056 | Shifting and Sharing Mental Load
As we talk about mental load, it is important to acknowledge that in US households with CIS gender heterosexual partnerships the mental load falls largely and disproportionately to women regardless of employment status outside the home and even when the men help with household tasks. There is additional mental load and emotional labor for solo parents, those co-parenting across multiple households, and families headed by same gender partners as they also have to constantly advocate to normalize their family structure and their rights as a family are consistently under attack.
All this to say that your mental load is more than the sum of your to-do list and your ability to juggle the different hats you wear. It’s tempting to make this about personal effectiveness. “If I can only figure out how to do this better then my load will lessen.” I am all for good strategies to lighten the load and offer them here, but they are a band-aid if we don’t also start to address the systemic patriarchal assumptions about gender roles that we don’t always notice are at play because it’s the water we’ve been swimming in.
How can you start to shift things in your household/in your corner of the world? (Yes, this adds to our mental load in the short term, but we’re teaching people to fish.)
Consult for buy-in & to build awareness of the volume of decisions and tasks. I’ve started dinner conversations with my husband and our 6-year-old with this prompt, “I’m trying to figure out _______. What are some ideas we could try?” This is especially helpful when I need their participation to make it work.
Clarify who owns what & what done looks like. My husband owns the morning routine for our daughter from when she gets up to when she gets on the bus. This includes breakfast and backpack ready. It was a game changer to not decide every morning who would do what.
Notice what you are modeling for your children, intentionally and unintentionally, about how work and mental load are shared or not. Is there congruency with your values? If not, what can you shift to better align?
Make shifts incrementally to build habits that will last.
What are your thoughts?
