of hassles occurring in old age (i.e., ages 60–74). Compared with older adults, young and midlife adults reported experiencing a hassle or multiple hassles on more days, and they perceived their hassles to be more severe.
The content of the everyday hassles that individuals reported included arguments or tensions, overloads (i.e., having too little time or resources), and hassles regarding respondents’ social networks, health care, home management, and work or school. Arguments or tensions accounted for half of all daily stressors reported by men and women, and most of these tensions involved spouses or partners. Overload and network hassles were much less common, occurring on 6% and 8% of the study days, respectively. Women were more likely than men to report hassles involving their social networks (i.e., relatives or close friends), whereas men reported more overloads related to work or school than did women (Almeida, 2004). Compared with older adults, the younger and midlife adults in Almeida and Horn’s study experienced a greater proportion of overloads and reported that hassles caused greater disruption in their daily routines.
Feminist scholars have focused on gender differences in family members’ experiences and the subjective meanings that family members ascribe to routinized hassles. For example, feminist researchers have demonstrated that women perform the bulk of family labor (e.g., cooking, housecleaning, laundry), parenting, and caregiving, and this work has multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings for the individuals who perform it. Studies involving national surveys and time diaries confirm a gender gap in household labor but suggest that it may be narrowing somewhat in the 21st century (Sayer, 2005). These results show that men are spending more time on routine household chores and childcare than in the past. Women, however, continue to perform about twice the amount of housework as their husbands, and mothers spend substantially more solo time caring for children than do fathers (Bianchi, Sayer, Milkie, & Robinson, 2012; Sullivan, 2018). Furthermore, even though men’s and women’s time allocation has become more similar, the types of activities performed remain strongly gendered. Women spend a greater percentage of total time in unpaid labor on routine, time-consuming, and less optional housework (e.g., laundry, cooking), whereas men spend a greater percentage of time on occasional household tasks that require less time and regularity (e.g., mowing the lawn, car maintenance). Relative to fathers, mothers experience childcare as more stressful and tiring, which may reflect the fact that mothers do more multitasking and physical care, provide care on a more rigid timetable, spend more time alone with children, and have more overall responsibility for managing care (Connelly & Kimmel, 2014; Craig, 2006; Offer & Schneider, 2011). In addition, gender disparities in free time have increased, with women reporting almost 4 hours less free time each week than men (Sayer, 2005). When paid and unpaid work hours are combined, married mothers work more total hours per week than married fathers (Bianchi & Raley, 2005; Sayer, 2005). Finally, the increased use of 24/7 information and communication technology (ICT) by 21st century families may lead to gendered patterns of spillover between hassles at work and home. For example, Chelsey (2005) found that increased ICT leads to more family demands spilling over into the workplace for women (e.g., caring for family needs while at work), and more work demands spilling over to the home for men (e.g., handling work demands while at home). The gendered nature of family work is not without costs, as evidenced in findings demonstrating that women report more stress from both external daily hassles and internal (relationship) daily hassles, and, relative to men’s, women’s internal and external hassles place both partners’ relationship satisfaction at risk (Falconier, Nussbeck, Bodenmann, Schneider, & Bradbury, 2014).
Even in situations where couples define their division of family work as equal, inequalities abound when examining the management of everyday hassles. Regarding the everyday hassles associated with organizing family members’ schedules, Jeannie [a mother of two children ages 9 and 12] observed: “I mean the thing is it generally falls on the woman. It’s really kind of hard to expect [this to happen] and maybe it’s just because of … nature. When I first got married and had kids I thought [we should share childcare] fifty-fifty because everything else was fifty-fifty” (Kaplan, 2010, pp. 598–599). Inequalities may also manifest in the degree of worry mothers and fathers express about their children. For example, Eleanor, a mother of a 12- and 14-year-old, commented, “[My husband] doesn’t worry as much as I about my daughter … Sometimes I say to him, ‘Don’t you know when she’s coming home?’ And he’s sort of, ‘Oh, she’ll be home.’ So we have a different standard of worry” (Kaplan, 2010, pp. 603–604). These mothers’ experiences of tending to the everyday needs of their children underscore feminist characterizations of the often “invisible” nature of the work required to care for children and maintain a home and suggest that if this type of family work were measured directly in large-scale survey studies, gender differences may be even more pronounced.
To understand the links between everyday hassles and family relationships, one must recognize that family labor is multidimensional and time intensive, involves both routine and occasional tasks, and is highly variable across and within households. Furthermore, because much of the “worry-shift” is mundane, tedious, boring, and generally performed without pay, most women and men report that they do not like doing it (DeVault, 1991; Kaplan, 2010; Robinson & Milkie, 1998). The sheer volume of family labor and caregiving, as well as the ongoing and relentless nature of many of these responsibilities, requires planning, preparation, scheduling, and multitasking—tasks that often fall disproportionately on the shoulders of women. Thus, although caring for family members includes enjoyable aspects, the work itself often creates hassles that impact family relationships (Connelly & Kimmel, 2014). Peg, a school psychologist working 45 hours per week and a married mother of three young children, explains the division of family labor in her home and her frustrations with the arrangement:
He’s not a morning person. He has coffee and sits. That’s one of the biggest gripes. When I’ve had a tough morning, I’ll say, “Am I the only one who hears people say, ‘more orange juice?’” … Things build to a head and then I have what you call a meltdown. “I can’t do this anymore. This isn’t fair. This isn’t right. I’m not the only adult in the house!” Then for a few days he’ll try to make lunch. It’s generally when I’m feeling pressured … and the stress level just gets to me and then I let it all out. It changes for a short period of time but then reverts right back to the same. (Deutsch, 1999, pp. 50, 53)
Ethan, Peg’s husband who works 60 hours per week in the biotechnology business, recognizes the inequality but explains it differently: “[Peg] just naturally jumps in where I kind of wait for her to take the initiative…. Maybe I’m not helping as much as I could because I feel like that” (Deutsch, 1999, p. 51). Ethan’s response implies that “helping” with the children in the morning is an option for him—something he can opt out of if he does not feel like participating.
One explanation for the differences between women and men in the ways they experience everyday hassles focuses on the extent to which individuals interpret their involvement in family labor to be freely chosen or voluntary. In an exploration of the contextual conditions surrounding family members’ experience of emotions, Larson, Richards, and Perry-Jenkins (1994) were the first to discover how married spouses’ perceptions of choice played a key role predicting fluctuations in their moods throughout the day. Their rich data on the contrasting moods of husbands and wives at work and at home highlighted how differently men and women experience these contexts and the everyday hassles they encounter. For example, employed wives recorded their most positive moods while at work and an emotional decline at home during the evening hours, which were filled with housework and childcare. In contrast, husbands recorded their most negative emotions in the workplace; at home their moods lightened, in part, because non-work time included leisure activities. However, even when men performed housework or childcare, their moods while doing these tasks were more positive than were those of their wives when they performed the same activities. Further analyses revealed that performing housework and childcare tasks elicited more positive reactions from husbands than from wives because the husbands perceived that they had more choice regarding their involvement in these domains than did the wives.
The reverse is true for paid work. Husbands
