mental load.

Largely because of the pandemic. And I think that there was some optimism at that point in time that maybe that COVID shift had sort of permanently changed gender based household roles. I’m not sure that that’s actually what happened broadly. So I’m going to ask you, have you seen a lasting change in the division of labor amongst the couples that you work with?

And has there really been a shift?

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah, I don’t really know that the answer to that question. I did some research about family dinners during the pandemic and what families expected of themselves after the pandemic. And what I learned there is that family dinners became much more frequent, and kids and male partners were more involved with those family dinners.

And as the frequency increased, families found that they enjoyed family dinners and predicted that they were going to continue having more of them, even when they could go to restaurants and get takeout. And I think that to me, that’s the biggest change that happened from the pandemic, is that family dinners became more frequent, more prevalent, more appealing to more families.

As far as the gender balance, I don’t know yet. I think it’s going to, you know, there’ll have to be some studies to look at that. Anecdotally. I haven’t really seen that. And certainly the last nut to crack is that invisible labor. You know, I think that men are leaning in more at home to help, you know, with making meals happen, but the, the hamster wheel, I’m not sure that that has been shared. I don’t know if, two little hamsters are running around at 3 a. m. 

Bri DeRosa: I think I’m really glad that you’re, you’re pointing this up, right? What happened, what seems to have happened is that we reinvigorated our love for family dinner, right? And we saw… you know, there were articles during the pandemic about like CEOs who were like, Oh my gosh, I’m actually home with my family to have dinner. And it’s completely changed my outlook on work and life and balance and, you know, all of those things. So yes, people, people realized that they love to have dinner with their families. They realized that there was value in this activity. They pulled together a little bit more to make that happen. And now the circumstances are back to what they were before, making it harder to do that for many people. 

Secondly, we still exist in this place of mental load, right? And certainly over the years we’ve seen, and people have sent us– pointedly– a number of articles, op eds, think pieces. I sent you one the other day that was even just a survey about how the difference in the way that people handle the mental load at home is killing relationships, right?

That was the headline. We’ve, people have sent us the 2013 thing, the tyranny of the family dinner, right? Like all of these things, people are still talking about how this is unfair to women. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. 

Bri DeRosa: And, and there’s been this crazy huge cultural phenomenon lately with the rise of the trad wife influencer, which is kind of the opposite of all of this.

This is the woman who is leaning into domesticity and saying, it’s fine if it’s all on me. That’s my job. That’s my role. I am supposed to be providing beautiful from scratch family dinners, you know, and this is the person who probably is going so far as to raise their own chickens and, you know, grow their own vegetables and make their fresh sourdough every day.

And I’m not throwing shade at that. If that’s the life that you want and you architect for yourself and that works for you, that’s great. But we’re seeing this huge push and pull between these two very different forces around the idea of domestic labor and dinner and providing for a family. But really what we’re trying to do is say, either way, let’s let it be a conscious choice.

Let’s let you and your partner really deconstruct what works for you and for your family and move forward along that path, without guilt, without resentment, and without somebody feeling really burnt out by all of of the choices that are being made. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. 

Bri DeRosa: So, how do we do that? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: So, I’m not sure, but I’m going to throw out a couple couple of ideas that aren’t at one end of the pole or the other.

So one idea, and this again comes from research, which is, I often lean on for inspiration, is that family dinners are good for adults, too. Good for their mental health to eat with other people. It’s good for their physical health. Adults tend to eat more fruits and vegetables when they eat with their kids or eat with other people. And so, kind of keeping that in mind, I think, takes us a little bit out of this kind of oppression, family dinners as oppressive to women or family dinners as sort of supporting the patriarchy. I mean, this is sort of a third way of thinking about it. The family dinners are really good for everybody, and therefore it would be great if everybody could contribute to making them happen. 

So that’s one, one thought I just want to throw out. The other is the sort of, the work of, if there, if you’re in a partnership, having ongoing conversations about what you prefer to do, what you’re good at. And continuing to kind of work that out with your partner so that it’s not.. The gender roles aren’t defined by default. 

