[This post is the second one in a 2-post series.]
In last week’s post I introduced the concept of “Mental Load”, known also as “Cognitive Labor”. Today we’ll break it down into 4 parts. This division helps understand and discuss mental load in an effective way. Effective means that discussing it with your family can make your life easier!
The four horsemen of Cognitive Labor
Harvard University PhD candidate Allison Daminger breaks down “cognitive labor” into these stages:
- anticipate,
- identify,
- decide,
- monitor.
To illustrate, let me share a hypothetical situation that I may or may not be dealing with right now…. Let’s say that our nieces and nephew are celebrating their birthdays together next weekend. What kind of mental load could this create?
- “Anticipate” is realizing that we should buy them gifts;
- “Identify” is coming up with ideas, researching online, checking with my sister-in-law;
- “Decide” is selecting the gift;
- “Monitor” is ensuring we buy the gifts on time, write birthday cards, and remember to take them with us to the party…
Like many seemingly simple home and childcare tasks, gift buying is actually a multi-step project. It also involves different kinds of cognitive labor and decision making tasks.
As we’ve seen in Emma’s comic last week, spouses who see themselves as “helping” are often happy to perform only the physical task (between deciding and monitoring). This leaves all the cognitive labor with someone else.
But even in households where there is some sharing of cognitive labor, it is rarely fair. In her research, Daminger found out that while deciding (#3) was quite collaborative, anticipating and monitoring where overwhelmingly performed by women.
This means that women are often left with the responsibility of remembering and planning much/most/everything which creates a huge burden.
In my case, my husband would be very happy to go buy the gifts (he likes shopping way more than I do.) But I wonder what would happen if I don’t mention them at all. He’s aware of the party’s date, but the realization that this requires action isn’t here yet. If I weren’t afraid to disappoint the kids, I would have loved experimenting! My bet is that he would have remembered and bought the gifts a day before. Which could have been a decent solution, actually, if only I could trust that this would happen, instead of worry (anticipate) myself to pieces….
It’s important to say that there are many households with the opposite imbalance. (Personal unresearched hunch: when the woman has Attention Deficit Disorder. Reply/comment if you agree!) This also came up in the article’s comments. Men who perform the majority of planning responsibilities feel attacked and belittled. They also feel that attributing character differences to gender is disrespectful and biased. They’re right!! Also, in some families, when parents are unable to perform these roles, it’s the children who do.
So of course I recognize that family situations differ dramatically. Yet, from my experience, if you’re reading this and you’re a woman, it’s likely you feel that you manage most of the cognitive labor.
This is a cultural difference more than a natural one. The men who participated in Daminger’s research were more than capable of performing all types of cognitive labor for their jobs. This is true for my friends and clients as well.
But at home there’s a profound difference.
Daminger thinks it has to do with identity. Women are more afraid that botching up will classify them as “bad mothers”. Sadly, she notes that many men still don’t see themselves as ultimately responsible for childcare and homecare in the same way. And even if they do see themselves as such, there are fewer societal ramifications to messing up.
[I believe that maternity leave begins the slide into inequality in heterogeneous couples, but more on that another time]
Still, regardless of the gender of the person feeling they are carrying more of the load, we should look at responsibilities, and have candid conversations about them. This is true also for single-person and single-parent households, when sharing tasks.
When speaking to my husband (for real) we both felt it was easiest for both of us when one of us was responsible for a whole task start to finish. Second best was full ownership of all planning aspects, with limited delegation. Yet most of our lives were in the messy middle, where roles and expectations were implicit and muddled.
In these cases, it comes down to better communication. We discussed summer vacation planning (which he anticipated! I then started identifying/researching it and got stuck…) We decided to sit down together to move forward.
Now we only have the simple task of blocking 30 minutes of uninterrupted time when we are both free and alert. Ha!!
Resources:
- Allison’s Daminger’s original paper in the American Sociological Review.
- New York Times article by Jessica Grose.
- Do you find it difficult to explain mental load? I found this comment from a reader named Jenn (4/21) very illustrative:
To all the men who are posting “not all men,” I ask you the following:
1) Do you know when your children will be due for their next dentist appointment? 2) What’s your child’s best friend’s parents’ names? 3) When is the next half-day at school? 4) How many rolls of paper towels do you currently have in the house? 5) What time is the soccer game this weekend? 6) Does your child have a swimsuit that fits since last summer? 7) What size do they need? 8) Did you contribute to the teacher gift? How much? 9) What’s for dinner tonight? 10) Do you have a back-up bottle of ketchup in the cabinet? These are just some of the things that women are keeping track of every single day and it is EXHAUSTING!
