My favorite conference ritual is wandering the exhibition hall perusing new releases displayed at publishers’ booths. I get to temporarily slip into a fantasy world where I actually have time to read all the books that catch my eye, always while comfortably seated in a fireside armchair or perhaps sprawled across a lounge chair on the deck I do not have.

But making the rounds at a conference last summer, I knew when I picked up a galley of Nina Bandelj’s Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting that this was a book I’d be reading, citing, and thinking about in the real world. It’s in close conversation with my own research, insofar as it centers the work of parenting. But it’s also a book I suspected (correctly) would help me make sense of the parenting waters in which I now personally swim.

Nina was kind enough to answer some questions about her amazing work. If you’re intrigued, you can pick up Overinvested at all the usual places!

[On another note, this winter was a rough one, but things are looking up, and I hope to be popping into this space more often than every three months (eek) going forward. I’m working on a piece about the uses (and misuses) of AI in family life and would love to hear from you: have you been using AI tools to manage elements of your home life? How? Are you opposed on principle? Why? Reply here or DM me – I’d love to hear about your experiences, good or bad.]

First off, Nina, I’m wondering if you can settle a debate I’ve been having (mostly with myself): is parenting today harder than it was a generation ago? Given my near-constant level of exhaustion and overwhelm, I’m heavily biased toward the “yes” side. But I’m also wary of the very human tendency to exaggerate the uniqueness of our current moment. What’s your take?

How about you don’t just take my word for it, Allison? Here’s the reality: in summer 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report titled “Parents Under Pressure.” This was a public health advisory, urging the American people to recognize the stress and mental health toll associated with parenting as a serious public health concern for the country. Nearly every one in two parents would report that most days their stress is completely overwhelming. These levels are unprecedented, urging us to ask, how did we get to this troubling parenting reality? Surely, the pandemic was a really hard time. The New York Times famously created a “primal scream line” for parents who are “tired as hell,” offering that they could “click the number to scream after the beep” to release some pressure.

In Overinvested: The Emotional Economy of Modern Parenting, I show how this crisis has been brewing before the pandemic, and how over the past several decades, we turned childrearing into exhausting labor to toil over and children into projects to manage. I trace how we ramped up the standard of what it means to be a good parent and how we privatized childrearing, especially childcare and education, by telling parents that it’s on us to invest from a very early age, even in the womb, into developing our children’s skills and abilities, or what you may see defined as “human capital.” At the same time, we’ve made parenting super emotional through a fount of advice that parents nowadays receive nonstop from parenting manuals, Facebook groups, Instagram posts, TikTok memes, WhatsApp chats, shaping our very subjectivities. All of it surrounded by an expanding multi-billion-dollar parenting industry offering gadgets, apps, extracurricular programs, financial instruments, you name it, that capitalize on parental love and devotion. It’s these social norms and structures that make parenting evermore financially and emotionally exhausting, increasingly so, compared to a generation ago.

As I was reading the first few pages of Overinvested, I will admit to raising an eyebrow. You start by making the case that contemporary parenting is largely “a process of human capitalization”: parents are working hard to increase their kid’s future economic value (i.e., the wages they will someday command) by stuffing them full of skills and education. That argument doesn’t jive with my experience; I want my kid to be happy and emotionally well-adjusted and honestly haven’t given much thought to her economic prospects. (Though to be fair, she’s only one.)

But then you added a second strand to your argument, and I thought, ‘Got me!’ Not only has parenting undergone a shift toward economic logic, you write, it’s also undergone a shift toward emotional logic. How are those two sides of the same coin? And why is it that they add up to something different than what most of the folks reading this newsletter likely understand as “intensive parenting”?

I love you pushing back on this idea, Allison, that parents engage in “human capitalization” of children. That’s exactly the sense I got from parents we interviewed for this research, and it was a surprise because when I analyzed how scientists and policy makers talk, it was very obvious that they kept offering a very economic cost benefit perspective, the need for “parental investment,” as they call it, to yield future economic returns to children. My research team and I talked to many parents, 120 of them, across socio-economic and racial backgrounds, and of different political and religious persuasions, and we did not hear that their goals of parenting are to primarily set up their children for future economic prospects. What then did parents say? Like you, they mostly talked about how much they love their children and how devoted they are to them. How they wanted their children to realize their potential, pursue their passions, and be happy. To have a loving relationship with their children, something that was much more important to them than what they thought was important to their own parents raising them.

For me, this is not surprising because, as I trace in the book, we live in a world that increasingly emphasizes how important emotions are to how we think and live. It’s because of these social forces that parents today are not only intensively focused on raising a child, what many know as intensive parenting, we are also invested into being good parents, ready to devote our entire selves to parenthood. And we are also invested into this with a lot of money, something that has become increasingly pronounced because of what social scientists call “financialization” of society, the intrusion of financial instruments and economic logics into the intimate sphere of family life. To capture this qualitative shift, and how the power of emotions and the power of economics have bowled us over, I call out that parenting today requires parents to be overinvested, not only intensive. That’s why the book title is Overinvested, not to pass judgment – absolutely not! – but to capture these strong societal pressures on individual parents, and even more on mothers I should add, to bear heavier and heavier emotional and financial burdens.

I’m obsessed with the power of social science to “denaturalize” our understanding of the world. Back in college when I was studying medical anthropology, my still-forming mind was blown by the idea that illness wasn’t just a matter of biology. It also has a cultural component! Your work is such a great example of this kind of paradigm-shifting power. For those of us who believe it’s natural - programmed into the human species, even - for parents to pour everything into their offspring, can you make the case for why this is in fact a “historically specific and culturally based” style of parenting, rather than an inevitable feature of rearing children?

You are right about how easy it is to think that some things are just natural, a matter of biology, or somehow essentially true. Parenting is one of them given that it feels so intimate. Love for and devotion to our children feels very natural. In fact, people today are divided on so many things, but this may be one that a lot of people have in common, agreeing that parents should be devoted to their children and want to do everything they can for them.

But is how we parent today simply programmed into the human species? Sociologists and anthropologists would disagree because how we see children, what they are capable of, and what it means to raise them, actually varies substantially over time and place. For instance, the “cry it out” method (leaving a crying baby to self-soothe during the night and then fall back asleep) used to be acceptable practice but is now quite controversial, with many advocating for attachment parenting focused on responsiveness and closeness. At the same time, the American Academy of Pediatrics maintains that “co-sleeping,” where the parent and child share the same bed, is dangerous for the infant because of the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), even though co-sleeping has historically been the more common practice and still preferred in many cultures. We may find shocking that the famous early twentieth-century psychologist John Watson advised that parents should NOT hug and kiss their children. For Watson holding babies just for the sake of it was a sure way to produce “little tyrants.”

More? Princeton University sociologist Viviana Zelizer showed in her brilliant book that before the turn of the 20^th century children were treated as “economically useful,” capable of working on the farm and contributing substantially to household labor. Historian Paula Fass reported how child independence has been a core American value throughout history, but today we talk a lot about “helicopter parenting” and “snowplow parenting” and “Tiger mom parenting” or other parenting styles that in many ways limit independence. Not that long ago, 12-year-olds would babysit neighbors’ kids. Not so much these days when most believe that 12-year-olds require supervision themselves. “Don’t Tell America the Babysitter is Dead,” was a 2024 article in The Atlantic that captured this shift (with a provocative title, of course).

Self-help books are really the quintessential Rich Texts, aren’t they? You analyzed more than a century of parenting advice books as a way to chart shifts in the definition of good parenting. What’s changed since 1894, when Dr. Emmett Holt began instructing parents on the benefits of “airing” for cold prevention and what to do in cases of “excessive nervousness in infants”? What do contemporary bestsellers like Expecting Better and Good Inside (both of which I read and enjoyed!) tell us about the state of the parenting advice industrial complex?

