Latest news with #EveRodsky
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Eve Rodsky Says Solving Burnout Is All About 'The Life-Changing Magic of Mustard'
Parents Next Gen winner and author of 'Fair Play' author Eve Rodsky has been called the 'Marie Kondo of relationships' because of how she helped families balance domestic labor. She says it started with one question. Balance isn't a fairytale for Eve Rodsky, it's a way of life. Coming from Harvard with a background in organizational management, Rodsky applies the idea of treating our homes as our most important organizations, and it's made a big difference in the lives of families across the world. In her New York Times bestselling book, Fair Play, she developed a game plan to help couples restore balance to domestic labor within their homes and their relationships. Followed up by Find Your Unicorn Space, Rodsky dove deeper into the idea that every individual, especially parents, needs time to unlock their creativity without a margin. Rodsky's work to help parents balance that mental and physical load while reclaiming their creativity is what makes Rodsky a Parents Next Gen winner. Rodsky was born and raised by a single mom in New York City, and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their three kids. Called the 'Marie Kondo of relationships,' she shares how organization can be an effective tool for radical change, and gives more insight into what has now become a national conversation. How does Fair Play approach the imbalance within domestic labor? Fair Play is a system. It treats the home as an organization, so that was the big 'aha' moment. That's my background; I'm an organizational management specialist. I'm a lawyer, and I have lots of experience working for families that look like the HBO show Succession.I would say that people should feel bad for me, but what I learned in that work was that all successful organizations have two things: they have accountability and they have trust. So what Fair Play does is it uses organizational management techniques to restore accountability and trust to the home. No one had ever done that before. You surveyed over 500 couples across the US to get a better understanding of the invisible load families carry. Is there something you specifically heard from men that informed your approach to how couples can work together to restore balance? I call it the life-changing magic of mustard. What I heard from men at first was that they were overreporting what they were doing, so that was the thing that was most alarming to me. Women were coming to me saying they were completely overwhelmed and their partners weren't helping, but men thought that they were doing 50% of the work. What I had to do was change my research approach, so that's why I call it the life-changing magic of mustard, because how you ask questions is how you get good data. A lot of the questions that I asked before Fair Play were questions that weren't capturing the real problems. The question I started to ask was, 'How does mustard get in your refrigerators?'Once I asked that, I was able to capture data in 18 countries, and now we have a study on women's cognitive labor based on that question. What that allowed me to do was realize that in 18 countries, women were the ones who noticed that their son Johnny liked yellow mustard, not spicy noticing, that conception, is a key part of project management. The 'aha' moment was that the reason men were saying they were involved in groceries was because that's the planning phase, they weren't involved in that. They were involved in the execution phase.I realized that I could change the dynamic of how men felt as well by moving from a 50-50 scorekeeping exercise to one of full ownership, and that's where Fair Play was born. What is the toll that women often face being the 'she-fault,' as you call it? If you're always the one in charge of the C [conception] and the P [planning], regardless of whether you have someone helping you execute the E, that C and the P is where the cognitive labor is. We have a new study that shows that the more women hold the cognitive labor (that C and the P), the more they're not allowed to give ownership to others, the more their mental health suffers, the more they're personally burnt out, and the more their relationship satisfaction literally life and death. Women are sick, they're burnt out. We have women in our studies, basically any woman that says that she holds more than 60 of the Fair Play cards—most people play with about 80 cards if you have kids—if you're holding more than 60 cards, almost every single woman in our study was showing some physical ailment and the top ones were insomnia, stress-related disease, autoimmune diseases, we had women reporting a lot of cancer not saying that stress causes all these things, but it definitely exacerbates them. Recent research confirms what we're sure you already know, that 71% of moms still say they feel they're shouldering the majority of the mental load. What message do you have for them and what do you hope the future looks like for them? My message is that there is a way out. There is a secret formula for the home, assuming that you have a willing partner. My number one thing is if you have an unwilling partner, a partner not willing to engage in fair play, or any of these conversations, then you should leave the marriage. That's what I've learned over 10 years: get out if you can. But in most marriages, most of the couples—and we have thousands of couples that are in the Fair Play system—the partner is willing. They just didn't know how to help.I like people to do an audit where they ask themselves, 'In the past month, have I ever said to myself, 'I'm a better multitasker—I'm wired differently to do this?' Have I said to myself, 'we're both rectal surgeons, but my partner is better at focusing on one task at a time, and I can find the time? Have I ever said, 'My partner makes more money than me or my job is more flexible?''If you've ever said any one of those messages to yourself, they're all toxic. The system is Fair Play, it's