Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday
May twenty fifth, twenty twenty six, and I'm the host
of the show, Doctor Kara Santa Maria, and as always,
before we dive in, I want to thank those of
you who make Talk Nerdy possible. Remember, this show is
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week's talk patrons include Chuck Blell, David J. E. Smith,
Daniel Lang, Mary Neva, Will Defrain, David Compton, Brian Holden, Gabo,
Jay Ulrika Hagman, Pasquale, Jilati, Rika Maharaj and Joe Wilkinson.
Thank you all so much, so let's dive right into it.
This week I had the Opera oportunity to speak with
the author of Good Daughtering the work You've always done,
the credit You've never gotten, and how to finally feel
like enough, Doctor Allison m Alford. Alison is a clinical
Associate professor in the Department of Information Systems and Business
Analytics at Baylor University. Her PhD is in communication studies.
We're going to talk about what exactly that means. And
she also has her own coaching and consulting firm, Good
Talk Communication Consulting, where she offers communication coaching to help
professionals and students, you know, really learn how to improve
their communication skills. Her research focuses on all sorts of
very interesting topics like adult daughtering, work, family balance, and
invisible labor. So we're going to get into it today
without any further ado. Here she is doctor Allison m Alford.
Speaker 2: Well, Alison, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 3: Absolutely great to be here, Kara, thank you.
Speaker 1: So I'm excited to talk about your new book, Good Daughtering,
the work you've always done, the credit you've never gotten,
and how to finally feel like enough. I think that
almost any woman or even any you know, gender minority
who is listening to this show can really resonate just
with the title alone.
Speaker 2: But before we get into the sort of the topics of.
Speaker 1: The book, let's talk a little about you and your
subject matter expertise. So you your training is in communications,
Is that correct?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: Okay, So I've always been kind of confused about It's funny.
I was all through psychology. I remember the communications and
the psychology department shared a building at my undergrad alma mater,
and always always like, what do they do over there? Right?
Speaker 3: You know, it can be very siloed when you're in
a university setting, but I mean their companions. I think
of communication studies and psychology as cousins. And you know,
psychology is a study of what are we thinking, what
is our cognitive processing, what is our you know, assessment
of that? And communication is the study of how do
we co create our realities through a shared experience through
talking or body language or you know, how do I
get my point across to someone, whether it's through language
or nonverbals, and a As a researcher, I'm interested in
how the language we use or the choices that we
make with our physical self create our reality. So in
some schools you'll find them in the same spot. In
some schools you'll find them in different places. I would
say also so on distinction to just be very bougie
about it is we think of communication no s as
the study of the field of shared realities and how
communication shapes our lives, whereas communications with an s is
more like media studies, very important, but a little bit
more of a distinction there. Journalism is communications. So I
don't know if that helps a little bit.
Speaker 1: I think that helps a lot, and it makes me
almost I feel a little cheated that as I you know,
I did my undergrad also I was in Texas back
at the University of North Texas and my master's there,
and then did a whole career actually as a journalist,
and then I went back to school to finish my
PhD somewhat more recently, and so as a working clinical
health psychologist, I feel cheated that I didn't get communication
like not communications trad but communication education and training, because
I feel like it would really improve or increase one's
capacity in a clinical setting to have a deeper understanding
of the very things that you study.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, it's very theory driven and it's very much
based on the idea of like what does our social
system create between us and how do we interpret that
and how do those interpretations then transform our lived experiences,
our realities and our relationship and so a lot of
of course communication studies is about what's broken, you know, what,
what's not going well in relationships? Why do people divorce
or what's you know, why are they're on again off
again relationships? Are stalking or something. But there's also a
lot of exploration of what makes relationships work what and
that could be in a personal setting, you know, family setting,
inner personal one to one, or it could be in
an organizational setting like how do we like our boss?
And also in this in the school I was in
ut Austin that had a rhetoric program, so also how
does our written communications such as public speeches, public address
change people's experience of a candidate or a person or
a phenomenon. So I think it's it's a bit cerebral,
and what's really important is to bring it to get
to that place, but then always bring it back to
the real people who need to use it. And for me,
that's why I wanted to bring out a book because
I thought in academia, you create these publications, they take
you two three years, they cost money to get grants
and get people to take this, do the surveys, and
then like twenty people read them. And I've always wanted
to have an impact to have real people use the summer,
have better relationships and better lives.
Speaker 1: You know, it's so interesting when we think about kind
of interpersonal relationships, and especially at the familial level, you know,
mothers and daughters is a perfect example. And then we
think about interpersonal relationships in organizational structures employees and bosses,
co workers, teams. They feel like they'd be very disparate
areas of inquiry, but at least from a psychological perspective,
you know, they are. I consider them two of the
three sort of main pillars of mental health and self efficacy.