This was such a fun part of research for me. I was inspired by sociologist Sharon Hays who wrote a very important book published in 1996 called “The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood” in which she coined the term “intensive mothering.” If folks don’t know, this book is the original source of the idea of intensive parenting. Hays analyzed three main parenting manuals that were popular in the 1980s, to understand what expert advice was given to mothers on childrearing, including Dr. Benjamin Spock’s The Commonsense Book of Baby and Child Care, dubbed the “parenting bible,” which sold 50 million copies by the time of Spock’s death, with nine editions published. But Dr. Spock ran out of fashion because of a proliferation of parenting books since the 1980s, consistent with the increasing emphasis on therapeutic/emotional advice giving in our society. The first edition of What To Expect When You’re Expecting came out in 1984 and it wasn’t published by a doctor or even a psychologist or parenting expert. The author, Heidi Murkoff, was a new mom who wanted more moms to know, well, what to expect when they are expecting.

Another explosion of parenting advice came in the early 2000s, very prominently with Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor, not writing a legal treatise but a memoir, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, published in 2011. Two other bestselling parenting books during that time were, one, Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting, by a journalist who moved with her family to France and, second, fellow journalist Jennifer Senior’s All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Mothern Parenthood. All this to say that what started to resonate more and more in the parenting advice field was not just advice from experts with PhDs or MDs but experiences of moms themselves, as well as topics that paid more and more attention to the emotional wellbeing of children and the emotional experience of parenthood, or more specifically motherhood. This is consistent with what I mentioned earlier, how emotions play a bigger role in our lives, and how we understand ourselves and others. Let me just add that Good Inside, the 2021 book you mentioned, Allison, promises to offer practical strategies for parenting that, I quote, “feels good.”

I know from reading Overinvested that in addition to writing about parenting, you are a parent yourself. I’m in a somewhat analogous position: I’ve written extensively about the mental workload most mothers partnered with men carry—and I’m now a mom co-parenting with a dad. There are some days where my knowledge feels protective. Other days, I’m convinced it makes things worse: I know X, yet I still do it, and then I feel bad about doing it because I should know better. How do you navigate between your “sociologist of parenthood” and your “parent” roles? Have you been able to carve out a different relationship to parenthood than the (over)invested model you critique in the book?

I’m with you, Allison. And also can I just pause to say how much I love your book, What’s on Her Mind. (If you don’t have it yet, get it!) [Ed. Note: I swear I did not ask Nina to say this!!] And, like you, I’ve thought to myself: Nina, you should know better. You’ve researched this thoroughly, systematically, based on decades of experience as a sociology professor and social scientist, to discover that the overinvested parenting standard leads to negative outcomes for the wellbeing of parents, children as well as society… Yet, it’s SO incredibly hard when it’s about our own children. And I get why. After all, I live in this same exhausting parenting reality. That’s the big sociological lesson that I feel deeply in my own skin. That even the most intimate feelings are shaped by social forces. Most of these social forces—the power of emotions and the power of economics that I discussed, for instance—are not very visible so it’s easy to forget they exist, and to feel like parenting is all about personal choices and personal feelings. But we do see, for example, what other parents are doing, which creates pressures, and we can feel the draining power of the parenting industry and high costs of childcare and education on our wallets. These are visible social forces.

Can I also add that talking to many parents wasn’t just data. It’s people’s lives and often really heartbreaking stories of exhaustion and sacrifice. And a palpable sense of how hard it is to imagine getting off this derailed train of parental emotional and financial depletion. How can we get off? I have an anecdote from my own life in Overinvested, where I scream from the top of my lungs that I’m done, and I’m going on a parenting vacation. Well, it was a temporary solution, just like any vacation from a job that causes burnout is. Except, one can potentially quit a work job. Not easy, certainly, if it’s the only way to livelihood, but let’s say that we can hypothetically imagine quitting a work job more than we can imagine quitting the parenting job. But if we can’t just quit, then we need to work together to redefine the expectations and change the conditions of this job. There’s no boss to have a serious talk about it, but we can talk to each other, and to our policy makers. We need to support each other in changing these unsustainable parenting norms. If there’s one thing I want to say without a doubt after ten years of research, is that parenting can be something other than grueling labor leading to parental burnout—and that we all will actually be better for it. Children, for one, don’t deserve exhausted and burnout parents. Growing economic and racial inequality due to privatized childrearing is not leading to the bright future we all say we want for our children. There’s strength in numbers, so I’m calling on moms and dads, and grandparents and pet parents and non-parents, too. Let’s all join a social change movement, a collective effort to change norms and change structures and policies, with a mission to lessen the individual overinvestment pressure and feel empowered to ask for more societal investment in all of our children. What have we got to lose but a lot of stress and exhaustion?

Nina Bandelj is Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Learn more about her here, and pick up Overinvested at Bookshop or via the publisher.

But with the mercury rising (as I type, it is 2 degrees F) and my nausea subsiding, I am seizing this rare opening to let you know that…you will be hearing from me less often in 2026!

If you read my last post, you may recall that things were feeling a bit ~unsustainable~ over here at TDD HQ. Over the holiday break, I tried to time-manage my way out of the problem. Literally, I sat down with one of those “ideal week” templates where you map out your weekly schedule, and I shuffled all my commitments around the grid like little puzzle pieces.

Even in this perfectly controlled fantasy, free from extreme weather and various bodily ailments, the math just wouldn’t math. So for the time being, The Daminger Dispatch is returning to its roots as an ad hoc publication. Don’t tell the substack deities I am flouting the golden rule of consistency! You’ll still hear from me, but the “when” part will be a fun surprise for all of us. (I’ve turned off paid subscriptions, too, since it doesn’t seem fair to ask for money under the circumstances.)

But lest you think I summoned you here just to talk logistics, here are two things I’ve been thinking about instead of writing newsletters (in addition, I hope it is obvious, to wringing my hands and hitting the “donate” button as I monitor the events in my neighboring state with horror).1

What does it mean to “value” something?

If we’re being honest, this is often something I’m thinking about. But this month, valuation questions have been particularly top of mind. I’m moving (maybe? hopefully?) into the home stretches of a paper that applies devaluation theory to the household context. (I’m going to be a bit oblique, since that paper is still in the works, but hopefully this is still semi-interesting.)

Devaluation theory originated as a way to explain why predominantly female occupations paid less than similar occupations dominated by men, or why women were paid less than men for doing comparable work.2 Perhaps, the hypothesis goes, work gets devalued when women do it.

Phrases like “women’s work is devalued” get thrown around a lot in the housework research, too, but devaluation theory hasn’t been systematically studied there. You can probably guess why: how do you ascertain value when there’s no salary and no employer?

What my coauthors and I argue (drawing on lots of other smart thinkers) is that wages are not actually the best way to assess social value. Because the way we judge something (or someone’s) worth isn’t just an economic process. It’s cultural, too. How warm or cold do you feel toward this someone/something? How prestigious do you think they are? Etc.

I try my darnedest not to pay too much attention to the Substack Notes wars. Nevertheless, I am vaguely aware of the camp who feels that by calling domestic activities labor, we somehow cheapen them. I wonder, perhaps optimistically, whether this broader understanding of “value” might soften some of the hostility.

How do you measure a vibe?

My filter bubble over the last year or two has been full of (mostly) women telling (mostly) other women that it’s okay to get that divorce. Heterosexual partnerships, the thinking goes, are more or less doomed to fail—or at least make one or both parties unhappy. This general ~vibe~ was termed “heteropessimism” by Asa Seresin way back in 2019,3 but it seems (from a purely anecdotal perspective) to have grown even more prevalent in the years since.

My colleague and I are hoping to go beyond pure anecdote, though, and have been designing a survey that will assess people’s attitudes toward straight relationships with some rigor. It’s been fun to bring these nascent survey questions into real life. “Heterosexual relationships serve no one’s interests. Discuss.” “Men are only partnered with women so they have someone to do their housework. Thoughts?” (I’m a great dinner party guest, as you might imagine.)

If you have suggestions for our survey (real or satirical), send ‘em my way.

Your favorite (new) posts of 2025

#5:

It seems counterintuitive, but divorced women often do less physical labor than married women. Alas, getting out of a bad marriage might not get you out of the mental load.

#4:

David Hilgendorf, stay-at-home father turned fatherhood researcher, offered some frank reflections on male privilege and what it will take to achieve change.

#3:

Couples’ therapist Tonya Lester (whose excellent book Push Back is now available!) explained how she works with couples whose core challenge is labor or power inequality (hint: she often helps women surface their anger).

#2:

A reflection on the two bad choices many women face: find a way to accept a suboptimal relationship, or end that relationship.

