Before you embark on parenthood, before you volunteer to make cupcakes for a school party or stay up late to finish a fourth grader's science project-and definitely before you pick up another copy of Martha Stewart Living -read this book!, Schulte takes a purely practical and secular approach to a question that philosophers and spiritual teachers have debated for centuries-how to find meaningful work, connection, and joy-but her research is thorough and her conclusions fascinating, her personal narrative is charmingly honest, and the stakes are high: the 'good life' pays off in 'sustainable living, healthy populations, happy families, good business, sound economies.', ' Overwhelmed is a superb report from the front lines of the sputtering gender revolution.

Brigid Schulte takes up the perennial problem of women's 'second shift' with fresh energy and fascinating new data, effortlessly blending academic findings and mothers' lived experiences, including her own often hilarious attempts to be both the perfect parent and a successful full-time journalist. A must-read by a truly perceptive author!, Overwhelmed is a superb report from the front lines of the sputtering gender revolution. Overwhelmed is the story of what she found out.īeautifully written, with searing facts, engaging stories, illuminating history, and wry personal observations. She investigates progressive offices trying to invent a new kind of workplace she travels across Europe to get a sense of how other countries accommodate working parents she finds younger couples who claim to have figured out an ideal division of chores, childcare, and meaningful paid work.

Schulte speaks to neuroscientists, sociologists, and hundreds of working parents to tease out the factors contributing to our collective sense of being overwhelmed, seeking insights, answers, and inspiration. In Overwhelmed, Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post, asks: Are our brains, our partners, our culture, and our bosses making it impossible for us to experience anything but 'contaminated time'? Schulte first asked this question in a 2010 feature for The Washington Post Magazine 'How did researchers compile this statistic that said we were rolling in leisure-over four hours a day? Did any of us feel that we actually had downtime? Was there anything useful in their research-anything we could do?' Overwhelmed is a map of the stresses that have ripped our leisure to shreds, and a look at how to put the pieces back together.

Can working parents in America-or anywhere-ever find true leisure time? According to the Leisure Studies Department at the University of Iowa, true leisure is 'that place in which we realize our humanity.' If that's true, argues Brigid Schulte, then we're doing dangerously little realizing of our humanity.

Overwhelmed schulte