You've got love, You've got work, and I often say,
and then you've got play. And so two of those
three are these familial or even as you mentioned before,
I guess romantic relationship structures just relationship structures in general.
And then the interpersonal experiences people have at work, which
of course includes their educational endeavors and you know, kind
of associated things. It's most of us are not operating
in a vacuum. We're working with people, we're living with people,
we're interacting with people all the time. And so I'm
curious how you chose or how you choose where to
kind of point your research, because it's pretty broad the
options that are available to somebody who who works in
this field.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're absolutely right that context matters. You know, there's
nothing that happens in a vacuum. And so when we
think of our own relationship with our parent, it really
matters what our socioeconomic status is, what country of origin
we're from, what privileges we have, or what difficulties experienced,
what illnesses have come into play. So context always matters
when we are examining how and why this relationship is
going in this way. So for me, as you know,
I think one thing that's kind of opaque for some
people is what do you do during a PhD? And
I learned that a large part of doing a PhD
is reading and learning and listening so that you can
understand the scope of the field and what's happening. And
then the next thing that you have to do is think,
what have we not explored yet and why why wouldn't
we have explored that thing? And what I learned was
that we had some information about women in midlife, particularly
around parenting or in the workplace, or we had information
about adolescence and the parent child relationship, and we had
information about research already done, great research, important research about
how women are the primary care gime or for their
adult parent, typically in elderhood. But we were just missing
so much nuance and context from the middle of life,
from what you're doing in your twenties, thirties, forties, fifties,
when you're two independent or interdependent individuals and nobody sick
or hurt or kind of meeting the other, but you're
trying to be in a relationship, which means you're connected,
you're interconnected, and you do want something from each other.
And so I directed my attention towards that, towards the
idea of what is the active role of daughters and daughtering,
because I saw that there was a gap. There was
not a usage of this sort of aegentic agency given
format for thinking of how women show up in families.
And we have had a lot of progress over many
decades about how we think of women as act participants
in their home, in their work life, in their social systems,
but we really weren't thinking. It wasn't being discussed intergenerationally
in anything except those the sort of more rare contexts.
And that's why I thought, you know, there's a bit
of hubris because it was about myself as well. But
it's like in my family, I do a lot. I
mean I am giving a lot, I am asking a
lot and coordinating. I am showing up for these people
because they matter to me. But I'm not just some
waif who's just blowing in the wind, waiting around for mothering.
I am doing daughtering actively. And when I look at
my peers, the smart women around me, they are too.
But for some reason, nobody is giving any credit to
how much that draws on our resources or drains our resources.
It means we have to make trade offs with other
things in our lives.
Speaker 1: You know. I think part of the reason when this
book came across my desk that I immediately was like, okay,
I want to have this conversation.
Speaker 2: Is because it resonates.
Speaker 1: Even beyond this, I guess, this relational role of daughtering.
Speaker 2: You know, the first thought.
Speaker 1: That comes to mind when I even just when I
read literally the title of your book was you know,
emotional and cognitive labor. It's like the only thing I
could think of, And I got to admit, you know,
this is a hot topic of conversation among my friends,
within my relationship. Even in the therapy sessions that I
have with my patients, A lot of sort of psycho
education about gender roles and about expectations, and about the
way that we raise our girls versus boys, and how
that translates to the roles and the responsibilities that we
assume as we grow into adult women versus adult men.
And I can't help but point to and I've mentioned
this on the show before, and I'm just curious if
you've seen these documentaries and if you feel like they
I don't know if you feel like the same kind
of connection to them as I do.
Speaker 2: But Jennifer c.
Speaker 1: Bul Newsom has produced some really phenomenal documentaries in the past.
Her first one was Misrepresentation. She then did The Mask
You Live In and then finally another one that really
resonates for me is one called fair Play. And they
really grapple with this gendered expectation that is societally induced
and that is sort of invisible under the radar. We
all carry it and sometimes we don't even know we're
carrying it.
Speaker 3: Well, you nailed it. You nailed the entire premise of
my book and my research, which is the idea of
invisible labor and why that expectation exists. But you know,
Eve Rodsky is the author of a book called fair
Play that then came Yeah Yeah, as well as a
Netflix special, and she was kind enough to give a
support to my book because ultimately, that is what we're
talking about. We're talking about invisible labor. We're talking about
social expectations and how the social context matters in how
we show up or decide how much to show up.
And yet we haven't most of us decided we're just
doing something, you know, of wrote sort of discipline or obligation.