#1:

A review of a new paper challenging the idea that so-called “invisible labor” is actually hidden and a broader reflection on what it means that “mental load” is now a household term.

Some numbers for the quantitatively inclined

37 new posts in 2025 (+ 4 updated reruns and 1 Live)

+ 70% subscriber growth (not so impressive in absolute numbers (+850), but considering I do very few of the things you’re supposed to do to “grow” on Substack, I’m pleased)

+ 60% annual revenue (again, sounds impressive until you look at the absolute amount (+$1000) and remember that even with this increase I’m writing for well under minimum wage…eep. In case you’re curious, 2.5% of subscribers are paid, which is a bit below the average ranges of 3-5% that I’ve seen cited)

This is a small-potatoes newsletter by most measures, but the potatoes grew quite a bit in 2025! Whether you’ve been here for four days or four years, I’m grateful for your support.

What’s coming in 2026

Honestly, I’m not quite sure! (Sorry, that header was a bit of a tease…) I’ve been toying with a few possibilities, but life has been moving a mile a minute (see below), and I haven’t settled on anything in particular. This is me committing to doing some reflection over the holiday break and reporting back in my first 2026 post.

State of The Daminger

I’ve found myself fantasizing about retirement lately. Am I too young to become a Professor Emerita? (Answer: At my university, there’s no age specification, but you do have to serve at least ten years before you’re eligible. I’ve got a ways to go.)

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This was also the appointment, according to the handy magnet we received in the hospital, where she’d receive her first Covid shot. I wondered if we’d have to fight to get it - I vaguely recalled hearing news about some childhood immunization kerfuffle. Instead, the nurse told us the pediatricians in the practice were recommending we go ahead with the Covid vaccine, but we needed to be aware that it was technically “off-label.”

“Off-label” is not a particularly comforting phrase. After the visit, I spent a solid hour online trying to make sense of what had changed and what it all meant. The long and short of it: over the summer, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. dismantled the CDC committee charged with recommending which vaccines Americans should get. He then reconstituted it with new members more amenable to his views. This revised committee determined that Covid vaccine schedules should be driven by “individual-based decision making,” rather than a universal recommendation for kids my daughter’s age.

I’m not interested in wading into the do-vaccines-cause-autism controversy today. Instead, I want to make the case that as polarization over medical questions grows and trust in public institutions plummets, mothers like me will be forced to add “medical expert” to our already lengthy job description. I doubt the consequences will be positive for us or for our children.

More policy changes are expected in the coming months as Kennedy enacts his vision to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA). Under his leadership, an already tenuous public health consensus seems poised to further erode. In response to proposed or enacted federal changes, blue states are rushing to shore up vaccine mandates even as red states hurry to relax them. Professional medical associations are speaking up to defend the safety of the same medications federal agencies caution against.

The net effect of this confusion and controversy is to shift even more of the medical research and decision-making burden onto individual parents. In practice, women will likely bear the steepest costs.

Already, mothers are primarily responsible for making health decisions for their children. In pregnancy, mothers are the ones navigating guidance around foods they can eat, activities they can perform, and, yes, medications they can take. Later, mothers are disproportionately the ones conferring with pediatricians, monitoring the progression of children’s illnesses, and overseeing preventative health practices such as eating a balanced diet and practicing good oral hygiene.

In this new, hyper-politicized public health era, mothers’ health-related mental load is likely to grow considerably heavier. On one hand, they will be pushed to do their own research rather than accept now-suspect expert guidance. On the other, their familiar roles as family peacekeepers and conflict mediators will take on new weight as the circle of controversial health topics continues to grow.

“Parental choice” is often framed as unmitigated good. Many people believe that, so long as they are not abusive or neglectful, parents should have broad authority over how their children are raised, including the medical care they receive.

When deployed well, trustworthy expert guidance reduces mothers’ mental load without undermining their authority. Typically, government actors achieve this balance by setting default recommendations they believe reflect the medical consensus and promote both individual and public health. Then, they allow parents to deviate from that guidance if they choose, barring cases where such deviation is deemed unsafe.

In theory, at least, this system still holds. I wanted to vaccinate my daughter and was able to do so. Pregnant women looking to treat a fever can still access Tylenol. In practice, though, the overt politicization of public health is eroding parents’ trust, effectively outsourcing the work of expert synthesis to laypeople—mostly, to mothers.

In a new profile of Kennedy, journalist Michael Scherer reports that RFK Jr. spent a recent weekend reading 70 research studies related to the “possible connection between taking Tylenol during pregnancy and the development of autism or attention deficit disorder in children.” Kennedy hopes the rest of us will make similar choices:

“‘Trusting the experts’ is not a feature of science,” he likes to say. “It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of totalitarianism and religion.” But having everyone “do their own research,” as Kennedy recommends, was untenable even before the advent of technologies like nanoscience and genomic editing.

“Untenable” because the medical research literature is complex and often inconclusive or even contradictory. Relatively few parents have the skills needed to independently assess the evidence and identify the best treatment for their child. (I include myself in this camp: though I have a PhD and am definitely pro-research, I am wayyy over my head when I try to pick up journals like JAMA…)

“Untenable,” too, because there are approximately 1,273 decisions that need to be made on a daily basis (I’m rounding down), and it would be literally impossible to review and synthesize the primary research literature before making each one. If I spent my weekends reading medical journals, I would have no time to actually care for my kid!

The “do your research” ethos of the MAHA movement is but the latest incarnation of what my colleague Jess Calarco calls the “Supermom Myth,” which “paints a portrait of children in constant danger and of mothers as the only ones with the power to rescue them from harm.” Calarco writes:

Mothers matter, a lot. But they aren’t the only ones who should be protecting children. Nor would children need as much protection if we had a stronger social safety net…The Supermom myth leads us to ask the wrong questions—‘How can mothers best protect their children?’—rather than: ‘Why are women the ones tasked with protecting kids?’ Or even: ‘Why do we have so much to fear?’

Indeed, the list of things to fear grows ever longer. Here’s one of mine: as our public health system splinters, women and children alike will bear the costs.

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Updates and happenings

🎤 The podcast fun continues! I spoke with couples therapist Dr. Alexandra Solomon for Reimagining Love and - for something completely different! - entrepreneur Adam Fishman for Startup Dad.

🏆 New Scientist named What’s on Her Mind one of its top popular science books of 2025!

🎁 Speaking of which, I bet WOHM would be a great gift for a parent in your life. You can find it on Bookshop, Amazon, and all the usuals. (There’s even an audiobook!)

Most of us know (or can intuit) that turning what you love into a job sucks the joy out of it. Resist the urge to spin your hand-knit dog sweater hobby into a side hustle! Before you know it, knitting miniature outerwear will become something you have to do rather than get to do.

Whenever new categories of “work” are identified, I suspect it’s this truism that motivates some of the blowback. If you stick the “work” label on activities like “planning a child’s birthday party” or “helping your lonely spouse find some friends,” don’t you risk turning love and joy into obligation and drudgery?

(Not coincidentally, this pushback almost always seems to come from people who are not currently doing the supposedly joyful task themselves and seem to be made uncomfortable by the fact that others may find it effortful.)

I’ll be the first to admit that this can go too far - though where the line lies is anybody’s guess. If I wrote for The Onion, I would pitch the headline “Totally Normal Thing is Actually Form of Oppressive Labor, Study Says.”1 But while pushback against the encroachment of “work” into more and more corners of life isn’t totally unfounded, it draws on several misconceptions.

Misconception #1: Work = bad

Do you hate your job? Okay, sure, don’t we all. But when you break it down into its component parts, do you really hate every single bit? Probably not. (And if you do, you have my condolences. Perhaps you can spend this section imagining your dream job, or at least a marginally better one.) Most people I know feel a range of things about their paid work: they dread task A, feel pretty meh about task B, and quite enjoy task C.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines work as (among other things, there are a lot of definitions) “action or activity involving physical or mental effort and undertaken in order to achieve a result.” If you accept that definition, labeling something as work doesn’t imply that it’s a horrible thing to be minimized at all costs. It implies that it is an effortful undertaking in service of some larger goal, often one that provides value to others.

