For all its benefits, the practice can be a double-edged sword — especially for moms.
In March 2020, millions of American parents turned kitchen tables into desks, closets into boardrooms, and Zoom meetings into opportunities for impromptu dance performances when they started working from home to care for their kids during the pandemic.
Of course, some parents worked from home before the pandemic began, but by making the practice far more common, the lockdowns helped entrench a new role in American families and society at large: that of the work-from-home parent. Now, more than three years after the pandemic began, it looks like that role is here to stay.
Despite company attempts to call workers back to the office, remote work has stabilized at about 25 percent of total days worked, up from 5 percent of days in 2019, said Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University and a co-founder of the project WFH Research. Parents, especially mothers, are more likely to take advantage of remote policies when they’re available: in 2022, moms worked an average of 33.6 percent of their days from home, compared with 32.4 percent for dads and 27.7 percent for men with no kids, according to WFH Research. And what started out as an emergency measure when schools and many workplaces were closed has become, at this point, the only way many parents (again, especially moms) can imagine balancing their many competing responsibilities.
The setup has a lot of perks. Tonya Abari, a Nashville-based writer and editor who works from home alongside her husband and two kids, 8 and almost 2, says she loves being there for milestones and more quotidian moments alike: “when they start walking or when my daughter has a concert or a soccer game.”
“I’m a family person,” she said. “Home is the epicenter for everything for me.”
But working from home is also a double-edged sword for parents, who can find themselves taking on a disproportionate share of household and child care responsibilities on top of their paid work. The effect is more pronounced for parents whose partners work outside the home, and for moms, who still do the majority of child care in American families. Research conducted during the period of pandemic lockdowns found that when just one parent worked remotely, “the parent who’s working from home becomes the housewife,” said Jennifer Glass, a family demographer at the Population Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. That was true to some degree when the father was the one working remotely, but “it was way more true when it was Mom.”
The ability to work from home is, in many ways, a privilege — those who never have the option to work remotely, like many service-sector workers, tend to earn less and have less control over their time. Still, the rise in work-from-home parenthood threatens to deepen inequities in families and workplaces. To remedy these inequities, work-from-home parents need what, to some degree, all parents need: fair work schedules, affordable and flexible child care options, and a society that values care and domestic work as the necessities that they are. “Appreciation and respect for parents, and caregivers in general, will make things easier,” Abari said. “I think it starts there.”
Working from home has real benefits for parents…
It’s not hard to see why working from home is appealing for parents. At the most basic level, most work schedules do not match up with children’s school calendars, leaving parents scrambling to figure out care for kids during summer and other school breaks, as well as every afternoon. There’s also the need to take care of sick kids (a near-weekly reality for many families even in non-pandemic times), attend parent-teacher conferences and other school events, and manage the innumerable tiny tasks that tend to crop up when you are responsible for young people who cannot reliably feed or clothe themselves. Paid child care can fill in some of these gaps — and is the only option for many families with babies and toddlers — but it’s expensive and often difficult or impossible to find, especially after school and in the summer.
Remote work offers parents the same thing it offers everybody else: time. A 2023 study found that getting rid of the commute to the office saved American workers an average of 72 minutes a day, time parents can use to pick up their kids at school or camp, help them with homework, or just hang out with them.
Working from home “allows me to both do the really mundane shit of going to doctor’s appointments and being able to take care of a sick child, but also being able to insert little moments with my kids throughout the day,” said Jo Piazza, host of the podcast Under the Influence and a mother of three. With her older kids home for summer vacation right now, she can choose to take an hour in the middle of her day and go on a hike with them.
“Moms often have tremendous mom guilt being away from their kids all the time,” Piazza said. “My answer to it is that I can pop in and out for little things, and I feel like we’re getting to spend some meaningful moments together.”
For Abari, remote work is a necessity at this point in her family’s life. They don’t have family nearby to help, and with the cost of formal child care, “it’s cheaper and easier for us just not to have it,” she said. “We are the child care.”
Working from home also allows Abari, who is Black, to avoid the racism, sexism, and microaggressions that have been “very present in my life from school all the way up through my professional life,” she said. “I just wouldn’t consider returning to a place of business because I don’t want to deal with those things.”