I think gay couples have a much easier time with this when it comes to domestic labor, because they can each choose to do the part of family meal planning or cooking or cleaning or, you know, all the other domestic work, the part that fits them, that suits them, that they’re good at, that they are drawn to.

And I think heterosexual couples could sort of take a page out of that that notebook. And not assume that in every relationship, the woman will do the cooking and the man will do the cleaning or, you know, however, it might go. And then, you know, there there are other parts of figuring out a fair and equitable division, which is a little less tangible, which is the kind of the norms that each member brings from their own family.

So one member might have grown up where the, there was grocery shopping that was done on one day, and all the meals were planned. You know, it was meatball Monday and it was taco Tuesday. And in another family, it was much more catch as catch can. And you could imagine that that couple will need to negotiate what’s going to be our sort of culture around meals. Are we gonna really be very planful? Are we going to allow for more spontaneity? Are we going to be a family that is vegan? Are we going to be a family that cooks hamburgers a couple nights for those who eat red meat and, you know, continues to be vegetarian for everybody else?

So those things I think also would benefit from being aired out within a family. 

Bri DeRosa: I think that’s all so useful and I want to pin down something that, you know, you’ve, you’ve kind of mentioned here that’s also an implication in all of this, which is so much of this is our programming. It’s how we were raised.

It’s the things that we saw around us, the things that were spoken and unspoken. Skill level runs to this, right? And it’s something that, you know, really does need to be worked out because to your point about heterosexual couples and, you know, households where you have a traditional male and female role or the opportunity for that, sometimes we fall into that because we weren’t actually raised to do it differently. 

So there are a lot of men out there who were not taught to plan meals, grocery shop, cook, and clean. Because they grew up in families where the idea was just not being aired out that boys and men should do those things, right? They maybe were taught to have strengths in other areas, car repair, yard work, right? Those more traditionally masculine things. And so now they’re in a marriage where maybe they have a partner who’s going, no, I really need you to pick up some of the slack in the kitchen because our life looks very different to what our parents lives looked like. And I can’t do this by myself. And they don’t, they literally don’t have the skills. Right? 

And so how do we then architect around that as couples, without there being resentment and anger? And we, we have to recognize that we’re coming from this place of you weren’t taught, we weren’t programmed that way. And now we need to come to some other, more equitable way to manage this. Right. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yeah. I mean, I think it can be a kind of a creative project for a couple to figure that out each other and to think anew about it. But it’s, it’s hard, it’s much easier to just defer to the comfortable roles that you came into the relationship with.

I think in my own, of my own long marriage, when my husband and I first got together. Neither of us had great cooking skills. He would make the tuna ghetti pea and I would make a quiche and we’d like, alternate night to night. But as the years went on, I found I love to cook and really like leaned into that, and his skills never developed. And I don’t even think he could make tuna ghetti pea today, nor would we want to eat it today. 

And I think it becomes almost a a dance that some couples do. As I got better, he stopped trying. And I could have at some point said to him, hey, you know those eggs you make for breakfast? How about making them for dinner? Or you can follow a recipe, you know, would you, would you make dinner tonight, but it was much easier just to kind of do the roles that that suited us best. So he’s done all the cleaning for many, many years, all the dishes. 

Bri DeRosa: I think there’s a real, there’s a real thing there where we do have to acknowledge that we write our own roles, right? To a certain extent. And if we want to change them, we really have to have that conversation. And, you know, similarly to you, now, I came into our relationship with a lot of cooking skills.

And I already loved to cook and I was raised to cook and I was already hosting dinner parties in college and, you know, grad school. Like I, I was, I was a cook. But you know, my, my husband was never kind of invited into the kitchen, ushered into the kitchen, and, and shown how to do these things. We joke that his specialty is grilled cheese.

So, when we were getting married, he sat down with me and he said, If you are willing to continue feeding me like this every night, if that’s okay with you, I will do the dishes every night. I will do the cleaning, right? And so that’s one easy, in your household, in my household, it’s one easy way to make sure that the labor gets divided.