Admittedly, the OED’s definition of “labor” is more intrinsically negative: “bodily or mental exertion, particularly when difficult, painful, or compulsory.” I’d argue that it’s the “compulsory” piece of things that comes into play when the hobby-to-side hustle transition goes south. Remove the agency by becoming accountable to customers or becoming dependent on the financial proceeds of your dog sweater sales and, yeah, that’s less fun.

In the unpaid labor realm, the “compulsory” bit operates slightly differently: whether you call procuring food labor or not, your family does need to eat on a daily basis. Labeling meal planning and cooking as “labor” doesn’t change the underlying dynamics of the exchange. More often, it validates the cook’s feeling of exertion and, perhaps optimistically, encourages their family members to appreciate the contribution.

Misconception #2: All work is equally bad

Would you rather spend one hour cleaning your bathroom, or one hour cooking a meal? If you are like most people, option B is more appealing. And while I haven’t empirically tested this proposition, I suspect many people would even be willing to spend 1.5 hours cooking to avoid 1 hour of bathroom-cleaning time.

But that nuance often gets lost in quantitative household labor research, which operates under the assumption that more time on housework is worse than less time, and that every minute of housework time is equally painful regardless of how it’s spent.2

There are a lot of valid reasons for these assumptions. But when the data allow for it, I appreciate when researchers acknowledge task heterogeneity—i.e., that some tasks are more onerous than others. Doing so is tricky, because the tasks you find onerous are probably not identical to the tasks I find onerous. (The same goes for whole categories of activity: gardening may be work to me and leisure to you, but it’s gotta get categorized somewhere.)

Nevertheless, scholars have tried to identify task characteristics that impact the average person’s experience in predictable ways. For physical housework, they usually look at flexibility and frequency: if you have more control over when you do something, and if you don’t have to do it all that often (e.g., paying bills), it’s usually seen as less onerous than a frequent task with a cadence you can’t control (e.g., feeding your family).3

In the book, I outline a similar taxonomy for cognitive tasks. YMMV, but what characteristics make the average person dislike a task more? Originally, I tried plotting cognitive tasks on a continuum from most to least burdensome. But when I re-analyzed my interview data, I realized there were actually two continua: burden and benefit. The average person’s dream is not to do zero cognitive labor. Instead, I suspect most people prefer to maximize the benefits while minimizing the burdens.

What makes a cognitive task burdensome? Usually, more complexity and abstractness. The more moving parts you’re dealing with, the more effortful the task becomes. The less concrete the task, the more thankless and distracting it becomes.

What makes a cognitive task beneficial? More visibility and higher stakes. When it’s obvious, to you and to others, what you’re contributing, that’s a plus. Likewise, when your effort more directly shapes outcomes you value, it’s more likely to be experienced as beneficial. There’s a reason scholars often use decision-making authority as a proxy for power: it’s not intrinsically negative to decide how you’ll allocate your resources or handle a parenting conundrum!

Misconception #3: The goal is for both partners to do the same amount of work

Sometimes I get the sense people think there’s a single “Right” way to divide up household work. I don’t personally subscribe to that philosophy; my goal is more along the lines of helping folks achieve their own personal “Right.”

Many of the couples I hear from say they’re striving for something along the lines of balance or fairness. If that’s you, optimizing for equality by task count (i.e, you handle 10 tasks and your partner handles 10 tasks) probably isn’t the best way to achieve that aim.4 (It might be the best way to get a researcher to consider you an egalitarian couple, though…)

As we’ve seen, cognitive tasks vary in their burden and benefit levels. If I have ten high-burden but low-benefit tasks, and you have ten low-burden but high-benefit tasks, then my subjective experience is going to be way worse than yours.

Here’s the rub: what’s high-burden to you might be low-burden to me, and vice versa.

Does that mean throwing out your fair/equal/balanced goal altogether? Nope. It means finding a way to account for the subjective alongside the objective. For my partner and me, this means we independently sort all the household and childcare tasks we’ve agreed need doing into three piles: Yuck, Meh, and Yay. I put researching flights and hotels into my Yuck category; my husband put that same task in his Yay pile. I put keeping track of household supplies in my Meh category; he put it in his Yuck pile.

When I’m thinking through my own categorization, I take both the burdens and benefits into account. For instance, managing daycare-related admin for our daughter went into my Yay pile. Not because I consider filling out paperwork and messaging with her teachers a fun hobby, but because I don’t find it especially taxing and I place a high premium on knowing exactly what’s going on with her care. The benefit component of that task outweighs the effort involved, so on net it’s a Yay.

Then when my husband and I get back together to divvy up the tasks, our primary goals are to make sure neither of us is a) saddled with too many of our personal Yucks, or b) overwhelmed by the collective weight of all of our tasks.5 We keep an eye on the overall number of tasks each of us is responsible for, too, but that’s secondary.

The end of plausible deniability

First up, Abigail Ocobock on “Cognitive Labor, Power, and Patriarchal Bargains: Not-so-invisible Barriers to Gendered Change.” Ocobock interviewed 81 mothers and fathers raising school-aged children about their division of housework and childcare, among other topics. Her core argument is that cognitive labor is far from invisible to the women performing the bulk of it for their families. Nor is this labor invisible to their husbands, who were more willfully ignorant than innocently oblivious of the work their female partner was doing.

Cognitive labor is not, Ocobock argues, inherently invisible. Instead, it’s obscured by gendered power dynamics (i.e., men have the privilege to opt out) and upheld by women’s willingness to strike “patriarchal bargains” (i.e., “accepting inequality and trading power for gains in other areas of life”).

Ocobock is critical of my own and others’ research for perpetuating what she sees as a misconception of mental work as invisible rather than ignored or suppressed. I think our ideas are less contradictory than Ocobock suggests, though that’s a subject for another day. Still, there are differences in our findings.

My hunch is that those differences primarily reflect big shifts in the public conversation about household labor over the last few years.

Ocobock conducted her interviews in 2020, at the height of the pandemic lockdowns. Meanwhile, roughly half of the interviews I conducted (with different-gender couples; LGBTQ couples came later) for What’s on Her Mind took place in 2017; the other half took place in late 2019 through early (pre-Covid) 2020.

Though I haven’t (yet!) studied this systematically, I cannot stress enough how different things feel now than they did back when I started out. Here’s a stylized version of the transition:

A typical cocktail party interaction in 2017:

Me: So, yeah, I’m interested in the work of planning and making decisions for your family.

Random person: Oh, you mean emotional labor?

Me: Er, no, that’s actually pretty different…

Fast-forward to a typical cocktail party interaction in 2025:

Me: So, yeah, I wrote a book about the mental work of running a household and raising children.

Random person: Oh, the mental load! It’s all over my Instagram feed. My mom-friends and I talk about this ALL the time. Can I tell you an uncomfortable story about my spouse?

Me: Er, sure, I’m all ears…

I’m exaggerating a bit—plus I actually really enjoy hearing uncomfortable stories about spouses—but not that much. Things started to stir in the summer of 2017 when the French artist Emma’s piece “The Mental Load: A Feminist Comic” went viral, followed a few months later by Gemma Hartley’s also-viral article “Women Aren’t Nags—We’re Just Fed Up.” Two or three of my interviewees mentioned having seen these pieces, but the vast majority were unfamiliar with the concept of mental load.

Fast-forward to the Covid days, and those one-off viral hits swelled into something much bigger. The change was propelled by domestic situations that had hummed along at suboptimal-but-tolerable levels pre-pandemic but, when everything shut down, morphed into holy-shit-I’ve-reached-my-breaking-point. Media (social and mainstream alike) picked up on and amplified this energy. I don’t think it’s coincidence that my own work started getting a lot more attention outside academic circles around this time. (Okay, I also had extra time and energy on my hands and channeled some of that into proactively communicating with non-academic audiences…)

I stand by my findings (relative to physical labor, cognitive labor is a lot harder to see, and that’s particularly true of the kinds of cognitive labor that are most feminized, like anticipating needs). But it’s also extremely plausible to me that the relative invisibility I observed pre-Covid had meaningfully eroded by the time Ocobock was conducting her research.

I’m less certain about how far concepts like cognitive labor and mental load have entered most men’s media diets. I’m often shocked by how different my husband’s internet is from mine. Still, the era of plausible deniability for limited involvement in cognitive labor (‘I had no idea it was a thing!’) is waning. And that’s probably for the best.