And that's sort of my call to action, right, is
that you get to decide daughtering is active and it
is a choice. You may not have noticed before that
it was a choice that you had a choice, that
you were doing things on your own because you even
you know, very often we have the idea of daughtering
pushed to the back. You know, when we think of
women and women's labor, we tend to think with a
maternal lens. We tend to say things like I'm mothering
everyone around me or even there's a lot of trending
videos where someone says I'm raising my parents, now I'm
mothering my mother. And so what that revealed to me
as part of my research was we lot lack a
lot of the language that we need to get to
the nuance of what it means, because there's no way
that I'm actually raising my mom. You know, she's not
nine and I've had a nine year old and it's
a very different power dynamic. But there is a caring role,
there's an obligation role, there is a closeness factor, there's
an intimacy concern. But because we are not adept at
using those types of vocabulary, we default to this bigger
idea that all types of caring behaviors are maternal. And
really it's a patriarchal lens of the maternal body, that
women's bodies are maternal in everything we do. And it's
an unfair representation.
Speaker 1: Right, It's like it's it's the structure itself of the
patriarchy maintains and perpetuates that type of expectation, that type
of I don't know, maybe burden is too strong a word,
maybe it's not. And I struggle with it too because
I'm not a mother, and I think in some ways
that affords me a certain level of freedom where I
don't always identify with those types of ideas, and I
don't always identify with the language I tend not to
use it as often, but I even in my own relationships,
I found myself saying, I'm not your mommy therapist.
Speaker 2: That is not my job.
Speaker 1: You know, that is not my role, and that's not
the role I intend to assume in this relationship.
Speaker 2: But you're right.
Speaker 1: I don't often think of doddering as active, and possibly
it's because for the majority of the time that was formative,
when we considered ourselves the most dotty, if I could
put that in air quotes, we didn't have a choice.
We didn't have agency when we were young, or at
least not that much agency.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're right, you're right. So we're talking about when
you're a child, When you're a minor, you lack the
ability to decide. Not only are you not cognitively able,
but you're completely dependent on these parents for money, for safety,
for legal authority. And that's totally different when you have
an adult who you then begin to give care to,
who's older than you, who has legal authority, money, power,
and agency. So that's why the same words don't work.
And I actually think that it's easiest to see that
dichotomy within the women who have who don't have children
because because a woman who doesn't have children doesn't claim
to mother everyone everywhere, all the time. Then it starts
to be like, of course, it doesn't make sense that
all of a sudden she would mother her mother instead.
The more honorable way to address our full humanity, the
complexity of women's bodies and lives and experiences is to say,
let me use representative language for what it means to
do daughtering, and let me bring that type of language
to the forefront and describe the difficulties, the pain points,
the benefits, the obligation, the beauty and talk about it
in its own right. And I think that women we
fought for the right to we have fought over the
last one hundred years right, especially in the US, for
the right to be seen as individuals in the workplace,
not just women in the workplace, but just an individual
in the workplace. And this is kind of a next
frontier is to think of daughtering as a role that
is important and it is honorable, but it is distinctly
different from mothering or being an individual, or being a neighbor,
or being a friend, or being a worker. It is
an obligatory relationship with its own power, dynamics and closeness
issues and intimacy complexities that is between me and an
elder generation. And when I start to think of it
that way, it's like, yeah, I want to be able
to use words with nuance that describe the full scope
of that experience. And we do see, and my research
has shown there's a wide variety of ways to do
daughtering and types of mothers and fathers that you got,
and types of childhoods you've got in adulthoods that you got,
and we're not going to really be able to fully
explore and understand each other's experiences unless we could talk
about it with its own vocabulary.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting because I think about you know, as
you just mentioned, every relationship and every kind of connection
is unique. There are some themes, you know, if you
live in the United States, there are societal themes and
pressures that everybody probably experiences. But then, as you mentioned before,
based on different demographic factors and also just fundamental differences
like I don't have well, I do have brothers, but
I didn't grow up with brothers. For example, I have
one sister, so we were a daughter household and we
grew up to with a single mother as my parents
were divorced. I know people who don't have mothers, or
don't know their mothers, or they lost their mothers when
they were very young. There are people where there are
multiple children in the family, there are of course only
child only children. All of these things, you know, make
for a completely different experience.
Speaker 2: But all that being.
Speaker 1: Said, I caveat because I am curious about your take
going back to this concept of invisible labor, about how
the daughter role and the daughter responsibility translates into the
invisible labor that women tend to carry throughout the lifespan,
not just with their mothers, but also with their partners,
and also with their siblings, and also with their colleagues
and across the board. Is it do you think does
it all kind of come back to the expectations and
the responsibilities that daughters are, that are that's put on
daughters than that daughters therefore assume.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think that's a great question, you know.
And and so the concept that we're talking about is
invisible labor, and I think it's a good point to
define what is invisible labor, and invisible labor is unpaid
work that uses your resources such as time, energy, money,
your your you know, your personal bandwidth, your battery life
in order to achieve a goal. And with daughtering, the
goal is connection. The goal is that we are trying
to stay in our family, stay connected, to stay keep
the group together. And so in order to do that
we expend our resources. And through my research, what I
found was there's four different ways that we can think
of labor within the daughter daughtering work, and one of
them is visible and three are invisible. So I talk
about daughtering labor as acting, thinking, feeling, and being. And
so when you're acting like a daughter, that's pretty visible.