But there’s also kind of a different thing going on now where we now live in an era, and my teenage sons have pointed this out, and my husband is like, yep, okay, I get it. Where they’ve said, hey, dad, you know, there’s no excuse for anybody not knowing how to do stuff these days because we live in the age of YouTube. And if you don’t know how to grill a burger, you don’t know how to cook pasta. You don’t know how to make rice. There is a video for that. Literally, somebody will walk you through that. And so I think we are in an age where things can change a little bit more readily if people choose to take that approach.

And, and by the way, I mentioned my, my kids, your partner is not the only person in the household who can help. Right? And that’s something else that we need to air out is that we do, we’ve been talking about division of labor and invisible labor and partnership, as if, by the way, everybody has a partner. And I should, we should have called out earlier, many, many people do not. 

But also, you have the opportunity to change the way that the labor of dinner falls upon your shoulders, not just through your children and other members of the household, but I also want to point out, we’ve worked with a lot of like military families over the years, who frequently solve these issues by leaning on each other and creating villages and asking each other like, hey, we’re all, you know, maybe we’re all military spouses with our spouses deployed for a year, a year and a half at a time. And it’s really hard to keep this going as individuals, individual households.

We’re going to create a dinner swap system. We are going to, everybody’s going to rotate hosting, or we’re going to have like freezers full of meals that we make for each other. We’re going to have, at one point I heard of a community that did a soup swap. Everybody made, on a Sunday, different big pots of different types of soup and they packaged it up for each family and then everybody had like freezers full of soup. And you could make soup and grilled cheese when you were, you know, strapped for time.

So there are lots of different ways to go about this, right? It’s not just about making things different with your partner, if you have one. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Right. Yeah, those military families were really inspiring. I remember one, one group of military families divided into groups of four or five, and on Monday they would each make five times one dinner and then they would meet up and trade, and so they would leave the dinner swap with five different meals. And they would put them in the freezer and have them for the week. Now it takes a certain level of organization that I know I don’t have, but it, it does sort of open things up that it’s not just an individual. It doesn’t have to be an individual family solution. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah. And, and in fact, maybe if it’s not just an individual family solution, it may actually be better for us in the long run, right?

If you think about the opportunity to say, Hey, maybe we’re not going to go to that level of organization, but maybe it’s, you know, every Friday night, somebody in our neighborhood takes a turn hosting. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes. 

Bri DeRosa: And so now family dinner has become framily dinner, friends and family. And we are now opening up that shared meal paradigm where it’s, we have more of the benefits of decreasing loneliness, more of the social benefits, more of the village benefits that I think are really lacking in modern life, for so many of us, we are really disconnected from a village these days. And the opportunity to solve a pain point in a way that opens our village is maybe something that we should all be thinking more about. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Yes, bring back more potluck dinners. That’s another way of sharing the load, you know, with Another family or a couple of other families or —

Bri DeRosa: yeah. Like, you know, Hey, every Sunday afternoon you know, one family is going to handle the burgers, dogs and chicken, and they’ll throw it on the grill and everybody else brings the sides and the drinks and the paper plates and the whatever. Right? There’s something about that that says, hey, we are all in this together. We are all part of a shared community, a shared problem solving opportunity, and we all care about each other to the extent that we’re going to solve this together. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: It’s what I think we also try to do with our community dinners. Bring a bunch of families together and and cook together and eat together and share what what’s hard about making dinner happen. And the families talk about their work arounds. And that also kind of conveys the spirit that it’s not just your unique problem that you have, you know, picky eaters or difficult schedule, but it’s a shared, you know, families are struggling with this across the country and there are a lot of creative ideas right here that can be shared.

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. You know, we really do try to model this for people, right? That if you’re not good at this, if you don’t know how to do this, we’re going to show you kind of how to share in this community spirit and how to do this in a way that feels rewarding, right? Because that’s really what it comes down to.

The whole point of family meals, I want to just drive this home for people. The whole point of family meals is not just to get everybody fed, right? The whole point of family meals, the reason that they’re good for us is the social emotional benefits, all of the mental health benefits, all of the bonding benefits.