Below the paywall, another recent article that caught my eye:

Do women who earn more than their husband do less cognitive labor?

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But I hear most often about a different fear: that parenting and housekeeping by yourself would be even worse than parenting and housekeeping with a minimally helpful partner.

If he1 is doing anything more than zero, this makes intuitive sense. How could losing one household adult lead to anything but more work for the one who remains?

And yet, this is one case where research contradicts intuition. As Corinne Low writes in her new book (citing research she’s done with coauthors Kyle Hancock and Jeanne Lafortune), women’s housework time decreases upon divorce. Meanwhile, the opposite happens for men: their housework time increases after a divorce.

‘But specialization!’ I imagine some commenters crying. ‘She’s doing more housework in marriage because he is contributing more financially. It’s just economics!’

Low (herself an economist) bursts that bubble pretty quickly: men’s housework time is extremely unresponsive to their wife’s earnings. Even when she’s the primary breadwinner, she does much more housework.

This chart shows the average housework time for the higher- and lower-earning partner in 4 different kinds of couples: a straight couple where she earns more; a straight couple where he earns more; a gay couple; and a lesbian couple.

The latter three follow the pattern we’d expect if economics carried the day: the primary breadwinner does less housework than their partner. But look at the “Straight Female Breadwinner” category, and you’ll see that the pattern reverses: she’s spending roughly 100 minutes per day on housework, whereas her lower-earning partner is spending roughly 50!

Another study, this one by Joanna Pepin and co., looked at time-use patterns among never-married, cohabiting, married, and divorced mothers. They, too, discovered something surprising: married moms spend more time on housework and less time sleeping than divorced moms. The authors nod to the possibility of specialization (e.g., if there are two partners, he can focus on paid work and she can focus on unpaid work) before offering the equivalent of an academic burn. Moms who lived with an extended family member (an adult child, a parent, a sibling, etc.) spent less time on housework and childcare than other mothers. It’s just the moms who live with a male romantic partner who end up doing more housework. Thus, they conclude, “our findings suggest that it is not just an additional pair of hands that is important; to whom those hands belong also matters.” (Boom!)

So perhaps divorce won’t increase your physical labor load – and might even net you a bit more sleep. But what about your mental load?

Alas, because this is an emerging area of research, the data are pretty limited. The one research paper I found on the topic is a small study based on interviews with 31 separated parents in the UK. The results make intuitive sense – but, as we saw above, intuition can lead us astray. So take this with a grain of salt.

The authors, Renee Reichl Luthra and Tina Haux, find quite a bit of variation in what happens to the mental load post-separation. For some couples, what happens after divorce is more or less the same as what happened before divorce: if she was carrying most of the load before, she continues carrying it in their new normal. If they shared the load before, they continue sharing it.

Luthra and Haux report that continuity was most common when the split was amicable and partners’ employment stayed broadly the same pre- and post-divorce. For example, couples who’d been in a neotraditional arrangement (where both work but she is in a part-time or less intense career) used the same narratives post-split to justify her greater cognitive labor load: “she’s just better at it;” “her work is more flexible;” etc. Whereas couples who had established a more equitable arrangement during their marriage – perhaps because they had non-overlapping work shifts, so he spent a fair bit of time on his own and “in charge” of the kids – didn’t see a reason to change that post-divorce.

But for other couples divorce did lead to a marked shift in their cognitive labor allocation. Sometimes that was a function of employment changes: she started working more hours to make up the lost income; he cut his work hours back to make room for the increased parenting required of him under their custody arrangement. In turn, their cognitive labor arrangement shifted toward more balance.

And sometimes, less pleasantly, it was the vicious nature of the divorce that catalyzed change. Less communication between exes meant their households operated more or less independently, and/or she was no longer willing to take things off his plate.

For these high-conflict couples, the mental load was sometimes reframed as a source of power rather than a burden. In the process, it morphed into one more asset to fight over. He was no longer willing to defer to her, and she attempted to edge him out of shared decision-making about their kids. The load might be more equitable, but it’s a Pyrrhic victory at best.

Because all of this is a bit abstract, I wanted to talk to someone who’s been through it personally. Gail Cornwall is a journalist who writes about a range of issues impacting “current and former children” (don’t you love that??). More relevant for today’s topic, she’s also a divorced (now remarried) mom. Cornwall was kind enough to take an informal poll of her divorced-mom network’s experiences with mental load.

Sometimes, mom remains the manager.

One of Cornwall’s connections, let’s call her Lucy, is emblematic of many others. Her ex cooks for the kids when they’re at his place, and he’s hired someone to do the laundry over there, but Lucy handles all of the kid-related logistics. She sets up the camps, arranges the playdates – including on days when he has custody of the kids. Lucy makes sure the kids have appropriately sized seasonal clothing at his place, while he ignores emails from their schools, knowing Lucy will let him know if there’s something he needs to do. She handles the scheduling of doctors’ appointments, prompts the kids to send thank you notes to his family, and so on. Part of that is habit, and part of that is the gendered assumptions other people make: people come to Lucy to ask about play dates and birthday parties, and it’s less work for her to just make a plan than to reroute a request to him and wait for his, ahem, “less efficient” response process to unfold.

Coordination work ramps up.

When you go from a family living in one household to one spread across multiple households—sometimes with new members added on—Cornwall said there’s just more to organize, and more complexity:

“If band is on Tuesday, and Tuesday is a Dad day, but Monday is a Mom day, you have to remember that the clarinet is going to need to sleep at one house Monday night, but then it’s going to go home to the other house on Tuesday after school, so then it has to make its way back over to Mom’s during the week so it’s ready for school again next Tuesday.”

Confused? Me too. Cornwall explains that this is an area where financial resources can go a long way: clarinets are too expensive for almost everyone, but a lot of the families she polled have bought two soccer uniforms, a pair of identical favorite stuffies, multiple lunchboxes, and more to save themselves the hassle of transporting them back and forth.

But, it doesn’t feel as bad as it did when they were married.

I assumed that all this cognitive labor would be crazy-making: you’re not even married anymore, and you’re still handling his shit?!? But Cornwall told me that for many moms she knows, there’s less resentment. Now, all of this work is for their kids, not for him. Sure, they wish they lived in a world that produced dads equally poised to take on more cognitive labor, but it feels less personal post-split. Many of these women say they have extra energy for this sort of thing, now that they’ve exited a draining relationship. Cornwall has a highly collaborative, flexible coparenting arrangement that has all hands on deck most days, but for many of the women she knows in California (which defaults to 50/50 custody), regular breaks from the physical labor of parenting make the cognitive load easier to bear.

Dynamics change when exes remarry.

Candace represents a bunch of Cornwall’s friends whose logistical load was lightened when a new woman came on the scene. When Candace’s ex remarried, someone else was suddenly paying attention to whether seven sweatshirts had piled up at one house, leaving just one at the other. The two women now text frequently about things like switching to a hypoallergenic laundry detergent and whether slipping grades might require an extra parent-teacher conference. Frantic “Jonny needs his clarinet!” phone calls decreased, and “Dad days” became relaxing for Candace. (Cornwall said some men also enlist their parents: When Julia’s ex has the kids, her former mother-in-law comes over and handles the housework.) For her part, Cornwall said she, her first husband, and her second one now parent as a trio, and many hands—and minds—can make for lighter work.

Overall, Cornwall emphasized that there’s no single story: “The differences in co-parenting [post-separation] are as varied as the differences in parenting. It totally depends on who these individual people are.”

In other words, your mileage may vary.

I don’t want to come across as an unequivocal divorce booster. (Not least because this would be hypocritical of me as a happily-married-and-hoping-to-stay-that-way person.) Time and brainpower expended on household labor are pieces of a much bigger puzzle. Divorce is not, typically, a good deal for women economically. And the process of divorcing is usually not great for anyone’s well-being, even if most eventually recover.

To counter some of those potential downsides, the economist Low—herself a remarried mom—advises women to start planning for divorce as soon as they get married, including by making financial decisions with the possibility of future separation in mind. While this is probably good advice, I suspect readers in a good (or even merely good-enough) marriage will cringe at the thought, as I did.