ever-standing, and you can do an audit of the system. How well is your system working? How functional do you feel like your home is, or are you a home where you're waiting to decide who takes the dog out every night before it takes a pee on the rug? If you're feeling completely chaotic, start with the system. If you feel like you've said one of those toxic messages to yourself, start with your boundaries. If you feel like you can't even bring things up, start with communication. Do you and your husband follow the rules of Fair Play, and if so, how does it help you divide the labor of raising your kids? Everyone should watch our documentary on Hulu. It's called Fair Play, and it shows how we practice fair play. I think it's affected our kids the most because they have ownership of their tasks in the understand that laundry is not just putting the clothes in the washer. It's understanding to separate darks from lights. It's understanding that certain clothes don't go in the washer, that certain clothes have to be hand-washed or dry cleaned. It's understanding that you want to plan for when you do the laundry so that you have clean clothes for when you need them. It's understanding that once those clothes go in, you also have to set a timer to know when they go in the dryer, and then set another timer for when they have to come out of the dryer. And then you have to set another time to fold them, and then you also have to know where those clothes that's the ownership of laundry. Understanding that CPE [conception, planning, executing] is the core tenet of our household has been really helpful for our children's executive function. You shared that your mother was a single mom. What was it like growing up with her and how did she influence your perspective on unpaid domestic labor? My mother is a professor in macro-social work, so she does a lot of social change work. What she always taught me was that everything's a both-and. It's not I've learned is that we have to fight for better systems for parents within this country, whether it's subsidizing childcare, paid leave, allowing men more flexibility to be caregivers—but also, with the both-and, we can take the opportunity to change our lives can start practicing Fair Play. We can start demanding a better world for our time. We can reclaim our time. We can spend less time doing cognitive labor. We can insist that our partners share the load. You talk about people having a unicorn space. Can you explain what that is and tell us about what your unicorn space is? Unicorn space means creativity is not optional. As parents, we are parents, partners, and professionals on repeat. We have zero opportunity to explore creativity, and so what this concept really gets at is that identity loss in parents is real. To reclaim the things that we love, values-based curiosity, sharing ourselves with the world, and completing something different outside of our roles is really the antidote to antidote to burnout is being consistently interested in your own life. You're not going to get there by just having a once-a-year girls trip or men's trip or even going to the gym every day. We have to have this third thing, this idea of unicorn space. Something in our life to say, 'I'm working towards a goal where I can't believe I just did that.' The consistency of learning and excitement, and the fear, all those elements are really what make a meaningful life. I signed up for something called 29029. It's a hike up Whistler Mountain where you go up eight times to replicate what it would feel like to do the elevation of Everest. I've been training. It's helped me process my father's death in October. And it's the craziest endurance challenge I've ever done, so that's my unicorn space right now.I will say that I think it's very important to understand, my husband and my kids are not like, 'Wow mom you're amazing.' They're like, 'Ugh, mom's going on another hike again.' 'When you hold a boundary, people are not cheering for you. It doesn't work like that. Expect other people's discomfort when you hold your boundaries. Read the original article on Parents Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
04-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
My Husband and I Watched a Documentary on Hulu. It Changed My Marriage
The mental load is real, but for modern couples—i.e. those with spouses that do make the effort to pitch in—it's also complex. In my own case, after surfacing (and lamenting) the mental load on more than one occasion to my husband, it became a sticking point…and one that required attention. (Our main point of contention was about the division of labor—my spouse was confused: Doesn't he also carry a portion of the mental load?) As we attempted to hash this out, I realized that my husband—who is hugely participatory in family life as we raise two boys—and I could benefit from watching the documentary, Fair Play Life, which is based on the bestselling book by Eve Rodsky, called Fair Play. Could we watch it together and come out with a deeper understanding of each other on the other side? We queued up Hulu to find out. Released in 2022 in partnership with Reese Witherspoon's production company, Hello Sunshine, Fair Play Life is based on Rodsky's book of the same name, Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much To Do (and More Life to Live). Told via the perspectives of actual couples, it offers a deep dive into the household division of unpaid labor for heterosexual couples, specifically when it comes to the ongoing (and mostly invisible) tasks of managing a home and family, aka the mental load. Immediately, it was easy to see bits and pieces of my own marriage in the faces of other couples. For one thing, my own propensity to just keep shouldering the load. (As one woman vents, just continuing to do the work is easier than training her partner, but it doesn't solve the problem—and 'round and 'round we go.) But I also clocked some key differences: My husband and I divvy up household- and family-related tasks regularly and often; we both work full-time, so share the childcare