Working moms complain their husbands treat them like housewives

Winnie Thompson’s shift begins at 6:30 am.

The 33-year-old working mom from Atlanta, who is married with two kids, helps get her 16-year-old son out the door for school while prepping her 9-month old’s bottle. After her husband leaves for his job in IT, it’s just her and the baby, who she hopes will stay quiet through her Zoom calls and nap long enough to let her answer emails and tidy up around the house.

And when her husband, also 33, comes home from work, it’s no different.

“There’s been times when it’s [my husband] and my son and the baby’s screaming, and there’s a pot of spaghetti boiling on the stove and I’m just like, ‘Can somebody do something!’” Thompson, co-founder of Books N Bros, a book club for boys to amplify black authors, told The Post.

Millennial moms are opening up about how motherhood strikes a blow to their equitable marriages, where babies seem to transform their supposedly feminist husbands into old-school, hands-off, 1950’s-style dads. Despite remaining outwardly supportive of their wives’ careers, these secret traditionalists want partners who do all the childcare, cooking and cleaning, the women say, expecting them to kick off from work and turn into June Cleaver from “Leave it to Beaver.”

And when it comes to their kids, women go along with it. According to a recently published book, “Ambitious Like a Mother,” 75 percent of moms assume responsibility for their children’s doctors appointments, and they’re four times more likely than their husbands to call out of work to take care of their kids when they’re sick.

For Thompson, she wonders if her can-do attitude at home has sentenced her to taking care of everyone. “I’ve been used to cleaning up after my son,” said Thompson, who had her 16-year-old as a teenager.

“As far as adulting goes, I was thrown into the fire a bit earlier and that may also have communicated some silent expectations … but when you add another child in there and even another human [her husband], that’s a lot of load to carry,” Thompson said.

She’s not alone in wanting help. A poll for healthcare platform MDLIVE showed that 88 percent of moms wished they could clone themselves to help out with chores, watch the kids and take care of the house. Seventy-six percent of respondents said they feel “exhausted,” according to a survey of more than 2,000 millennial moms.

In the same poll, 54 percent of moms said they don’t get support from their partner or family. And a marriage therapist recently went viral on a TikTok saying the top complaint she hears about husbands from their wives is they are “passively responsible,” meaning, they wait to be told what to do around the house instead of just doing it.

Lara Snyder was shocked at the way parenthood flipped the script in her family.

The St. Louis-based 40-year-old had been the breadwinner for a while, working for the Food and Drug Administration while her husband, whom she married in 2008, was in residency to become a surgeon. But after she had her daughter four years later, everything changed.

“I remember he went back to work and I was five days post-partum. It felt unfair and overwhelming,” Snyder told The Post. After she had her son in 2015, she said she fell into the job of managing the entire household.

“Everything falls to me because I work from home and I have that flexibility. Whenever kids stuff happens it’s assumed that I’ll just take care of it, and it’s annoying and it’s frustrating,” Snyder said.

And her husband doesn’t pick up the slack: “Things don’t occur to him about keeping the house tidy because it doesn’t occur to people who never have that responsibility fall on them.”

She’s also worried that her kids are absorbing the model of traditional gender roles, like she and her husband did when they were children.

“Kids pick up on what they see modeled every single day and what my son sees is mom does all this kid stuff, she’s the one who drives you to all these activities, she’s the one bringing snacks to the random school event and driving everyone around,” Snyder said. “It’s a default that I am the one who gets called by the nurse. I am the one who gets called by the doctors office, the coaches. It’s 2022 and they still call mom first.”

“I constantly think of that famous quote from Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” she said. “‘This child has two parents.’”