But if any of you find yourself in a not-so-good marriage, I recommend Low’s book. While not exactly a pro-divorce text, it is much more frank about the “exit” possibility than most books in its genre. And after all, as Low points out, it’s when we believe we have no good options that we get locked into the worst deals.

Next week I’ll be live with the incomparable Gemma Hartley for a discussion about What’s On Her Mind. We’ll be speaking on Wednesday, October 15th, at 3pm ET! I’d be thrilled to see you there.

Wisconsinites: On Sunday, October 26th at Noon, I’ll be at the Wisconsin Book Festival, in conversation with Emily Callaci (whose work I’ve written about) and Pernille Ipsen. I’m excited about this one!

Something big dropped on October 3rd. I’m speaking, of course, about the article I wrote with the fabulous all-woman team of Mandi Nerenberg, Rachel Drapper, Allie Feldberg, and Kathleen McGinn. (Though I’d forgive you if you were distracted by that other thing.) It’s open-access, so you’re welcome to read the paper in full. But for the folks who’d rather get the tl;dr, I’m also going to break it down here.

The data

When the world shut down in March 2020, many work-family scholars scrambled to get new research up and running. Times were bad—but they were bad in an unusual way that researchers hoped would be theoretically generative! Lucky for me, Allie and Kathleen were among this prescient group. They fielded a mixed-method, multi-year study featuring 3+ waves of surveys and in-depth interviews with employed, married (and/or cohabiting) parents across the US. For this paper, we focused on the 209 interviews their team conducted with 78 men and women who sat for multiple interviews (at least two, and in most cases three) over the course of two years.

The inspiration

When I joined the research team in 2022, our brief was rather broad: write a paper about the role of household labor in the participants’ lives. To narrow down to a more specific question, we read and reread the interview transcripts, taking notes all the while on what was interesting or surprising in the data. One surprise was just how positive many respondents were about their spouse. They gushed about their partner’s good qualities, how the pandemic experience had strengthened their relationship, and how strong they now felt as a couple. These sentiments stood out because they clashed with the generally doom-and-gloom mainstream media coverage of family life under Covid. And as I read through all these statements of appreciation, I was reminded of Arlie Hochschild’s idea that every marriage has an “economy of gratitude” comprised of metaphorical gifts offered, received (and sometimes rejected) by one partner or another.

The questions

Hochschild’s core insight (as I’ve previously written) was that gratitude acts as a window: when you know what someone is grateful for, you can work backward to infer their initial expectations. We feel grateful when our partner exceeds our expectations. We feel resentful when our partner fails to live up to our expectations.

What the research team wanted to know was: what are the primary sources of men’s and women’s household labor-related gratitude and resentment? And what do those emotions tell us about what they expect of each other? Finally, because we had longitudinal data (i.e., data collected at multiple points over the course of months to years), we were also curious about when and how emotions shifted: what factors nudged a couple toward more gratitude and less resentment?

The insights

We broke our findings down into three parts: one on gratitude, one on resentment, and one on change over time. And within each of those, we reported separately on the patterns we observed among women and among men – because they were often quite different.

Women: One group of women was grateful for their husband’s “help” with housework and childcare. By simply chipping in on tasks like cooking or laundry without complaint, he exceeded her expectations. Other women, though, had a higher bar: they were grateful when he stepped up to contribute without being asked. As Jennifer said of her husband, “He was able to just jump right into it. I didn’t have to say, ‘Okay, I need you to do this.’”

On the flip side, women’s resentments also clustered into two groups. One group expected a co-manager and was disappointed that she instead had a willing helper. He offered to cook dinner but failed to think through the timing. He faithfully completed his “assigned” duties but didn’t keep the bigger picture in mind. The other group expected a helper and grew resentful only when he was so preoccupied by his paid work that he failed to remember they had a household to run.

Men: There was less variation among men than there was among women. Men were, by and large, grateful for the way their wife’s unpaid labor paved the way for them to do more paid labor. Daniel summed it up nicely: “I get a lot of support from my spouse in being able to do what I need to do at work to be successful. I can stay late when I need to; I know that the kids have been well taken care of.” Men also appreciated that their wife took care of things without complaining. “She’s just kind of absorbing” all of the household admin, said Tyler. Implicitly, these men expected to have to help with housework, or for their wife to be annoyed when they were focused on paid work, and they were pleasantly surprised when she took over at home.

Whereas women were mostly resentful about what men did or didn’t do housework-wise, men got resentful when they felt like their wife didn’t appreciate the contributions they made, or that she was blaming them for tasks they didn’t know about. In the former group, Jacob talked about how his wife nitpicked his cleaning, telling him he wasn’t doing it right. In the latter group, Michael was resentful when his wife got annoyed by her heavy housework load but hadn’t explicitly delegated tasks to him.

The implications

One major disconnect—and, in turn, source of friction—was that (some) women and men had very different cognitive labor expectations. Women resented “having to ask” him to do something; men resented “having to guess” what she wanted him to do. These resentments point to very different mental models: she more often saw household management as a shared responsibility; he more often saw it as a function of her preferences or needs.

What we saw among the couples who moved toward gratitude and away from resentment over time was some combination of him stepping up to be more proactive (we refer to this as greater attunement in the paper) and her giving up and lowering her expectations (we call this, more positively, increased willingness to delegate).

Extrapolating a bit, we conclude the paper by pointing to a well-known puzzle: why do so many people say they want an “equal” or “fair” relationship and yet divide housework so patently unequally? Our research suggests that what people mean by “equal” and “fair” may be way more nuanced than current surveys are equipped to pick up on. As we write, “‘Sharing’ household labor may simply mean something different to the average woman than to the average man.”

One of the ironies of internet household labor discourse is that we do a lot more talking about fathers than talking with them. Though understandable, this doesn’t strike me as the best pathway to social change. So when David Hilgendorf, a PhD student at UW-Madison, reached out with his thoughts on my recent post about men and the mental load, I was eager to add his voice to this space.

As you’ll learn, David is not exactly your average dad. Until recently, he stayed home with his three kids (roughly 7% of US fathers are at-home parents, compared to 26% of mothers). Now for his dissertation, he’s researching fathers in similar situations, with a particular focus on what leads some men to take on more cognitive and emotional labor. Read on to learn about his experiences as the lead parent and what his research and anti-racist work have taught David about how we might more effectively bring men to the table.

Prior to starting your PhD, you were an at-home father for about 8 years. Statistically speaking, that’s an unusual choice. Can you tell me about how you and your partner made the decision for you to stay home? And then, once you were actually doing it, what was good about that arrangement and what felt challenging?

The decision felt pretty natural for us. My partner had just finished her PhD and was starting to build her career, while I was working in IT—a job I didn’t see as a long-term passion. She was also earning more, so financially it made sense. But what mattered more to me was the opportunity to upend traditional gender roles. I didn’t just want to be a dad who “helped out”—I wanted to be fully responsible, to be really good at it.

Being an at-home parent was both challenging and rewarding. I loved building a bond with our first child in ways I know I wouldn’t have if I’d been working full time. At the same time, I was struck by how gendered the whole experience was. People constantly praised me for being such an involved father—often for things mothers are expected to do without acknowledgment. That double standard was always in the background, even as I took pride in becoming a confident, competent parent.

I got to know you through your research on fathers and the mental load. Stipulating that this is work-in-progress: in a nutshell, what are you studying? What drew you to these questions? And what have you been finding so far?

I study the mental and emotional labor of parents—things like anticipating needs, planning, and keeping track of the family’s life. I’m interested in what leads some fathers to do more of this work, and what leads some mothers to do less. Ultimately, I want to know how these patterns shape children’s own ideas about gender and parenting.

My interest comes directly from my own experience as an at-home dad. For years I thought I was doing the bulk of childcare and household work, until I realized I was overlooking the fact that my partner was doing just as much on top of her full-time job—what Arlie Hochschild calls the “second shift.” That recognition pushed me to think about not just the physical tasks but also the mental and emotional side of parenting.

My early findings suggest that mothers and fathers often mean different things when they say they’re “sharing” the mental load. For example, when both say they manage the family calendar, fathers might mean adding appointments as they come up, while mothers also anticipate conflicts, plan around activities, and coordinate logistics. On the positive side, I’ve found that fathers with a strong sense of parental identity and those who feel social pressure to be “good parents” tend to take on more of this work—showing there are real pathways to more equitable divisions of labor.