You know, maybe you took a cast role, you bought
a gift, you showed up for the holiday, you helped
paint a room, or do some yard work, and everybody
can see that and maybe you could even take a
picture of put it on Instagram or Facebook. Right, So
it's very visible. But then the thinking work, feeling work,
and being work are invisible because they're happening inside someone's head,
their heart, their body. And so thinking work is the
cognitive labor of planning, preventing issues to you know, putting
aside resources well in advance of the time they're needed.
So the thinking work could be years or even decades
in advance of when the thing that you need is
going to happen. I met with one woman who told
me she was creating a fund for when her parents.
She was an only child and only daughter, and she
felt like when her parents in the future, decades in
the future, would become ill, that that was going to
be a big financial burden. So in order to alleviate
her current feelings of stress, she started putting money in
a bank account, and she talked to her partner about it,
and they budgeted for it, and so that was both
cognitive and emotional. So the feeling work is the emotion work.
Of emotion work is soothing and smoothing and making everyone
feel comfortable and putting out fires, preventing problems before we
ever get to the problem, like telling your brother, Okay,
you know that thing that you always do and it
makes while I'm mad, and then she leaves the room.
Don't do that, Just don't do that this weekend. Okay, Yeah,
that's kind of I think.
Speaker 1: It's people soothing for sure, and I think even beyond that,
and obviously this stands outside of the daughter role into
a lot of the female roles that we assume in
our lives, but anticipating the needs of men, really anticipating
the needs of anyone who is around us, but very
often anticipating the needs of men. And sort of how
do I put this, anticipating the emotional reaction of men
so as to ensure everybody's comfort. I think that this
is a so massive emotional and cognitive labor that we
undertake daily and don't realize how exhausting it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, you know, there's one form of being
emotionally responsive, reactive empathy, and that would be as if
you're the thermometer in the room right taking the temperature.
But the harder labor, the dodding labor, the woman's work
is to be the thermostat, which is to say, this
is the temperature we're gonna be, and I'm gonna make
everybody come to this temperature. And of course you would
leave the dinner or the event or the group chat
or whatever exhausted, because you know, we all know the
thermostat is using power and working hard to try to
regulate that environment. And so these are the kinds of
things that are the reason that they're invisible is they're
not tangible. Many of these things are preventative. We can't
take a picture of them and put it on Instagram
and say, I thought about thirty years in the future
when my dad might need care and put one hundred
dollars in the bank account. I guess in theory we could,
but typically we don't, so it's invisible. And the last
one of the types of invisible labor that I talk
about is being work, which is identity work of how
am I a daughter, representing my family, the legacy, the traditions,
and being a good daughter, the daughter that they would
want me to be, or the family member, or the
person that they raised me to be. And those are
not necessarily happening face to face engaged in talking with
your parent. They're happening inside the daughter. So unless the
daughter reveals them, narrates them, tells someone else about it,
they are They're difficult to see, and that's what makes
them invisible.
Speaker 1: And there are some real, I think negative psychological consequences
from engaging in sort of ongoing invisible labor that we
all do engage in. I mean, I think one of
them is this feeling of like this is so thankless
and I never get any credit for it. And that
can be a hard feeling when somebody is working really
hard under the radar and all of their sort of
hard work just goes unnoticed or there's not a lot
of gratitude in the room. But I think there's even
a more pernicious problem where by the very virtue of
this type of labor being invisible, it reinforces the privilege
that those who aren't doing the invisible labor have to
not do it. And so when I think about the
idea of anticipating the needs and being the thermostat in the room,
it allows for individuals who are not taking on that
role to be reactionary, to not regulate their emotions, to
do none of the labor and actually not It's like,
by definition, it's a negative feedback loop, right, Like the
more that somebody else takes on that role, the more
that the people who don't even know it's happening don't
have to take on that role.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it's a reifying experience. So once it happens, and
then it happens again, and then it happens again. And
I think that many women, particularly recently in the trending topics,
we've heard of the elder daughter syndrome. I think this
speaks really well to that point, which is the eldest daughter,
whether in childhood or continuing through adolescence into adulthood, she
gets really good at managing, preventing, caring for you know, stoking, tending, minding, whatever,
the sort of caregiving types of words we can use. Well,
then even if there are other daughters or sisters, they
are not as able. And it's because she keeps doing it.
And then every time she thinks, the eldest daughter thinks,
I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm not going
to be the one who fills the stocking, brings mom's
favorite cake, fixes things in the group chat. Well, then
what happens is nobody else does it.
Speaker 2: Yes, that everything falls apart right.