load if someone is home sick or has a day off from school. He cooks, I clean. I book the camps and make the pediatrician appointments, he grocery shops. But if the tasks are a 50/50 split, why was I continuing to feel so uniquely overwhelmed? (This was his question more than mine.) About 30 minutes into the film, my husband had a simple request: 'Let's both jot down our definition of the mental load before we continue.' We hit pause on the definition of the mental load, as informed by my work, but also my viewing (thus far) of the Fair Play Life film: 'The mental load is the invisible labor, the anticipation of tasks and the mental and emotional prep work that goes into managing a family and household. Less task execution and more task anticipation, organization and delegation.' (I read this to my spouse aloud.) For my husband, he viewed the mental load with a major distinction: 'It's the effort that goes into executing the tasks on our plate.' This was the moment I realized our divide. One of the most salient points that Fair Play Life drives home is the lack of recognition that men have for the mental load their wives carry. As she explains in the film, Rodsky better understood this in her own marriage after writing down a list she titled, 'The Shit I Do.' She narrowed those tasks to include anything that takes more than two minutes of time—for example, prepping school lunches, doctor's appointments, picking the kids up from school if they're sick. But she also accounted for the less talked about tasks: Sunscreen application takes two minutes, but she allows 30 minutes for the chase to pin her kids down and apply. Her agenda was to make the invisible visible. 'Can't wait to discuss,' she emailed her spouse. (Rodsky's own husband was shocked.) But that's what caught me off guard in my own marriage, as laid out by our varying definitions of the mental load. My husband viewed the mental load as the labor that goes into task execution (i.e. he makes a meal plan, he shops for groceries). I view it as the emotional baggage that leads up to the job. (Even though he cooks, I'm usually the one prodding him to set aside the time to meal plan; the one pinging him a reminder that we are missing a few ingredients if we still want to follow through on what we mapped out to cook, the one researching how exactly to introduce allergens to our baby.) Don't get me wrong: My husband is an expert at knocking things off the task list, but the burnout hits when you're the person plunking out the step-by-step process behind the to-dos. It sounds silly, but this tiny difference in our understanding of the mental load—not to mention the background the film provides about why women tend to be the ones to systemically carry it—felt like a breakthrough. It also gave us a road map for the future that also stems from Fair Play Life: My husband now feels a bit clearer on the mental load of any given task and wants to make a better effort with the invisible parts of our household to-dos. (Rodsky calls this the CPE: The Conception, Planning and Execution behind a task, with the cognitive aspects making up the bulk of the mental load.) Once again, our varying definitions come into play. So does executive functioning. (My husband is also working on systems that better prompt him to initiate when it comes to his weekly jobs.) All in all, we're forging ahead—but with a bit less friction when it comes to the to-dos on our plate. We Need to Teach Our Sons to Share the Mental Load (No, Chores Aren't Enough)
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Swiffer and BGC Canada Join Forces to Address the Chore Gap in Canadian Homes
Swiffer partners with BGC Clubs across Canada as part of an initiative aimed at promoting awareness of the equitable division of household responsibilities Toronto, ON, June 10, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In an effort to make Canadian household chores more equitable, Swiffer, a P&G brand, has teamed up with BGC Canada, the country's largest child-and youth-serving organization, to inspire kids to 'close the chore gap' at home. As part of the new partnership, Swiffer will provide easy-to-use tools, like the Swiffer PowerMop, to help bring the 'Home Eq[uity]' curriculum to life in BGC Clubs across the country. Research indicates that in 65% of households, the burden of chores often rests on a single individual, most often women. This disparity in the distribution of household responsibilities is what has come to be known as the 'Chore Gap.' While the inequity may look different in every home, the new partnership underscores the importance of addressing the chore gap before it happens, encouraging youth to consider what equity looks like within their own Close the Chore Gap initiative, launched in Canada in 2023 in partnership with Fair Play —a gamified life-management system inspired by Eve Rodsky's book—aims to educate families on the fair division of household work. Through age-appropriate curriculums developed for educators and families alike, the program teaches children and families that everyone has a role to play in maintaining a shared home.'Swiffer believes that addressing the chore gap starts with fostering a culture of shared responsibilities within the home,' said Nancy Li, Brand Director, Swiffer. 'Involving children in household chores not only tackles the chore gap at its roots but also equips them with essential life skills that contribute to happier, healthier adults. Our initiative aims to raise awareness of chore equity and inspire families to collaborate, showcasing how Swiffer can support a more balanced approach to household responsibilities.'The Home Eq[uity] curriculums, which BGC Canada will promote in its internal newsletter to Clubs across the country, will be available in full on the BGC Canada member website, with resources tailored to audiences from primary school to post-secondary.'At BGC Canada, we empower young people with the skills they need to succeed in all aspects of life—including at home,' said Brooke Duval, Sr. Director, Partnerships & Philanthropy, BGC Canada. 