It’s a common theme for workers of color — in one 2021 survey, 97 percent of Black workers said they preferred a remote or hybrid workplace. Remote work has also allowed pregnant people to sidestep some of the pregnancy discrimination that remains a stubborn problem in the American workplace, because no one can see their bellies growing over Zoom.
For all these reasons, many parents have embraced remote work, even after the Covid restrictions lessened and children returned to in-person school. As lockdowns eased, parents returned to in-person work, but at lower levels than non-parents.
Employers are continuing to try to get their workers back into the office — Citigroup, for example, announced in June that its employees would face consequences for a lack of attendance. But workers with the power to choose are resisting, with one in two finance professionals saying in a June survey that they’d quit rather than go back in full-time.
“Hybrid work is here to stay,” Glass said. The past few years have been a “giant experiment,” and mostly a successful one — “productivity didn’t plummet, and people liked it,” she said. “It’s going to be very difficult to dial that back.”
…But being a work-from-home parent comes with its own problems
Remote work doesn’t solve all the problems of working parenthood. With younger children especially, sick days are still sick days — it’s nearly impossible to get work done while taking care of a toddler who’s home from day care. Even if you have in-home child care or another parent doing the heavy lifting, working from home with kids around is still difficult. “You are much more accessible to inevitably get pulled into more child care, often with no warning, such as during a Zoom call,” said Bloom, the WFH Research co-founder and a father of four.
Working where you live can also make it easy for household tasks to encroach on work time. “There’s a complete mishmash of work with house responsibilities,” said Piazza, who has worked from home for six years. “Because I’m here, I feel obligated to do home things as I’m working.”
Then there’s the inequality factor. During lockdown, moms tended to shoulder the burden of child care and remote school in heterosexual two-parent families, even when both parents were working from home. In an April 2020 survey, 64 percent of moms in such families said they were responsible for the majority of child care, compared with 35 percent of dads.
Glass, the family demographer, and her team also studied parents during lockdown, and found that when a father worked from home, “he managed to protect his time, and wives would talk about ways that they attempted to protect his time.” For example, if both parents worked remotely, “Mom’s desk was the counter or the kitchen or the dining room table, whereas Dad got a room with a closed door.”
With children back in school, child care, and camp, the pressures on working parents have eased up somewhat since 2020. But some of those inequalities remain. Piazza’s husband also works from home, she said, but he doesn’t feel the same obligation to do housework and child care during the day. “He is not rushing downstairs to pick up a crying baby,” she said.
Indeed, there’s a risk that the ability of some moms to work from home will become simply a Band-Aid imperfectly slapped on America’s crumbling care infrastructure. If a mom works from home, she can quickly become the family’s caregiving backup plan, as Anne Helen Petersen writes at Bloomberg: “When the day care shuts down because it’s short-staffed or one of the kids is sick, she can cover.” But the more that happens, the more the family further entrenches the unequal division of labor that already exists in most heterosexual partnerships.
And of course, one mom working from home may be able to take care of her own kid when the day care is closed, but her individual flexibility (or her workplace’s) does nothing for the many parents who can’t work from home: people who work in hospitality, health care, warehouses, and other sectors where reporting in person is a requirement. People in jobs that can’t be remote are more likely to be low-income, to be people of color, and to be recent immigrants, Glass said. When schools were closed in 2020 and 2021, they reported the most work-family conflict.
These workers struggle with “overwork, and inflexibility, and the inability to predict when you’re going to be called into work,” as well as with “the fact that we don’t have a child care system that is suitable for people who have odd weekend or evening shifts,” Glass said.
The increase in remote and hybrid work over the last two years has done nothing for this group, even though they have the same parenting needs and concerns as everybody else. And even for those who can work from home, there’s a risk of a vicious cycle, in which moms have more caregiving responsibilities, so they spend more time at home, so they pay a career penalty, so they end up picking up even more caregiving responsibilities (and suffer a worsening motherhood penalty when it comes to their earnings and future financial security).
Mothers are already less likely to be hired and are paid less than men with similar qualifications, and some experts fear that remote work could worsen the penalty moms already pay. In a 2021 study by consulting firm Egon Zehnder, more than 7 in 10 C-suite professionals said that remote workers might be passed over for leadership roles because they weren’t in the office. Unless implemented very intentionally, remote work could end up leading to career dead ends for women, Brigid Schulte told Politico the same year: “You are mommy tracked to the billionth degree.”
