It’s Mother’s Day this weekend – a chance for one of the most stressed-out demographics to be celebrated in style. Breakfast in bed, chocolates, handmade cards, and time with the family. It’s nice of course, but can’t we do better?
Truthfully, I think we should aim for more this year.
We know that all mums are stretched way too thin and working mums even more so. One child raises our stress by 17% and two by 40% in comparison to the general population. A large contributant of that stress comes not just from the inevitable work and mental load that households with children come with, but from the fact that no matter how much mothers work and earn, they still carry the lion share of the that load .
We are getting better at sharing the visible work of care and households: the dishes, the laundry, the bottle-feeding. But we are nowhere close to a truly sharing the mental load – the associated thinking, the pre-empting, the worrying, the planning.
Just because it is invisible, and we seem to be doing it all the time and everywhere, as per the study by Leah Ruppaner and colleagues from UoM, it doesn’t mean it is not having a significant impact. In looking at the research, as well as from our own conversations with almost a 100 families while working on melo, a solution we are building to address this issue, we know that this inequitable sharing of the load is causing frustration, resentment and in some cases leading to divorce.
Here is the kicker though, dads, and those in traditionally fathering coded roles are not happy about it either. Our and other academic research shows that they are deeply aware of the issue, and it is having a negative impact on their relationships both with their partner and their children.
The issue is that we seem to be a bit stuck. And the discourse and current solutions aren’t helping.
The conversation on the mental load seems to have squarely put it in the camp of a women’s issue where it really is a family one.
Mums don’t need ‘help’ with managing the family mental load. Families need to manage it more effectively as a team. We keep on thinking that if we just find who to blame, we could fix this. So, the conversation oscillates between two extremes: either women need to lower their standards, or men really need to pull up their socks. And even though there is truth in both of those ends of the spectrum, the reality is that this is not the fault of any gender – this is a result of deeply rooted, and these days completely useless gender roles.
We all know that “Hallmark holidays” and other calendar events can start to feel tokenistic. In fact, this year we saw International Women’s Day conversations centre on the idea the occasion should really be #morethancupcakes. This Mother’s Day, I challenge us to take a similar approach. In addition to chocolates, flowers, and breakfast in bed, how about we start a conversation about the mental load and what we can do in our families to truly start working as a team.
Here are some tips:
- Be forward focused – start the conversation from not looking for who is to blame, but how you move forward, together and as a team. Just getting more organised is not enough, you will have to try to do things differently
- Make the invisible visible – one of you has a lot of implicit knowledge and does a lot of things the other doesn’t even notice. Take the time to transfer and share both
- Empower yourself with tools – whatever they are (and if you don’t have any check out melo) they can help you get stuff out of your head, releasing your cognitive capacity and making it visible to your partner.
- Sharing an event is not enough – surface all the bits that need to be planned, prepared, thought of ahead of time. A kiddo going to a birthday party means RSVPs, buying a present a few days before, possibly organising car-pooling as well as drop offs and pick-ups.
- Huddle up – once a week have a chat where you get on the same page. From big conversations that never get airtime, to who has got what in the coming week. Saves SO MUCH nagging on the go. I promise, a weekly huddle will change your life.
So this Mother’s Day give yourself or your partner #morethanbreakfastinbed. Commit to doing things differently and sharing the mental load more equitably. Even though it may look like a present for mum, it will be a huge thing for the whole family.