Speaker 3: Because they don't know how, and the eldest daughter doesn't
know how to resist for long enough for the those
other people to learn. So then it just is like, ugh,
I guess this is my role. These people will never
do this, and so it's got to be me. And
then she's back at it. And so whether it's a
son or a younger sibling, the situation is reiffied, it's reaffirmed,
it's reinstated. But it doesn't have to be that way, right,
And I think the hopeful message that I want to
impart is actually many, many things are changeable, and you're
not trapped in a system that is immovable, immobile, static.
You are a change maker and you can make that
change as long as you can be patient enough to
know that people don't change quickly, and these types of
changes that we might want in our family system, they
can take a long time, like putting on a pair
of braces. You know, our teeth are not going to
change over night. They're going to take two or three
years of daily movement and monthly appointments for them to
finally become a beautiful smile. Well, similarly, your family is
not going to change because you make one quick change.
It takes a long time. But if you can be
thoughtful and patient, you can make positive changes that are
both good for the family and good for the self.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it seems like another really important ingredient other
than patients is boundaries. Is the ability to say I'm
not gonna do that thing, and I'm going to, you know,
do what I can to empower others to take that role.
Maybe it's about delegating. Maybe it's about just you know,
being more pointed in how we ask for help, but
also removing myself from the situation. If and when there
is a lot of emotional dysregulation, or if and when
chaos ensues because I didn't clean everything up, I have
to allow myself the freedom to dis connect from that
uncomfortable display and say it's okay, it's not the end
of the world. We're going to get past this, and
I'm not going to bear witness to this drama right now.
Speaker 3: One of the ways that I'd like to talk about that,
and I talk about this in my book Good Daughtering,
is there's different kinds of happiness. There's different ways to
think about good relationships and a good life. And so Seligman,
who's a positive psychology person, says in his book he
talks about you to monic happiness and hidonic happiness, and
so you tomonic happiness is overall, big, overarching lifetime happiness
what makes us feel like a good person who's lived
a good life. And hidonic happiness is what makes me
happy right this moment, you know today and feels really
good and fun, and you can kind of see that
there'd be problems with each of those. There's benefits to
each of them, there's problems to each of them. And
I think metaphorically, I think of this like a homeowner.
I'm a homeowner or a home mortgager from the bank.
And what that brings with it is a lot of
satisfaction about living in a home, providing a home for
my children, being a neighbor, being in a community. But
what it also brings with it is I have to
take the trash out or it smells in the kitchen.
I have to deal with a fallen tree limb or
it will break a window. I have to pay for
cockroaches to be eliminated or they'll crawl across my bed.
So there's a lot of junkie stuff, not fun stuff.
So it's not pleasant every single day to be a homeowner.
But it contributes to my eudaemonic happiness, my overall lifelong,
big picture happiness to say I did that, and sometimes
I also contribute me to contribute to my daily happiness
and say not todaysh bag, you know, not today gutters
with the leaves in it. You know, I'm going to
put out a decoration in the front yard and enjoy
this little flag or something, and we have to balance
those things. And so the point that I'm trying to
make here is that if we evaluate our lives as
daughters or as women, or as individuals in the same way,
we can notice that sometimes you have to do junkie,
not pleasant stuff, and yet it still contributes in a
way to an overall long term satisfaction and happiness with
a life well lived. And I think there are many
parts of doddering that are kind of unpleasant in the moment,
but overall I feel like, yeah, I'm a good person,
and this is good daughter ing, and this is a
I'm happy to have provided this to my parent for sure.
Speaker 1: And I think some of those examples are also just
really an algorithmic like ROI calculation. I think about I
have a very good friend who has a lot of
executive dysfunction, right, so she really struggles with ADHD. And
one of the things, a perfect example was that historically
when she had when she had her last dog, she
had one of those gravity water feeders for the dog,
and the dog was constantly running out of water, and
then she would just pour water into the bowl and
I was like, why don't you fill up the bottle
part because if you do that, you don't have to
pour water into the bowl every few hours.
Speaker 2: It's so much work. What are you talking about.
Speaker 1: You're doing so much more work now than you would
if you would just take the few extra seconds to
fill up the bottle feeder first. And I see this
happen all the time, where there's a quick fix or
a quick interjection because it feels less tax but really
investing a little bit more effort now pays dividends in
the future. And I think that that kind of goes
hand in hand and what you're talking about about affecting change.
Part of it is patients, part of it is boundaries,
and part of it is you know, kind of flexing
your chief executive below and making decisions now that that
hopefully will will pay dividends in the future.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, if I was to talk to
your friend, I would say, what is it within you
that feels like that job of filling up the bowl
is too big? And so I think there's a bigger conversation,
which is where are all of our resources being taxed,
where are all of our resources being expended? And who
can we bring in to help us with the big
picture items, and so in my life doing daughtering, I
think many women think of daughtering or the mother daughter
relationship or parents child relationship if it's with their dad
or stepdad, stepmom, mother in law, whatever, as this really
one on one isolated thing, and I think of it
as a group effort. And so when I'm thinking about
going to see my mom and dad and I'm going
to go to their house and I'm going to spend
a weekend and I'm going to spend money and buy
food for us, et cetera, I enlist my support system
to all have tasks. And those tasks are not them
doing grandchilding or them doing son in lawing, if you will.