Many work-from-home parents are clear that they like the flexibility the setup offers, as Petersen notes. But they never signed up to be, as she puts it, “one-woman safety nets.” If American work and family cultures get too reliant on the work-from-home mom, then nothing substantive has to change.
Work-from-home parents need more child care options and better schedules — just like everyone else
Indeed, what families really need now, experts say, is a shift in employer expectations, policy priorities, and larger cultural attitudes — one that would benefit both work-from-home parents and those who go to work in person.
“There are a lot of assumptions that no matter what kind of job you have, if you’re working in the home, it is somehow less-than than being in an office” and that “you can take on all of the burden of parenting because you’re the one that’s at home,” Piazza said. “Those kinds of attitudes just have to change.”
Employers can do their part by setting boundaries around work hours and meeting times so as not to disadvantage remote employees, Erin Grau, COO of the consulting company Charter, told Politico. Companies like Etsy have also embraced hybrid work for everyone — including executives — to avoid penalizing parents or others who prefer remote work.
Improving the accessibility of child care is also part of the equation. “If I had assistance with child care, I could even do more work and I could be more of a contribution to society,” Abari said. Reducing costs is important, she said. In April, Democrats in Congress introduced a bill to make child care more affordable for working- and middle-class families, but it is unlikely to pass.
Flexibility and quality, though, are also crucial. “There has to be a trust factor,” Abari said. She’d like to see a kind of coworking space for remote-working parents that allows them to bring their kids and check on them periodically throughout the day. “Where are those places?” she asks. “There are none here.”
Parents also need reasonable working hours and predictable work schedules, experts say, regardless of how their jobs are structured. Fair workweek laws that aim to guarantee predictable schedules, for example, could result in a more just economy for all.
Finally, parents and experts alike are calling for a cultural shift toward actually valuing the work of caregiving and setting up workplaces and communities with parents in mind, rather than forcing them to figure everything out on their own. “We’re ushering in the next generation of leaders and change makers,” Abari said. “In order for us to be able to do that, we need support.”
How love triangles capture our hearts and our attention.
Jenny Han’s young adult trilogy The Summer I Turned Pretty, and its Amazon Prime TV show adaptation, depicts a classic love triangle, with a few notable twists. Teen protagonist Belly (Lola Tung) is caught between the love of two brothers, Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah (Gavin Casalegno). In season one, Belly was deeply in love with the quiet, brooding Conrad: the ultimate symbol of the unavailable boy you just have to have. Because Conrad was reticent about his feelings, Belly ended up making out with his brother Jeremiah — a bubbly, blond, Abercrombie model-esque boy next door whose affection came more easily.
I’m a huge fan of love triangles, but even I have to admit that The Summer I Turned Pretty is a little … intense. All this romantic turmoil happens while the boys’ mom, Susannah (Rachel Blanchard), is dying of cancer. Add to that Belly’s mother, Laurel (Jackie Chung), is best friends with Susannah. They raised their children together as fictive kin, and it makes the whole thing feel slightly incestuous. Still, while it gives me a tummy ache, that tension and taboo is partly why this series is so beloved and why viewers are locked in. As viewers and readers of romance, many of us are drawn to love triangles more than any other trope.
For writers and showrunners, there’s a clear financial benefit in feeding our hunger for love triangles. It’s more likely to lead to more books, TV seasons, and movies, and it increases reader/audience engagement. This is what Ethan Calof, PhD candidate in English and Comparative Media Analysis and Practice at Vanderbilt University, calls “social community formation.”
“If you’re drawing out a tense, emotional love triangle plot through multiple books, it strengthens community formation by encouraging readers to join teams for a ship war. And ship wars are not an accidental happenstance,” they say, citing Twilight and how Team Edward and Team Jacob generated countless fanfiction and merchandise opportunities. (Remember Nordstrom’s Twilight clothing line?) Even in The Summer I Turned Pretty, the fourth wall is broken a bit when Belly’s brother Steven (Sean Kaufman) and her best friend Taylor (Rain Spencer) argue about whether they’re Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah, echoing online fan defenses of the respective love interests.
