What the takeover costs you

So far I've talked about what it costs the child. I'd like to spend a chapter on what it costs you, because I think you've been under-counting, and the under-count is part of why the habit survives.

The obvious cost is the minutes, and you've got a number for that from chapter 1. Multiply it by the days in a school year and then by the years until the child would have learned the thing anyway, and you've got a rough figure for what the quick version has cost you so far. It won't be small. The takeover is cheap on any one morning and it's a large purchase over a childhood, and the reason nobody sees the total is that it's paid in twenty-second instalments.

The less obvious cost is what it does to quarter to eight. A morning in which you do the shoes, the bag, the sandwich and the form is a morning in which you're doing four people's jobs and being thanked for none of them, because nobody thanks you for a thing they didn't know was theirs. The resentment that arrives around the third job isn't a character flaw. It's the correct response to doing other people's work. And it lands, usually, on the child, in the voice from chapter 7, and the child has no idea what they've done, because from where they're standing they've done nothing. That's the point. They've been arranged so that they do nothing, and then they're resented for it.

There's a third cost, and it's the one I'd want you to sit with. A parent who does everything is needed all the time. That can feel like the point of the job, and there's a real pleasure in being the person the child turns to. But being needed for the shoes at seven, and the phone call at fourteen, and the form at nineteen, is a full-time post with no promotion, and the parent holding it has, without meaning to, made themselves unable to leave the hall. Every job kept is a job you'll be doing next year. The takeover doesn't just cost you the minutes. It costs you the version of family life where the children carry some of it.

I'd say that plainly. You're tired at quarter to eight because the household has one working member and three passengers, and the passengers are able-bodied. The method in the next chapters is slower for a fortnight and it's the only thing in this book that gives you time back. It gives it back by giving the jobs back.