Alright, so we’ve established your bonafides on both the personal and professional side of things. Now I want to get into the exchange we had in response to one of my recent newsletters. I argued (in agreement with Diana Fox Tilson, whose post I was responding to) that men don’t take on more of the mental load for their household in part because they weren’t socialized to do so. You challenged me to more directly acknowledge the role of privilege in all of this: the socialization issue isn’t just about not building skills or learning to care about domestic issues, it’s also about how men learn to see this work as someone else’s job. Can you say more about the distinction you see there, and why you think it’s important to acknowledge?

This is something I’ve only recently started to realize. For a long time I told myself, and other dads, that we just didn’t have the tools—that we hadn’t been socialized to do the emotional side of parenting. And that’s true to a point. We’ve been shaped by patriarchy and masculinity, and most of us weren’t taught to nurture relationships or manage the social-emotional side of family life.

But I’ve also come to see that as kind of a convenient excuse. For example, I’m great at the basics: feeding the kids, getting them to school, handling the logistics. Where I struggle is the social-emotional stuff: keeping connected with other parents, setting up playdates, finding camps. For a long time I told myself, “Well, I just wasn’t socialized to do that.” But if I were a single parent, I’d figure it out, no question.

That’s the privilege piece: I can opt out, knowing my partner will pick it up because she cares about it and our kids need it. So it’s not that I can’t do it—I can. It’s that I don’t have to, and that’s a really important distinction.

You and I have also talked a bit about how we can more effectively invite men into sharing cognitive and emotional labor for their families. Two of the most common narratives I see are “men-as-villains” and “men-as-victims.” How would you describe those narratives? And how effective do you think they are at bringing about change? (To put my own cards on the table here, I think both are limited in important ways!) I happen to know that you’re also involved in anti-racist work and research, so feel free to bring in anything relevant you’ve learned from that work.

Yeah, this is something I wrestle with a lot. The “men-as-villains” narrative paints dads as unwilling or selfish, while “men-as-victims” suggests we’re simply products of patriarchy. I think there’s truth in both, but neither tells the full story.

For some men, the “villain” framing feels like an attack—they don’t want to be the bad guy. That’s where I borrow from anti-racist work: it’s not your fault, but now what are you going to do about it? Not taking on the mental and emotional labor may not be your fault, but if you want an equitable relationship, what steps are you willing to take?

Other men really do feel victimized by patriarchy. We see how it’s limited our friendships, our relationships with partners, even our ability to connect deeply with our kids. I feel this myself—when my kids were little, it was easy to meet their needs by just being present. As they’ve gotten older and their needs are more complex, I’ve struggled to meet them in the same way my partner does. That gap feels like a real loss.

And that’s the tension: we’re shaped by patriarchy, we’re harmed by it, but we also reinforce it in our own parenting. It’s complicated. As much as I sometimes want to just say, “men need to do better,” I don’t think shame creates real change. What does is showing fathers how much better their lives could be—closer relationships with their kids, stronger friendships, better mental health—if they step into this work. That’s where I see hope.

Alright, last question! You’re a parent of three kids. How does all of what we’ve been talking about here shape the way you think about raising them? Are there practices or approaches you’ve adopted to, for example, promote a different kind of socialization than the one you, me, and most current adults got?

Raising kids is hard, and in some ways it gets harder as they grow. With little ones, it’s enough to be physically present—holding them, comforting them. My oldest is 12 now, and their needs are so much more complex. It takes real emotional sensitivity and active engagement, not just showing up.

One thing we’ve tried to do from the start is parent in a very gender-expansive way. Our oldest identifies as non-binary, our middle child uses she/they pronouns, and our youngest doesn’t really think gender is a thing yet—he once told us his class was made up of “just kids,” not boys or girls. We’ve always encouraged them to express themselves however they want.

Looking back, I used to think that me being an at-home dad was enough to disrupt traditional gender roles for them. I realize now that it’s not. I still model plenty of traditional masculine habits in my parenting. So the real work is in staying actively involved in all parts of their lives—especially the emotional and mental labor—and showing them that dads can take on those responsibilities too. That’s how I hope to give them a different model of what parenting and partnership can look like.

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Thanks, David, for such thoughtful reflections! In the comments, I’d love to hear your take on the dominant narratives of men-as-villains and men-as-victims. How effective are these? What alternatives would you like to see?

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To summarize the paper, I’ll quote myself in 2024’s end-of-year research roundup:

Darom reports that mothers of cisgender adolescents regularly find themselves “schooled” by their children about shifting community norms vis-à-vis gender. That is, their teens do some combination of a) explaining the “new regime” to their mom (‘Nonbinary means…’), and b) trying to prevent her from committing a gender-related faux pas (‘You can’t say that anymore, mom!’).

Given my enthusiasm for her research, I was delighted when Naomi joined Substack a few months back. After exchanging comments on a few of each other’s posts, we decided it was time to collaborate. Check out The Gender Nerd wherever you get your substacks, and read on to hear us debate whether there’s any hope for achieving household labor equity among today’s adults.

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The greatest trick the patriarchy ever pulled

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a year ago · 40 likes · 23 comments · The Gender Nerd

First, though, some quick notes about upcoming happenings!

📚Book events

Greetings from New Jersey, where I’m right in the middle of my East Coast tour for What’s On Her Mind. Coming up this week:

Boston, MA | Tues., Sept. 30th, 7pm

I’ll be at Porter Square Books, in conversation with the delightful Paige Connell. Paige tells me (from experience) it’s important you know this: we will be at the Seaport PSB branch. Don’t plug the bookstore into your GPS and land in Cambridge by mistake! You want to go to 50 Liberty Drive: Suite 500.

Philadelphia, PA | Thurs., Oct. 2nd, 6:30pm

This one is hosted by Head House Books, and I’ll be joined by the wise Elizabeth Earnshaw. I’ve got an important note for this event, too: grab your ticket ahead of time, if you can! It’s just $5 and will go toward any purchase at Head House that night.

Naomi Darom: To kick things off, let’s start with some basics: what drew you to the topic of cognitive domestic labor, and what were you expecting to find?

Allison Daminger: A lot of serendipity brought me here, to be honest! You know how when you apply to PhD programs you have to propose a research topic? My proposal had zero mention of gender, or housework, or pretty much any other keyword that would describe my work today. (Okay, maybe not zero overlap - “inequality” has always been a throughline.) But when I started the program, I was assigned reading on the second shift and the motherhood penalty, and it sort of blew my mind. I put what I was learning about domestic labor inequality together with what I’d learned at my pre-grad school job, where I’d been a consultant at an applied behavioral science firm. One of the projects I worked on there started from the premise that decision-making is taxing. And so I wondered: what if we thought about decision-making as a form of labor and looked at who was making decisions in families? How would that change our understanding of how gender shaped household labor? I expected that probably women were doing a lot of it, but what I really wanted to understand was why.

And can I ask you: what sparked your interest in studying gender, especially across generations? My introduction to your work was your article from a few years ago, where you really challenged my understanding of this thing we call “gender socialization” but is sometimes quite vaguely defined. How did that get going?

ND: Becoming a mother got me interested in what we learn (or not) from our parents about gender and sexuality, and how that shows up in the way we talk to our children. Those questions turned into my dissertation, in which I interviewed mothers raising teens about the conversations they had (or didn’t) with their parents around gender and sexuality, and how they talk about it with their children.

I cited your work on cognitive labor in my dissertation, when I wrote about how mothers are still the parents most likely to be tasked with talking to children about sexuality. Most communication about sex and puberty occurred between mothers and daughters, though fathers did talk to their sons. Feeling responsible for this conversation, planning it and carrying it out - it’s all part of the cognitive labor you describe. You found that in heterosexual couples women still do most of this work, yet couples don’t see it as gendered and instead chalk it up to personalities and skills (“my wife is just better at this”), which you call “personal essentialism.” There’s been a pretty grim public conversation, not least on Substack, about the unequal division of cognitive labor and how hard it is to change these dynamics, even in families where men declare egalitarian values. Do you think there’s any hope for making men carry more of the cognitive load?