Calof says that literary binaries and tropes provide readers with “a sense of comfort, a clear debate to weigh in on, and a digestible sense of conflict that keeps a story propelling forward.” They explain, “Joining a broader team is just a manifestation of this instinct — the comfort of being part of a large group, and an exploration that deepens as each sequel is published.” So that callout to the fandom, while a bit ham-fisted, was purposely meant to continue the lucrative communities that can build around love triangles.
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IMDb
Despite how this shows up in the digital age, love triangles are a centuries-old obsession. “When reading a love triangle plot through a monogamous lens, each potential partner represents an aspect of the protagonist’s personality, or a moral choice, or one side of a binary,” Calof says. “Most of Jane Austen’s novels feature a female protagonist choosing between two or more men, one virtuous and one immoral, with her protagonists eventually choosing the virtuous side and resolving a moral dilemma,” they point out. “Anne Elliot from Persuasion chooses the clever but less pedigreed Wentworth over her manipulative cousin William, Elizabeth Bennett chooses the shy and wealthy Mr. Darcy over the charming adulterer Mr. Wickham, Emma chooses the honest Mr. Knightley over the shallow Frank Churchill.”
Despite our love of building community around uniting behind one love interest or the next, or our general consensus that one love interest is superior — no one likes Wickham over Darcy — some might say that our interest in love triangles might point to a wider cultural desire to explore polyamory. While I don’t doubt that many are curious about exploring options outside of the dominant form of monogamous relationships, I disagree that the classic love triangle is a good example of this. For the most part, love triangles are the antithesis of what most people say polyamory is intended to be about: loving multiple people equally and simultaneously. In contrast to this definition of polyamory, love triangles are hyper-focused on the act of choosing, the ebb and flow of affection and attraction. Aimée Lutkin, an entertainment writer for Elle magazine and author of The Lonely Hunter: How Our Search for Love Is Broken, says, “There’s still a real monogamous bent within these love triangles. They have to choose one. It’s very rarely that the ending is like, ‘Yeah, I’ll date both the brothers.’”
Many forms of polyamory are also centered around the idea that love shouldn’t be hierarchical. But the love triangle as a trope is about the constant battle for primacy. As one potential lover rises in esteem, the other falls. It’s either a roller coaster or a steady, depressing road trip of rejection for one party (Jacob from Twilight never stood a chance), not a stable and equal development of love for all involved. In fact, the person in the middle of the love triangle (in this case, Belly) usually doesn’t love both equally. One is usually a more comforting, safe love (ahem, we’re looking at you, Michael from Jane the Virgin ) and the other is their fated lover that their heart can’t live without, the OTP, or One True Pairing, like Joey and Pacey from Dawson’s Creek. And, spoiler alert, in this series, it’s so obviously Conrad. Keshav Kant, romance novel consultant and executive director of Off Colour, says that love triangles are reminiscent of “fake open relationships where you want to test the waters to see who else is out there because the one you got at home is starting to get a little stale.”
In other series too, the brooding older guy usually wins over the younger, more exuberant one, a pattern that might suggest that love triangles are often about leaving youth behind for adulthood. One notable exception is Outlander, where Claire rejects the love of her serious dark-haired academic husband Frank, going back in time to 18th-century Scotland and falling in love with the younger, red-haired, mischievous Jamie Fraser. In that case, Claire’s choice might reflect a desire for adventure and youth, and a rejection of the traditional trappings of adulthood and womanhood.
In this idea of choice, there are also lessons. Sometimes people get focused on one option, thinking that there is only one romantic partner for them. That obsession can be unhealthy, leading people to eschew others in favor of chasing someone who might not even be the best fit. That’s why dating around is healthy. Laurel speaks to this briefly in the last episode of season two, telling Belly she wants her to have many lovers before she settles down. Of course, Belly just runs to Jeremiah instead of finding an entirely new person.
It’s the toxicity of the situation that makes a portion of the Summer I Turned Pretty fandom criticize Belly, often calling her selfish and narcissistic for pitting two brothers against each other during their mother’s terminal illness and even after their mother’s death. There’s an argument to be made that perhaps Belly and the boys are engaging in their own self-destructive tendencies.