Photo credit: Photo by AllGo – An App For Plus Size People on Unsplash
Reading this I can certainly see the challenge that my mother had doing this as she was handling all of these and my dad did pretty much none. It also makes me pat myself on the back as I ran through your list of 10 questions for men ,and I could answer 9 of them (not sure about the swimsuit!). I feel so fortunate to have a wife and partner where we do share the load and divide/conquer a lot. The kitchen is mine, so dinner, backstock, groceries, etc I handle. Kids’ clothes / school related days off and such? That’s hers. It’s almost like we have an org chart with some clearly defined areas that helps us know who has got what, and we have enough history of the other person really having it and asking for help when needed that we can let go of it.
Brilliant! Having clear areas of responsibility simplifies everything so much!
If you’re willing to have a second family on the side, our kitchen could use an able manager… 😉 😛
OMG! Brilliant questions at the end to test who is really carrying the mental load. And, oh yeah, it’s Mother’s Day here in the States on Sunday. Guess who’s planning the gathering for the whole family of mothers? Let me just say, it ain’t the fathers or sons.
LOL!!!!!!!! 😀
I have a lot of opinions that are really hard to digest down into a small, concise, and ideally not controversial response. It’s a completely justified feeling you’re talking about and definitely something to be worked against. But like all things, it’s complicated… and with ADHD in the mix, I can definitely find myself even slightly more defensive. I know what my sense of awareness can be like and where I’d like for it to be. They’re not often on the same page and not intentionally. It’s a good reminder to be more aware though. Thanks.
ADD or ADHD is a whole other issue with its own complications, but it can get misinterpreted as just not caring, and that’s definitely something that families with ADHD must manage for everyone’s wellbeing. I think the main problem is that it can look the same as someone who can pull their weight, and still finds it more convenient to be reminded.
I’m really sorry if I made you feel defensive! That was not my intention. Just an observation.
This is so great, and I really appreciate your focus here on how both partners may contribute to the imbalance. My mother and I decided yesterday that, for Mother’s Day this weekend, we would specifically request that my father, husband, and brother-in-law plan and execute the celebration. (We did the “anticipate” step, but hey, it’s a start!)
Awesome! I hope they do a good job of everything else, and execute like pros!
Happy Mother’s Day!
Interesting topic! And gosh – If you think about things this way it actually feels like a lot more work than it really is 🙂
But that’s possibly for gifts – really useful to use for bigger projects – as it gives handles to be better at planning things out (where I am often ‘off’)
Thx
Oh Shlomit, I relate and it is indeed exhausting. Thank you for breaking it down. Communication does help.
As someone without kids and who has been in a series of long-term heterosexual relationships, it most certainly does not start with maternity leave! There is research to show that in grade school, girls are rewarded for tending to environments (cleaning up) and relationships (helping and kindness). Boys are rewarded for getting things right.
We also had our parents modeling this dynamic for us at home.
There’s nothing wrong with men and women and every other expression of gender. Just dig in to how folks were raised and what they were rewarded and punished for and it all makes sense! This article is awesome and has raised some very different and productive conversations with my partner!!
Yay for productive conversations!
You’re absolutely right about differences starting early. I’ll rephrase then, and will be clear about it when I write more in depth: even in egalitarian couples that had every intention of avoiding any gender biases they were raised with (other than pregnancy and breastfeeding, still unresolved 😉 usually there are inequalities down the road, sometimes even severe ones. Those sneaky differences in roles and responsiblities in the family can be often traced to the time when the mother is solely responsible for everyone – maternity leave. By the time she goes back to work (even in families where parents have similar pay and hours) she’s more “involved” and bound to have more cognitive load.
I don’t have good research on this particular case, of the egalitarian couples, just the experiences of many friends across different countries. There is much research on the effect of maternity leaves on women’s work in general.
I’ll definitely dig in some more, and see if anyone else noticed what I’m saying – that even with the best intentions, things can go awry….
Spot on and yes at some point the cognitive load is too much and things get missed. Funny how after years of training everyone in the household to take on the cognitive labor, it can so easily revert back to the mom taking it all on.
Wow, what fascinating research. I definitely feel the burden of cognitive load at home when it comes to making plans (in fact, feeling that way about mother’s day right now – that I need to make sure my daughter does something thoughtful for her grandmothers….). I think one of the things that causes that pattern to persist in our house is that I enjoy the control of shouldering the burden even though I don’t always have the bandwidth to do it…..
I have a friend who is a university professor and CEO. She likes to manage. She is perfectly happy planning everything and delegating tasks as she sees fit.
If it works, it works! There’s nothing wrong with any type of division of labor as long as everyone is happy.