Their tasks are to help me do effective daughtering. And
I think sometimes we forget that we can go one
step bigger and ask the question, why am I so
worn out that I can't fill up the bowl? Who
do I need to ask for help in my life
in other spaces, at work, in my community, in my
extended family, in my you know, with my partner, and
then I may free up because resources are finite.
Speaker 2: And so if I'm using them.
Speaker 3: All at work, or I'm using them to do the
dishes or I'm using them on childcare or amusing them
to get out the vote, I'm gonna have fewer resources
for dottering that if dottering becomes an important thing to
put my attention on, then I need to figure out
how to draw resources and support toward that activity to
support me so then I can feel good about it,
like I'm doing it in a measured way, in a
balanced way.
Speaker 1: And I think there's almost there's almost an unstated major
premise here that we we we touched on but maybe
glossed over quickly, because I can imagine I'm trying to
put myself in the shoes of the listeners now, and
I can imagine that there are a fair amount of
men listening to the show right now saying, but I mean,
why do you keep saying doddering, Like why does this
not just apply to every child? Like I'm a son
and I have to do this and that, and I
have to show up and do this, and why is
it that the daughters are the ones complaining about being
so exhausted? And I guess what I would say to them?
And I'm curious your take on this is that you know,
when I go into the infusion center at the hospital
where I work. I'm a psychologist, as I mentioned, in
a cancer center, and when I enter into that infusion center,
I'll tell you what.
Speaker 2: There are a lot.
Speaker 1: Of women and there are a lot of men who
get cancer. It doesn't discriminate. And very often the women
who are there getting infusions are either there alone or
their daughters are there with them. The men who are
there getting infusions very often have their partners, their female partners,
or their daughters with them. And I could bet money
that if I surveyed the people there and ask them
who made this appointment for you, it would be their
wives or their daughters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's an astute observation, and I think research backs
that up that when individuals are ill or elderly, that
the daughters take over. And it's by and large the daughters,
but it's also it's complicated as a little bit more
by who lives closest, and then lastly socioeconomically, who has
the time to give.
Speaker 1: And also who's single and who's not. Because I do
see sons step up, but I very often see the
son's wives stepping up.
Speaker 2: It's not even there a parent, you know, it's there
in law.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yes, yeah, so we we have a lot
of social systems that play there because we can also say,
does that daughter in law have a full time job
or is she doing this because she's quote unquote the
stay at home parents. So then as that she then
quote unquote has time.
Speaker 2: Right and is she expected to exactly yes?
Speaker 3: And so an interesting thing. I'll I'll tell you a
little story. My book came out in February and it
was on Good Morning America and that was so cool.
The posts were sitting on the couch and they were
talking about the book and invisible labor and what women
are expected to do. And Michael Strahan, one of the
co hosts, he pipes up and says, hey, Sam and
I are going to write a book about sunning. It'll
be one page. And I started laughing just like you,
and I said, nailed it. Because the biggest difference between
sons and daughters is expectation. It's not that men can't
do this. It's not that men don't have it in
them to be caring. It's not that all men are
uncaring unfeeling. It has to do with societal expectations about
who does the healthcare work, the childcare work, the family work,
and I think some of those are changing over time,
but we're not anywhere close to equality. So I mean,
there are many men who show up well in their families,
and I think I would say my husband has been
a great example of that to me over the past
nine years with his mother who is in an assisted
living facility, and he has just, I mean completely stepped up.
He's the leader of that, he's the desire. And what
a relief it's been because I have a full time
job and I can't do that. But not every man
has the emotional maturity to do that. And where does
that come from. It comes from a lifetime of experiences, expectations,
requests from the women, from the mothers and the fathers
to the sons. And so I think one of the
things that we can do to be hopeful about this
for the future is say, well, let's teach our sons differently.
So you know, I have a son he's seventeen, and
I talked to him and so, A he's watched his
dad be an incredible caring person to his grandma. And
B he read my book which is called Good Daughter Ing.
But a man, a son, an eighteen year old, read it,
and I said, you know, it's not necessarily about you,
but of course it's all about you because you have
a mom, you have a sister, you may have a
wife at some point, and so as a member of society,
men need to be aware of this expectation difference. I
think sunning is very real and very important. It's just
not my personal area of expertise. But that doesn't mean
that it's unimportant or doesn't need to be highlighted. And
so I'd love to see men step into that space
and say, I want to do this, I love this,
I enjoy this, and that's what creates long term culture change.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, I think it bears sort
of highlighting here. And I'd be curious your take on this,
because because yes, you are very very lucky that you
have an incredible partner who does step up and who
is you know, kind of pulling that kind of weight
and doing a lot of that labor. I have a
similar partner, and this is a conversation we have a lot.
