The Invisible Load of Motherhood: Why It Still Falls on Moms
Even when women out-earn their partners, they often remain the household project managers. You can hire help, but that doesn't necessarily mean you have outsourced the planning, anticipation and foresight that goes into managing a household and family.
Research from the University of Bath found that mothers earning more than $100,000 report doing 30% less childcare and 17% less housework than mothers with lower incomes. But they do no less of the mental household labour. On average, mothers in the study performed 13.72 mental tasks compared with 8.2 performed by fathers.
When I read this, it immediately resonated with me. As my career progressed and my income increased, we outsourced more in our lives. We hired an additional helper. We ordered more food. There was less physical work that I needed to do myself but it didn’t take away from the mental exhaustion I felt. I still had 200 tabs open at any given time.
Even though my helpers had clear roles and responsibilities like buying grocery, cooking dinner, taking our kids to after school activities, all the tasks were still floating around my brain. I was the one who found recipes, listed cooking instructions, where to buy certain ingredients and how to prepare the food. I was also the person researching all the kids activities, communicating with the businesses to find schedules, set up accounts and create family calendars. Even if I was outsourcing the physical labour, the mental load was still owned by me.
The thinking behind the doing
When we talk about household responsibilities, we tend to focus on the actually doing. Who cooks dinner? Who does school drop-off? Who takes the kids to the doctor? Who buys the birthday present? But there are many steps and actions that need to be taken that lead to the final executing step. Someone has remembered that a friend’s birthday is coming up. Someone has thought about what present to buy, checked whether it needs to be ordered, made sure it arrives on time and remembered to wrap it. That in essence is the mental load. It’s all the work that is done in someone’s mind and lives there rent free until it’s completed. The fact that that work is often difficult to quantify, makes it all the harder to explain and work through the division of labour in a relationship.
There have definitely been times when I've felt overwhelmed and guiltily thought, “Why am I so tired? I'm not even doing all of this myself.” I’m sure many of you have felt this way too.
Why doesn't outsourcing always solve the mental load?
This was the part of the University of Bath research that I found particularly interesting. The researchers describe “gendered cognitive stickiness”, where women continue to carry much of the cognitive household labour even when their income increases and they are able to outsource more physical work. I didn’t realize it until that moment that that was exactly what was happening in my own family.
I was/am incredibly fortunate. We have help. My husband is a great partner and father. Yet still, there were certain areas that I had always managed and simply continued managing. Partly because I know that work like the back of my hand, I’m good at it and I actually don’t hate it. But overtime, as our roles have become more solidified, the work streams that I owned still seemed to be mine even if I desperately tried to pawn them off to someone else. If you break down each one, on their own, they are insignificant but like anything, when you step back and look at the big picture, all those little tasks take up an inordinate amount of mental space.
Helping isn't necessarily the same as taking responsibility
This is something I've had to think about differently in my own household. Let’s say, I ask my husband to take one of our children to an appointment, he may be doing the physical task. But if I booked the appointment, put it in the calendar, reminded him about it and told him what he needed to ask the doctor - in that case, how much of that responsibility did I actually hand over? Yes, I delegated it but I was still managing it.
The same can happen when you have a helper. You can ask them to buy the groceries, prepare the food or organize the children's things, but if you are still deciding what needs to happen, communicating it and checking that it has happened, some of that mental responsibility stays with you. For me, that became a very important distinction. I didn't necessarily need more help doing things - what I need help with was ending the responsibility of thinking about all of them.
Then I had to look at my own role in it
It’s been hard to admit but owning these work streams also gave me a lot of power in our household to control how things worked, what we did and how we did it. For someone like me, a Type A, control-freak, it’s like giving candy to a toddler. You go crazy on it. You want more and can’t stop or let go.
I definitely had very specific ways that I wanted things to be done. I had onboarding documents for our helpers. I had specific instructions for how to clean, wash and tidy. There is also a part of me that feels that there are many things I could easily do on my own rather than taking the time to explain it to someone else. And therein lies the problem.
I realized that a lot of stress I had put on myself was created by me. It’s not an easy thing to admit. There is almost a sense of martyrdom that comes with it - “See how much I sacrifice! You should appreciate me!” but in reality, I was part of the problem.
My experience does not negate the research. There are much bigger social expectations and patterns influencing why mothers so often become the default parent and household manager but understanding those patterns didn't remove my own responsibility to look at what was happening inside my family. I realized that if I wanted to make space in my brain, I had to be ok with giving up control and ownership fully and most importantly, being ok with how things turned out. I had to be ok with things not being “perfect” by my standards.
Sharing the mental load differently
I've started thinking less about whether household tasks are divided equally and more about where the responsibility for them actually sits. If one person has to notice what needs doing, delegate it and then follow up, they are still carrying a large part of the mental load even if somebody else eventually completes the task.
A more useful way for me has been to think about full work stream or pillar ownership. If someone owns a work stream, they own the thinking that comes with it too meaning they don't wait to be asked, they think ahead for themselves, they plan, and execute. Another realization has been that this also requires me to become more comfortable with not knowing everything that is going on - again, letting go of the reins.
There is a strange contradiction in wanting someone to take responsibility while also wanting to retain control over how they do it. I don't think I fully appreciated that until I started looking at my own mental load more closely. Outsourcing has made our lives easier. Having help has made an enormous difference to how our household functions. But outsourcing the physical work was never going to solve the entire problem if I remained the person mentally responsible for all of it.
For me, reducing the invisible load of motherhood has meant paying more attention to what I am still allowing to live rent free in my head, questioning why I am carrying it, and deciding what I can genuinely hand over and not micromanage from the sidelines.
Learn more about how I work with organizations to support working parents.