The whole point is to relax and have a good time and connect and communicate, right? And if, if you’re doing family dinner in a way that doesn’t allow for that connection and relaxation and communication and bonding, and it doesn’t feel rewarding because one person is kind of seething with resentment every night, there’s something there that needs to be fixed. 

There’s a lot to digest here, but I want to move on to our episode ending food fun and conversation, which is what we do at the end of every episode. So I’m going to kick it off this time. And I think in terms of food, my biggest suggestion is to plan one night every week where dinner is just explicitly not the job of the person who usually handles it.

If you have a household where one person does the majority of the planning and creating of meals, you need to start planning one night where it’s not their job. You can rotate the responsibility amongst family members or, you know, pull in a dinner village, or you can literally just draw the line in the sand and say that like, hey, Thursday night, the primary feeding person is not doing the feeding. Solve that any way you will. You can solve it with takeout. It can be the night where your 11 year old heats up the nuggets from the freezer and takes out the bag salad kit and creates dinner for everybody, right, at their level. Or we have a short list of quote, unquote “no fail” dinner ideas that we’ve put together for this episode.

It’s on our site, you can find it in the show notes. You can say, you know what, this is the list. Every week, somebody in the family needs to pick from this list and make that dinner happen, but it’s not my job. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: I love that, Bri. It’s no fail dinners. 

Bri DeRosa: No fail dinners. Just, they’re, they’re things that are just, these are literally so simple.

You cannot possibly not be able to create this. Right.

Dr. Anne Fishel: Great. And a teenager could do them too. 

Bri DeRosa: A teenager could do them. A really, you know, well put together middle schooler or upper elementary schooler could do most of them. 

So, Annie, fun. What’s your suggestion? 

Dr. Anne Fishel: So, I think part of the answer, or part of the solution to changing how division of labor happens, is in the next generation. Is bringing kids into the kitchen, into the process of budgeting, planning.

And so we have a game called the grocery scavenger hunt. We have a teen edition and we have a edition for younger kids, and this is things like teens going to the grocery store and picking out the cheapest vegetable or figuring out the cost of their favorite snack food or picking something that they would like to learn how to cook or looking for a protein source that’s under two dollars. So it’s in a fun way, okay, teaching, you know, the cost of things and the planning and and grocery shopping. And, you know, I think that’s sort of where the hope of the future is, is helping our kids lean in and become engaged in the feeding process. 

Bri DeRosa: Yeah, I love that. And that’s such a great one.

And, and for the little kids, you know, it starts basic. It’s like, Hey, you know, find a new fruit or vegetable that you’ve never tried, or look for something red. Right. And just getting, building the familiarity with grocery stores and the whole shopping process and looking for things and really evaluating your choices. Yeah, that’s a great one. I love that. Good, good suggestion. 

And then for conversation, you know, we’ve, we’ve talked around this in this episode, but I think, you know, we want to encourage people to really have the discussion with your partner, ask the questions, don’t assume, right? And so we have, we’re here to help.

We have lists of these types of conversations, the questions that you should be asking each other around You know, what are we good at? What do we want to prioritize? What do we actually care about in terms of creating family meal structures, right? Because everybody’s going to have different priorities and different things that they think are important.

How do we get on the same page? So to, to help with that, we have some lists. You can find them on our social media. And again, we’ll link them in the show notes, but all the kinds of different questions that you should be asking each other to uncover that, you know, that childhood programming. So. We want everybody to have those conversations and call your partners in or call your family in, right?

Call in the people that you live with and, and work together to create solutions that make this not a fully gendered thing, not a fully one person job, but a shared joyful responsibility where we communally feed each other because eating dinner together is worth it. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Well said. 

Bri DeRosa: Well, thank you. And as always, it has been a delight to talk to you.

I feel like this is a topic we could pick the bones of for hours. So thank you for having the conversation. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Thank you, Bri. 

Bri DeRosa: All right. Take care and join us next time on The Family Dinner Project podcast. 

Dr. Anne Fishel: Bye bye.