'Through this partnership with Swiffer, we're helping kids and teens understand the importance of shared responsibility and teamwork in their own households. By closing the chore gap, we're fostering habits that promote fairness and equity—values that will benefit them for life.' Swiffer and BGC Canada together aim to drive awareness around the issue of chore equity and encourage Canadians to close the chore gap within their own households. Using simple and easy-to-use tools like the Swiffer PowerMop and Duster, families can integrate cleaning into their households at any learn more about how you can 'close the chore gap,' download the Home Eq[uity] curriculum at P&GP&G serves consumers around the world with one of the strongest portfolios of trusted, quality, leadership brands, including Always®, Ambi Pur®, Ariel®, Bounty®, Charmin®, Crest®, Dawn®, Downy®, Fairy®, Febreze®, Gain®, Gillette®, Head & Shoulders®, Lenor®, Olay®, Oral-B®, Pampers®, Pantene®, SK-II®, Swiffer®, Tide®, Vicks®, and Whisper®. The P&G community includes operations in approximately 70 countries worldwide. Please visit for the latest news and information about P&G and its brands. About BGC Canada For 125 years, BGC Canada has been creating opportunities for millions of Canadian kids and teens. As Canada's largest child and youth serving charitable and community services organization, our Clubs open their doors to young people of all ages and their families at over 600 locations nationwide. During out-of-school hours in small and large cities, and rural and Indigenous communities, our trained staff and volunteers provide programs and services that help young people realize positive outcomes in self-expression, academics, healthy living, physical activity, job readiness, mental wellness, social development, leadership, and more. Opportunity changes everything. Learn more at and follow us on social media @ Fair PlayDeveloped by Eve Rodsky, the New York Times bestselling book and Reese's Book Club Pick, Fair Play, is a gamified life-management system that helps partners rebalance their domestic workload and reimagine their relationships. Since its 2019 release, the book has elevated the cultural conversation about the value of unpaid labor and care. In her highly anticipated follow-up, Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World, Rodsky explored the cross-section between the science of creativity, productivity, and resilience. Written, produced, and directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom and inspired by Rodsky's book, the FAIR PLAY documentary was released in the summer of 2022. Fair Play is backed by Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine, a part of Candle Media, whose mission is to change the narrative for women through storytelling. More information can be found at CONTACT: Karli Kachur MSL Canada 4036054157
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How to Embrace Your True Purpose When You Feel Stuck in Life Roles
At some point in midlife, many women find themselves asking the same quiet question: What's next? Whether prompted by burnout, a layoff or an empty nest, the search for something more fulfilling—more you—can be both liberating and overwhelming. During the Flow Space Women's Health Summit LA on May 14, three powerhouse women gathered to help answer that question. Moderated by SHE Media CEO Samantha Skey, the 'Design a Life You Love' panel featured psychologist and 'optimism doctor' Dr. Deepika Chopra, New York Times best-selling author of Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space Eve Rodsky, and THE BOARD founder April Uchitel. Together, they shared hard-earned wisdom about resilience, reinvention and reclaiming creativity—especially when you feel like you've lost it. More from Flow Space 'Sex With Emily' Host Reveals What's Ruining Your Sex Life For Uchitel, the moment of truth came after walking away from a CEO role in the midst of the pandemic. 'I left a CEO role during the pandemic and wasn't sure what my next thing was going to be,' she said. 'So many people were reaching out to me saying, 'I'm out. I moved upstate. I left LA. I got laid off. I'm consulting.'' That wave of women in flux led her to launch THE BOARD, a curated network of women supporting one another's next chapter. 'It was created primarily to resource each other and to share learnings and knowledge and networks,' Uchitel explained. 'I joke that we're the black Amex of LinkedIn, but we're a food co-op at the same time.' Rodsky brought the fire—backed by data and her signature humor—pointing out that creativity doesn't stand a chance without acknowledging the burden of unpaid labor. 'You cannot talk about creativity without understanding unpaid labour,' she said. 'If I had written a book that told you to all have two uninterrupted days a week [to get into a flow state and spark creativity], you should throw me out and stone me.' Her call to action? Put your own name back on your life. Literally. 'We're given the 'mom' necklace the second we get back from the hospital,' she said. 'Start to take off your kids' names from your jewelry, your neck. Put your own initial on as a reminder [for your family] that they should know who you are… You are not just a parent, partner and professional on repeat.' That theme of personal reconnection carried through Chopra's insights, too. Known for her science-backed approach to optimism, she reminded the audience that resilience doesn't require a reinvention of your entire life. Sometimes, it's about taking just 12 seconds to celebrate a win. 'If you can focus on feeling a sense of joy for 12 seconds—that is enough time to rewire your brain,' Chopra said. 'It sounds simple, but all the research shows that we are our most resilient and productive selves, when we are celebrating our wins.' So, if you're in the middle of a career shift, a caregiving stretch or simply trying to remember who you were before the responsibilities stacked up, take this as your reminder: You're allowed to want more. You're allowed to evolve. And you're definitely allowed to take your name back.