Unsurprisingly, our attraction to love triangles isn’t always a wholly positive thing. “Love triangles can sometimes appeal to our narcissistic tendencies as they place us in the center of a conquest and divide strategy,” says Avigail Lev, psychotherapist and founder and director at the Bay Area CBT Center. Who can forget Jules’s selfish scheming in My Best Friend’s Wedding, where the well-being of everyone else took a back seat to her desire to get with Michael? “We become the focal point, the object of desire for two individuals who compete over our affection,” Lev says. “This dynamic can give us a sense of satisfaction, as if we have conquered something, triumphed over others.”
An interesting part of this love triangle is Conrad and Jeremiah’s deceased mom Susannah’s culpability (and by extension, the other two dads and Laurel’s, since none of them intervened). Susannah, who considered Belly a daughter, made it clear to Belly, from her childhood, that she knew Belly was “destined for one of her boys.” It’s an immense amount of pressure to put on a child, and I pointed out to Lutkin that it felt almost like incestuous grooming to me, since they were raised as cousins. Lutkin responded, “I’m glad you said the word ‘grooming’ because I was definitely not putting that word to it, but I was thinking about how manipulative it was of Susannah. … It was incestuous and bizarre how Susannah was pushing this idea that she was gonna end up with one of the boys, especially so close to her death, which is obviously gonna be a stronger blow to Belly [if those relationships don’t work out].”
There’s also the added pressure of the beach house, an absurdly expensive home in coastal Massachusetts that Belly and Laurel have been constantly told by Susannah is their house too. Season two revolves around Belly, Conrad, and Jeremiah attempting to save the house as Susannah’s older half-sister Julia (Kyra Sedgwick) attempts to sell it. But crucially, even if they save the home from being sold, unless Belly marries one of the boys, this home will never belong to her. It adds an unspoken layer of pressure that likely makes her hesitant to branch out outside of these two boys, because if she does, she’ll have to contend with another woman eventually being the head of a household that she was led to believe was hers her entire life. Through this lens, Belly’s choice to engage in this love triangle takes on a new dimension. If she chooses the wrong brother, she loses a major part of her identity and an inheritance that ethically should be partly hers.
Within that, there is insight into why the love triangle might appeal more to marginalized groups. “Generally people go to [the romance genre] to seek what they want or what they’ve been denied,” Kant says. “If you love ‘enemies to lovers,’ [you might] want someone who’s gonna love you even if they see you at your worst. If you love ‘friends to lovers,’ you are someone that wants comfort and security because maybe that’s been missing for you.” For traditional love triangles, she says what people are likely seeking is the feeling of being desired.
Due to desirability politics that usually (and falsely) spread the idea that people of color, trans people, disabled people, fat people, and people with mental illnesses are unworthy of being these sought-after objects of desire, it might feel validating for viewers to see protagonists — especially if they exist at one of these marginalizations — being desired by not just one, but two love interests. Part of why women of color enjoyed shows like Never Have I Ever, Jane the Virgin, and From Scratch is because they featured South Asian, Latinx, and Black women at the center of a love triangle — and therefore at the center of desire. After days of people sharing on Twitter about how common the trope of the “disposable Black girlfriend” is, it’s no wonder viewers are hungry for something different. The idea of choices can feel alluring and empowering for anyone, but especially for people who’ve been told their choices are limited or even nonexistent. Still, even though Belly is half-Korean, she doesn’t really exist at many other intersections of marginalization. It’s not lost on viewers that the center of a love triangle is still nondisabled, conventionally attractive, or light-skinned.
Readers of the trilogy like myself know how this love triangle is going to end, but viewers are waiting with bated breath to see the resolution in season three. And in the meantime, despite ourselves, we’re all drawn to the drama. As Lev says, “The drama surrounding a love triangle can be addictive, drawing us in and making us feel like active participants in the romantic turmoil. It evokes intense emotions, heightens the stakes, and adds excitement to our lives.”
My confession is this: There’s nothing I love more than a love triangle. I was raised on Joey/Pacey/Dawson, Elena/Stefan/Damon, and Bella/Edward/Jacob. I was #TeamRafael for every second of Jane the Virgin, and Kal Ho Naa Ho makes me cry every time. But even though love triangles can be useful sources of life lessons, they’re probably best left in fiction. In real life, they can make things hurtful and complicated. Date around, have lots of lovers, and be polyamorous if you’d like, but resist the urge to be the center of this kind of story.
