as making sense doing becomes a kind of knowing... -just as being the one to read the

book makes the mother the expert" (p. 227). Focusing on child care, Walzer (1996)

argued women complete these types of mental labor because they recognize "worrying

gets things done for the baby. If the father offered to share the worrying rather than

telling the mother to stop, the outcome might be quite different" (p. 224). She perceived

"mothers worry about babies, in part, because fathers do not" (p. 221). Importantly, this

emotion work rather than the physical caretaking of home and family has been linked

with mothers' experiences of depression during their children's early years (Strazdins,

Galligan, & Scannell, 1997).

 These unbalanced responsibilities are far different from what both men and women

expect their roles to be like upon transitioning to parenthood. In fact, one study found the

majority of husbands and wives felt the responsibility for housework should be shared

equally between partners, and an overwhelming 80% expressed that child care should

also be egalitarian (Hiller & Philliber, 1986). In another study (Ruble et al., 1988), this

discrepancy between expectations and actual arrangements was illustrated with a cross-

sectional sample of 670 women (whose status in the transition to parenthood ranged from

early pregnancy to 3 months postpartum) and a longitudinal sample of 48 women (who

were assessed during pregnancy and at 3 months postpartum). In this study, the majority

of pregnant women in the sample expected to share child care equally or to do somewhat

more than fathers, while only 12% of women in the cross-sectional sample and 17% of

women in the longitudinal sample expected to do much more than their partners; in

reality, 40% of these women said they were doing more child care than their husbands