"Other parents do it all"

They do, mostly. The takeover isn't your quirk. It's the water, and it's worth seeing that, because a habit that everybody has doesn't feel like a habit. It feels like parenting.

The time-use research from chapter 3 is the evidence. Across eleven countries over nearly fifty years, parents' time on childcare went up, and it went up most among the parents with the most education. Brendan Churchill and colleagues, looking at American time-use data from 2003 to 2018, found that mothers and fathers of every generation were spending more time in the direct care of children as the years went on, and that it wasn't a matter of one generation of parents being different from the last. It was happening to all of them at once. That's a period effect, in their language, and it means the thing pushing parents towards more doing is in the air rather than in you.

I don't know why, and the researchers offer several ideas that I won't pretend to adjudicate. What I'd say is that the direction of the pressure is towards more, and that the takeover is what more looks like in a hall at quarter to eight. It isn't a failure of yours. It's the thing the culture is currently calling good parenting, and it will be called something else in thirty years, the way most parenting fashions are.

But "everyone does it" is a description and not a permission. The chores study in chapter 13 found children of the same period, in the same country, whose parents didn't do it all, and those children were doing fine. The choice exists inside the water. It's just that nobody around you is making it visible, and if you make it, you'll look for a while like the parent who's doing less. You'll be doing less. The child will be doing more, and the total will be about the same.

I'd also say that the other parents aren't a jury. They're in the same hall with the same hand, and half of them are reading a version of this book. The ones who look like they've got it sorted are the ones whose children are at the stage where the takeover still works, which is every stage until it doesn't.