Nylah Burton is a writer based in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, Essence, and British Vogue.
Frenchies and other flat-faced dogs struggle to breathe all year. Extreme heat is making it worse.
Earlier this year, the French bulldog — or the “Frenchie,” as the breed is affectionately known — was named the United States’ most popular dog, ending the Labrador’s 31-year reign. But some of the characteristics that make the Frenchie so irresistibly cute — the scrunched-up flat face, the little button nose, the giant tongue — can also make it hard for them to breathe, especially during the record-breaking heat waves gripping much of the US and the world this summer.
Frenchies, along with English bulldogs (ranked 6th) and pugs (ranked 35th), and around 20 other flat-faced breeds, are brachycephalic, meaning they have unusually short skulls. This makes the soft palate at the back of their mouths too long for their heads, which blocks airflow into the windpipe and lungs. Some of the traits that make it harder for them to breathe are obvious to the naked eye, like their narrow nostrils and large tongues.
Taken together, these conditions make them highly susceptible to brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome, or BOAS, which veterinarians say is a chronic, lifelong, debilitating respiratory disease that degrades their quality of life. Brachycephalic breeds also have shorter lifespans; in the United Kingdom, French bulldogs have the lowest life expectancy of all breeds, at an astonishingly short 4.5 years. One University of Cambridge study found that 90 percent of Frenchies tested had some level of airway restriction.
Some owners put their dogs through invasive surgeries, like widening their nostrils, just to give them some relief.
“Imagine breathing with somebody holding your nose … and your throat’s really swollen,” said bioethicist Jessica Pierce, drawing from an article in DogTime. “Imagine breathing like that all the time.”
It’s estimated that around half of Frenchies, pugs, and English bulldogs suffer from BOAS, though many may not get the veterinary care they need as most owners see the clinical signs of BOAS — snorting, snoring, and heavy breathing — as normal.
“You’ll have people say that the snuffling sound is so cute, and it’s actually a dog struggling to breathe,” said Pierce, who has authored books on animal behavior and welfare, most recently Who’s a Good Dog? “I think it’s just a lack of empathy, and a lack of awareness.”
Just like for humans with respiratory issues, extreme heat makes it all the worse: Brachycephalic dogs are much more likely to suffer heat-related illness events than other breeds.
Emma Goodman Milne, a veterinarian in France, said that unless you live in an especially cool climate, there are “vast swathes of the day that [brachycephalic dogs are] incapable of exercising comfortably because a) they can’t breathe, and b) they can’t heat-regulate either. So they’re much more prone to heat exhaustion and heatstroke, and I think people often underestimate that.”
Milne said that while individual dogs vary, brachycephalic breeds tend to begin panting at much lower temperatures than other dogs — a difference of around 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Given that temperatures are expected to rise in the years ahead, we may want to add one more task to humanity’s climate change adaptation to-do list: Stop breeding dogs that struggle so much in the heat.
“It’s just a low-hanging fruit if you want to reduce dog suffering,” said Pierce.
How to keep your dog cool on a warming planet
There’s a lot we can do for brachycephalic breeds — and all dogs — to keep them cool as summers get hotter (and smokier).
The most obvious and effective thing to prevent heat exhaustion and heatstroke is to avoid the heat. This summer, I’ve taken to walking my dog, Evvie, in the mornings and evenings (while keeping daytime walks under 10 minutes). I try to not get too far from home in case she starts to display signs of overheating: According to the ASPCA, those include excessive panting, difficulty breathing, increased heart rate, drooling, mild weakness, or collapse. More severe symptoms can include “seizures, bloody diarrhea, and vomit along with a body temperature of over 104 degrees.”
If you haven’t already, identify your closest 24/7 emergency veterinarian office in the event your dog’s health goes downhill fast in extreme temperatures. And if your dog is really hot, be mindful to not cool them down too rapidly or too much, which can cause a condition called rebound hypothermia.