I don't know if it's because he's a unicorn. I
think part of it is that he cares enough, you know,
and that he has he's a feminist man, and he
thinks about these things and they matter to him. But
I think part of it is because I wouldn't allow
him not to. I wouldn't be in a relationship with
somebody who has those kinds of expectations of me. I
refuse to fall into that trap. Even though I still
do it. We all still do it. And when we
notice we're doing it, those of us who I think
are doing the work to a identify the problem of
invisible labor and b try to affect change, are actually
actively holding our partners to account.
Speaker 2: I just won't do it, you know.
Speaker 1: I just like there will be times where I'm like,
not my responsibility, so if it doesn't get done.
Speaker 2: I mean, I saw a TikTok video the other day
was insane.
Speaker 1: It was this girl that was like day three of
not taking the package in from the front step and
seeing what my husband does, and he would just step
over the package and walk and then when he came home,
he would step over the path and he would take
the dog. He would step over, and I mean maybe
it was like to be funny and they planned it
and blah blah blah, but it resonated for sure, and
it kind of goes back to what we were saying before.
It's not that men, by their nature, it's not that
men are incapable. It's that our society has afforded men
the privilege to not even notice that they're not pulling
their own weight when it comes to emotional and cognitive labor.
It's our sons, our sons. I don't have kids, but sons, brothers,
whatever you want to call them. Yeah, they marry sons
exactly America's sons. They don't notice the amount of work
that the daughters are doing because by definition, it's invisible.
And until we make it visible and we bring it
out into the open, and we hold our partners, and
as you mentioned, our sons, when those of us who
have them raise them to be accountable, I don't think
we're going to see a lot of change.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, No, I think it's so important to recognize
invisible labor can happen for anyone, any gender, any sex,
any person in any space. For instance, as somebody says, well,
I've been managing our investment accounts for fifteen years and
you've never asked about it, and I've been doing it,
and I've been trying to build this for us. That's
invisible labor to the person who had the privilege of
not thinking about money in the relationship. And so it's
not necessarily invisible labor itself isn't gendered, but there are,
what we can notice this many gendered responsibilities and ideas
about who does what and why. But when I look
at back at my own life, I think, you know,
it's not that one of us got a PhD. We
got a PhD because getting that degree for me learning
the material, going home and saying this is what I read,
This is what I learned. You know, one of the
things that happened. This is more than ten years ago.
I went home and I told my husband about this
article that I read in a sociology class. I mean
it's by MICHAELA. De Leonardo from the eighties, nineteen eighty seven.
She writes about the articles called the Invisible World of
Cards and letters, and it's about women's work can work.
How you who invites the auntie who doesn't have anywhere
to go, and who make sure she has a gift
under the Christmas tree at the you know, at the event,
that kind of thing, and it talks about sending Christmas cards.
And I went home ten years ago and I told him,
you know, sending Christmas cards is an invisible labor, and
he laughed, Well, here we are ten years on and
he sends the Christmas cards now and he understands how
hard that is now. And I don't think it's magic.
I don't think it's luck like you said, you said lucky.
I actually think it's learning.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 3: And so by virtue of myself getting a PhD and
having a partner who just listened to me day to day,
he was learning too. And you know, his investment in
me getting the PhD was initially economic, like let's get
better jobs and better lives. But the side benefit is
that he got open minded. He grew in his mindset
of what is possible, what is true, what is normal,
what is right. And so I think that should be
a message of hope for any women who are maybe
married to men that they're thinking, I'm not quote unquote lucky,
or I'm not married to the person, or I'm not
finding that guy out there when I'm dating and I
want to be dating that person is again, it's embrace's mentality.
It's a little bit at a time over time results
in that beautiful smile and as long as the person
is willing to keep connecting with you and coming back
to you, then change can be made. And the same
is true for daughters with their parent. Even when you
think this guy's seventy five, he's not going to change.
My dad's not going to change. If you change, the
relationship changes. It's not possible, based on communication theory, for
the other person not to change. They have to. They will,
but it requires a lot of fortitude, a lot of patience,
and a lot of willingness to sit in the tension
of being in relationship with him perfect people. And if
we can do that, and if we can notice that
and say this is worth it, This is worth it,
not just between me and my parent, but I'm you know, heck,
I'm shaping culture. I'm shaping future generations. By just holding
this line, this boundary, this or talking about these things
out loud, then you can see that there's a greater
human value in doing this work. And so that's why
I want to encourage women to do the work, not
give up or feel like it's fruitless or hopeless and
just shut down and keep it to themselves. It matters
and it's helpful.
