Zonal Marking

When people have two children, it is customary for one parent to take responsibility for each kid. However, is this sustainable?

Last Thursday afternoon, my son was born. On Friday night, I published a blogpost announcing it. On Saturday morning, I got this text from a friend, who has two sons:

I hope you realise you have given up a huge advantage. You both had your daughter double teamed, now it's one on one on the kids... Much harder to defend 😁

This wasn’t the first time that I had come across this argument. Another friend, also with two kids, had told us this back in 2017 (the younger of his kids was a little over a year old then).

A relative who I’d met for drinks last month had also told me the very same thing - he again has two children, and he said “sometimes it feels like we are two single parents living together with our respective kids”.

Last week, our daughter had brought home a virus (from school, I think). While we have so far managed to protect my wife and son from it, I got the bug earlier this week. And so I was out of action in taking care of the little one, not risking coming too close in contact with him. Last night, we had our own version of “man marking”, with my wife and son sleeping in one room, and my daughter and I sleeping in another. My daughter is trying to nap next to me right now as I write this.

All the examples I have quoted above, including my own case here, are examples of “man marking”. With two parents and two children, each parent takes responsibility for one child (in general, the father takes care of the older one, and the mother of the younger, from what I’ve seen). This includes both physical and emotional support (though the older one needs less of the former and more of the latter). I know of several relatives with two kids where the parents sleep in different rooms, each sharing a bed with a child.

The more I think about it (admittedly I didn’t give this enough thought before my son was born), the more I think of it as being inefficient. If you are fully responsible for one child, I think, there is no opportunity to do anything on your own apart from when the child is at school or something. For example, I’m now starting to take a break from online quizzing, and I can go for offline quizzes if and only if my daughter also comes along (it helps that she is interested).

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The football watcher in me has started wondering - is man-to-man marking the only way of taking care of children, or is there a version of zonal marking that one can employ here? With the zones here not being defined by areas of the pitch, but more in terms of time.

Over the last year or two, admittedly with only one man to mark, my wife and I had come up with a fairly sustainable strategy that we would each go out to meet our friends on our own, only ensuring we didn’t have to both go out on the same day. Thus, the other person could be with our daughter at home, and we could both thus have fun (of course, having many more friends than her in Bangalore, I happily abused this arrangement).

Does this arrangement work with two children (aged seven and zero) as well, or will the person at home get massively overwhelmed? Of course, for the next 2-3 months at least my wife doesn’t plan to really go out much, but if I’m leaving both kids at home with her, is it going to be sustainable?

I guess I can only try a few times and then be able to comment. The Chesterton’s fence says that others would have tried similarly as well and then moved to man marking, so maybe I can’t be too hopeful.