For the sake of my dog’s health and happiness, I abandon all sense of fashion on these walks and wear a decked-out fanny pack big enough to store a little water bowl and bottle of water if it’s particularly hot and sunny. Pierce’s daughter puts a cooling vest on her dog Poppy.
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Sage Madden
Beyond the air temperature, there’s asphalt, which can get exceptionally hot and cause injury to dogs.
“A good rule of thumb is to place a hand on the surface of the pavement for 10 seconds. If the pavement is too hot for your hand, then it’s too hot for your pets’ paws,” said Lori Bierbrier, senior medical director for ASPCA Community Medicine, in an email to Vox. And since dogs’ bellies are so low to the ground, heat rising from the asphalt affects them more than it does us. When possible, walk on grass and dirt. (Disclosure: This summer I attended a media fellowship program at Vermont Law and Graduate School that was funded by the ASPCA.)
When it’s very hot, keep outdoor time to a minimum, especially for the dogs most at risk of heat exhaustion. In addition to brachycephalic breeds, that group includes dogs who are overweight, senior dogs, puppies, and those with lung and heart conditions.
Amid their humans’ busy schedules, dogs may already be quite bored. With fewer opportunities for walks and exercise, they could become even more frustrated during the hot summer months, so be sure to play with them indoors. If possible, arrange doggy play dates (a few times a week, I get my dog together with a neighbor’s).
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Courtesy of Lynn Rose
Brachycephalic breeds, which struggle to exercise because of their respiratory issues and heat intolerance, could be extra bored.
“Their level of frustration is very high,” Milne said. “You’ll often hear people say that brachycephalics are good pets because they don’t need much exercise.” But they do — they’re just not in good enough shape to be very active, she said. University of Cambridge researchers consider dogs with BOAS to have “exercise intolerance.”
And of course, never, ever leave your dog alone in a parked car. “The temperature inside your parked car may be as much as 20 degrees hotter than the temperature outside,” Bierbrier said. “Not only can it lead to a fatal heat stroke, it’s illegal in many states.”
Fourteen states have “Good Samaritan” laws that allow you to legally break into a parked car with an animal inside if you have a good-faith, reasonable belief that their health or life is at imminent risk. In most of these states, you must first contact law enforcement; familiarize yourself with the laws in your state ahead of time in case you come across a suffering animal in a car.
Beyond tips and best practices to keep dogs comfy in the summertime, Pierce offers another idea that’s easy to implement: Adopt a dog adapted to your local ecosystem. If you’re in Alaska, getting a chihuahua is not a smart choice, and if you’re in the desert, a shaggy — or brachycephalic — dog is probably going to have a hard time.
“If a dog is well adapted to their ecosystem, they’re going to have more freedom to enjoy it without us having to put boots and coats [on them], and keep them in the air conditioning, and just have a little bit more freedom to be dogs.”
The growing backlash against breeding flat-faced dogs
Brachycephalic dogs’ poor quality of life raises more fundamental questions about whether we should be breeding dogs prone to painful chronic conditions in the first place.
In addition to respiratory distress, brachycephalic breeds are also more prone to eye diseases, digestive disorders, urinary tract infections, dental disease, pneumonia, skin disease, and intervertebral disk disease than other breeds.
“The French bulldog is a breed that’s been broken to accommodate us,” as Vox contributor Tove Danovich put it in a 2021 feature story about the breed.
Milne put it even more bluntly: “The suffering of [brachycephalic] animals is as tangible as if they were physically beaten on a regular basis.”
Humans continue to breed and buy Frenchies in vast quantities, despite their well-documented health issues, because we find their physical qualities so cute, Pierce said. In an essay for Aeon, she wrote about how the trend of dogs designed to look like cute human babies — round faces, big eyes, little noses — is hurting the very animals we so dearly love.
Sometimes, their behavior that appears cute is actually an attempt to cope with pain, Milne pointed out. There are loads of social media posts of Frenchies exhibiting abnormal behavior: sleeping sitting up — something they do because it’s harder to take in air while lying on their side — or sleeping with a hollow toy in their mouth in an effort to increase airflow.
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Courtesy of Emma Goodman Milne
As the Frenchie has grown in popularity, so too has the backlash — especially from veterinarians on the front lines, who see brachycephalic dogs suffering.