Speaker 1: And I think it's also okay to be angry. It's
all okay to vent about it and to have moments
where I think it is important to give validity to
the experience that so many women have, and I would
say especially so many women of color have, where they're like,
why is this my responsibility? Why do I have to
keep doing all of this work. Part of it is
that this additional work that we're talking about helps relieve
some of that burden. But I think it's a completely
fair complaint. You shouldn't have to do it all. It
shouldn't be a responsibility, let's say, as a black woman,
to educate your white friends about the experiences that you have,
just like it shouldn't be your responsibility as a woman
to educate the men in your life about the invisible
labor that you carry. It's an unfair position to be in,
and yet the reality is it is the position that
we're in because of these societal structures. We are in
a patriarchy. It's the water we swim in. We can't
always see it.
Speaker 2: But there.
Speaker 3: It's also the dynamic. It's a dynamic system that is changing,
whether even though sometimes we feel hopeless about it. You know,
one of the chapters in my book is called Intersectional
Perspectives on Daughtering, and I spoke to a few women
of different races, different nationalities. I spoke to transgender individuals,
and I asked them about their experiences because I think
that those experiences, why that while they may feel like
outliers to my own life, you know, I'm a white
woman in Texas, they help us to understand the totality
of the types of experiences that people are undergoing. And
you think, what's so interesting is to notice many of
these ideas that we're wrestling with with invisible labor or
things that women brought up in the seventies and eighties.
I mean, the academics brought them up. But that's how
long culture takes to shift from something being an academic
idea to a pop culture idea. And we can continue
to be a part of that. Right. So, fourth wave feminism, says,
is the idea that if we engage in podcasts and
online spaces and Facebook conversations and substacks and social media
posts about our experience, we are shaping culture. So I
want to tell women, your voice matters, even if you think, oh,
I made a little video and one hundred people watched it,
and especially you know, anyone who interacts with future generations.
Those future generations are watching and it really matters how
they see you handling daughtering or daughter in lawing or
step daughtering, or you know the likes of those things.
And when you place boundaries, they are empowered to place
more boundaries on their time, their life, and their resources.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, so I got to ask here as we're ending
the hour, you know, for those who pick up the book,
and I hope it's not just daughters who pick up
the book, because I think, as you mentioned before, sons
have a lot to learn from the book. Mothers have
a lot to learn, fathers have a lot to learn.
But for those who do pick up this book, what
are you sort of hoping is the main or maybe
a few different outcomes. Is it about just, you know,
validating somebody's experience first and foremost and being like, I
hear you, trust me this, You're not, you know, crazy,
like this this is an experience of many many daughters.
Is it about learning how to release the I guess
the rains a little bit and allow, not even allow,
but ask for the help that probably you so desperately need,
Like what do you hope the outcome will be here?
Speaker 3: What I've heard from many women who have the book
is there's a sense of relief, and that relief is
both I'm not alone. Wow, there are other women out
there and that story sounds just like mine. And so
even if I haven't heard that from a woman in
my current circle of to ten or fifteen women, there
are millions of other people out there, and some of
them are experiencing what I'm experiencing. But it's also a
place that gives us language to get into the nuances,
get into the thick of what does this mean? What
is what are these aspects of my life, my daughterhood,
being daughterly that perhaps I've never investigated before. So it's
a space right for thinking, work for sitting in that
space and thinking and evaluating who do I want to
be as a daughter and what makes a good life.
But the last part is, you know, the book is
not just full of definitions and research. It's got activities,
and those activities are designed for you to do, whether
it's what is my daughter in bandwidth? Or what is
my daughtering mission statement? Or how to have a conversation
with your sibling with your parent Because I think that
the best the best way can go forward with daughtering
is to communicate it. What am I doing, what would
I like? What looks good? How can we make this
work together? And so you know, while part of learning
about this book is hey, this is a pain point.
Oh my gosh, I'm doing doughtering. This is hard work,
the overall goal is to say I can find greater
connection and greater satisfaction and even better relationship, more authentic
relationships with the people in my life when I'm able
to express how important dodding is and how much of
my resources I'm using on it.
Speaker 1: Gosh, I cannot thank you enough for sharing so many
insights about a topic that is, you know, absolutely ubiquitous
and fundamental to so many people's experiences. But as you
mentioned before, until it is kind of identified, until the
introspection is there, until we have the language, it's just
existing sort of under the radar and in the background.
Everybody the book is good. Dadding the work you've always done,
the credit you've never gotten, and how to finally feel
like enough by doctor Allison m Alford. Alison, thank you
so much for being here with us today, for teaching us,
and for you know, bringing this into our consciousness.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Kara really appreciate it, and.
Speaker 1: Everybody listening, thank you for coming back week after week.
I'm really looking forward to the next time we all
get together to talk nerdy