“The moral burden on the veterinary profession is absolutely massive. … You’ve got people who’ve wanted to be veterinarians their whole lives, who are just morally crushed by the fact that they’re just picking up the pieces” from the sudden increase in Frenchies and their health issues, Milne said. “And breeders are just churning them out and making a fortune from them.”
In 2017, she founded Vets Against Brachycephalism, which has garnered support from 1,600 veterinarians across 66 countries.
Milne’s concerns began in veterinary school, as she learned about the common health issues faced by certain breeds (brachycephalics as well as others, like corgis and dachshunds, which are bred to have short limbs and long bodies). “I sort of thought to myself, ‘Well, this is a bit mad, because if we know that they’ve all got these [issues], why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?” she said, wondering why her profession wasn’t doing more to help stop the breeding of dogs known to be prone to serious welfare issues. “Then I got into practice, and it was just awful. You got to the point where you could predict, pretty much, what you were going to see and do and advise within probably 80 to 90 percent accuracy … just based on what breed the dog was.”
The British Veterinary Association has called on the companion animal community to reduce demand by avoiding imagery of brachycephalic dogs in advertising and social media campaigns. The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), in its policy on responsible breeding practices, states that it “discourages breeding companion animals with deleterious characteristics, since these features often require surgical correction or life-long medical or behavioral management.”
The original draft of the policy, written by the AVMA’s Animal Welfare Committee, stated that “companion animals exhibiting inherited characteristics that negatively affect the animal’s health and welfare should not be bred,” including brachycephalism. But the callout of brachycephalism, along with other conditions, was removed after opposition from breeding clubs. One of those was the American Kennel Club, whose chief veterinary officer, Jerry Klein, argued that such a policy could lead to breed bans and eventual extinction for some breeds. (The American Kennel Club makes much of its income from people registering their dogs, from which they get a certificate stating their dog is “purebred,” among other benefits.)
“Who’s going to make the decision about what dog is the right dog?” Klein told Vox. “You know, the perfect dog with no problems? What a bland world that would be.”
Klein said he doesn’t like to use the word “suffer” in relationship to the serious health issues experienced by many brachycephalic dogs. “I’ve had a bad back, that’s suffering,” he joked. “Trust me.” Rather, he said, the best way to put it is that these breeds “have a higher predilection for having certain predictable conditions related to breathing.”
The American Veterinary Medical Association didn’t respond to a question about whether brachycephalic dogs fall into the category of animals with “deleterious characteristics” as mentioned in its final policy.
Breed bans are precisely what Milne of Vets Against Brachycephalism wants.
“We’ve got 200, 300 breeds of dog,” she said. “If you took away 40, who cares? We never had those breeds before [modern pet ownership] … Why are we so concerned about it? We should be concerned for their innate health, shouldn’t we?” said Milne. (Starting in the mid-1800s, the goals of breeding shifted largely from purpose-based — hunting and herding — to aesthetics.)
“Lots of people don’t understand the difference between breeds and species. … Breeds don’t exist in nature, they’re completely man-made,” Milne said. “We as a species have to admit that we went badly wrong, and we need to drastically change that.”
Some countries have taken action. Last year, Norway banned the breeding of English bulldogs and cavalier King Charles spaniels; an appeals court overturned the English bulldog ban, which is currently under review in the country’s supreme court. In 2014, the Netherlands banned the breeding of around 20 short-snouted breeds, and lawmakers are now weighing a ban on possessing and advertising breeds with traits proven to cause health problems. Milne said similar efforts are underway elsewhere in Europe.
Klein believes a better approach would be getting Frenchie, pug, and English bulldog breeders to select for healthier dogs in order to reduce BOAS in the gene pool, and there are efforts to do so, he said, which are supported by the main brachycephalic breeding clubs. He also said dog trends are fickle — that breeds go through phases in popularity.
We should hope the Frenchie doesn’t maintain a 31-year hold on the title of America’s most popular dog breed, as the Labrador has — and that it’s not replaced with another breed so vulnerable to inherited disorders. The relationship between pet owners and their animals is already out of balance, with humans often taking much more than we give. Phasing out the breeding of dogs prone to serious welfare issues is the least we can do.
In the meantime, there are millions of dogs languishing in shelters and in need of a home. Preferably one with central air conditioning.