AD: At a recent book event, an audience member asked whether I thought the gender revolution had failed and we should give up on that whole household labor equality thing. Grim, indeed! I told him that I’m not quite ready to hang up my hat and call it quits, in part because I’ve interviewed couples who have managed to shift toward a more egalitarian division, and because I know a number of men and couples personally who are making strides on this front.

That said, those couples face an uphill battle. By the time they’ve entered adult relationships, they have decades of gender conditioning behind them. And by the time they try to change their division of labor–often after the arrival of a child, or some other life upheaval–they’re usually working against engrained habits.

So one of the strategies I’ve been thinking about lately is, how do we set the next generation up for something different? I’m curious if your own research on parent-child dynamics, to say nothing of your own experience as a parent, has given you any sense of how today’s parents are approaching these issues.

ND: A consistent finding from sociology is that children learn gender roles through looking at their parents, meaning that if today’s children observe their mothers doing most cognitive labor in the house they are likely to think that’s the natural order of things. In my research, I found that education doesn’t just flow from adults to children - that children can teach their parents a lot about gender as well. But I’m not sure how that translates into something as invisible as cognitive labor.

Speaking from personal experience, the key to teaching your kids to notice what needs to be done around the house is to task them with doing something from start to finish. My kids take turns clearing up after dinner. They don’t like it, but they do it (my husband and I shop for food and do all the cooking so, as we tell them, it’s unfair to expect us to do all the cleanup as well). The expectation is that they leave the kitchen reasonably tidy. So, this is about more than loading the dishwasher: it’s looking around and noticing the dirty pot still on the stove or the crumbs on the dining room table. Seeing and noticing are key because, from my experience, once we write something off as another person’s problem we barely notice it. I think that’s the idea behind the Fair Play cards as well - the person tasked with a chore (i.e. shopping for food) takes ownership of it, from planning to completion.

What do you think? How central are attention and noticing to cognitive labor?

AD: I love this! I think noticing and attention are absolutely central - I tell the story in my book of a woman who was frustrated that her husband rarely tidied because, she told me, he just didn’t “notice” or “see” objects out of place. This man was not blind in a literal sense, but he was blind to the idea that those out-of-place objects were things he might want to do something about. (One of my favorite papers from recent years is all about this phenomenon.)

And I think you’re right, too, that attention and responsibility are closely linked. When we see something as someone else’s problem, we stop noticing it. And this is not just a man thing! I’m very guilty of forgetting to check the gas tank, because my husband is almost always the one to fill it. It just doesn’t register for me until the car starts yelling at me to refuel.

What if we started talking about attention as a form of privilege? It is a privilege to be able to choose (even if subconsciously) whether to pay attention to household functioning. We need to teach the next generation (especially the next generation of men) how to notice things that need doing, yes, but we also need to teach them that noticing things is part of what it means to be a team player in the family arena.

[Side note: there’s an influencer who sells a course called “Little Cyclebreakers” that promises to teach kids to “notice and do.” I haven’t tried it out myself but would love to hear from any readers who have!]

One thing I’m curious about is how you handle it with your own kids when things go awry. Back when kitchen-cleaning was a new practice, what did you do when the dirty pot was left on the stove, or the crumbs on the table?

I ask because I hear often from (mostly) women that they want their partner to own a task from end-to-end, but in practice they are still on the hook to monitor things.

ND: Yes, that’s the catch. We needed to monitor the kids when they first started their chores and let them know what was expected. I don’t think there’s a way around it. On the other hand, a half-tidy kitchen is still less work than a fully messy one :)

Performing chores - age-appropriate ones, of course - has been shown to contribute to children’s self-competence, self-efficacy and pride, in elementary and high school and even in young adulthood. It’s even linked to later professional success. So, win-win! It’s essential not to gender the chores but have all kids do the same types of chores. What do you think - is that the key to reigniting the stalled revolution?

AD: It’s certainly an important piece, though I’m hesitant (typical academic…) to label anything “the” key. It reminds me a bit of the anti-poverty work I did at the behavioral science firm. A lot of the discourse in the field back then was about how the key to interrupting cycles of poverty was to intervene in early childhood.. I bought those arguments, but I didn’t think that meant we should stop investing in teens and adults, even if change was harder at those later life stages.

It’s an imperfect analogy, for sure, but my point is really that it’s a “both/and”: if we invest today in teaching kids of all genders skills like noticing and monitoring, I suspect we’ll be a lot better off in a few decades than we are today, at least in terms of household equality. And, I’m not going to give up on the adults just yet.

The novel, published in 1963, follows a group of eight women from their Vassar College graduation in 1933 through the death of one of their number in 1940. In between, there are marriages, divorces, affairs, and pregnancies aplenty—enough domesticity to incite the ire of one Norman Mailer, who sneeringly dismissed The Group as a “lady-book” in a rather sexist review.

There are overarching story arcs, but the sheer number of protagonists means The Group reads more like a collection of interlinked stories. The chapter that pushed me firmly into work mode came midway through, when Priss Hartshorn Crockett takes center stage.

By now, readers have learned that she was the “group grind” in college; that she secured the double whammy of fiancée and government job right after graduation; and that she’s had several miscarriages over the years.

We meet Priss now in the maternity ward, a few days after giving birth to her first child. Though I personally looked a hot mess at that stage, Priss is in full makeup and wearing a satin nightgown. Not by choice: rather, both her husband (Sloan, a pediatrician) and her (male) OB believe it’s “important for a maternity patient to keep herself up to the mark.”

Priss pines for a comfortable hospital gown and feels “unreal to herself” in all these trappings, but no one seems especially interested in her wishes or feelings. She’s presented as more subject than agent: a pawn in her husband’s game (he’s aiming to make a name for himself as a “new man” in medicine) and a bystander caught between warring factions (doctors versus nurses; her mother’s generation versus her own).

Much of the kerfuffle stems from Priss’s eccentric “choices” (scare quotes, because only in a very distant sense is she acting of her own free will) regarding infant feeding. Horror of horrors, Priss is breastfeeding her son. Exclusively!

Her mother is scandalized; the nursing staff look on skeptically; a friend in publishing implores Priss to sell the sensational story of a nursing Vassar woman to Reader’s Digest.

[A slight digression: a little digging suggests McCarthy was exaggerating for emphasis and/or projecting norms from the early 60s, when she was writing, back into the 30s. Breastfeeding initiation was still very common in the earlier period, though women with Priss’s educational background were somewhat quicker to embrace bottle-feeding as “modern” and “scientific” than other groups. Breastfeeding initiation declined over the ensuing decades, reaching its lowest point in the early 70s.]

Were Priss to deliver a baby in 2025, the same “eccentric” behavior would instead be lauded as the epitome of good, evidence-based motherhood. Expectant parents today are fed a steady drip (pun intended) of breast-is-best rhetoric. While some healthcare providers seem to be moving toward a “fed-is-best” discourse, the idea of a hierarchy with breast at the summit still comes through in many contexts.

To cite one example from my own recent experience, the handout I received at my daughter’s 4-month checkup read, “Be proud of yourself if you are still breastfeeding. Continue as long as you and your baby want.” Formula feeders were offered no guidance about how they should feel. Sheepish? Mournful? Repentant?1

I have no desire to argue with anyone about whether breastfeeding is best and, if so, just how much better it is than the alternative. Instead, I’m aiming to underscore how our collective obsession with identifying the “best”—and then harshly judging mothers who come to a different conclusion or cannot for some reason access that “best”— is just as shortsighted now as it was back in 1933.

McCarthy puts it this way:

“[Priss’s husband] was quite forward-looking, but he was enamored of his own theories, which he wanted to enforce…regardless of the human factor.”

The human factor, in this case, being Priss, who sometimes feels proud of her nursing, and sometimes ashamed. She admits to herself that she acquiesced to Sloan’s pressure to breastfeed primarily because she hoped doing so would make her breasts less sensitive, and in turn make Priss less reluctant to let Sloan touch them during sex. Specifically:

“So that she could give Sloan, who was entitled to it, more fun in bed. But so far nursing, like most of sex, was an ordeal she had to steel herself for each time it happened by using all her will power and thinking about love and self-sacrifice.”

And the human factor being Priss’s newborn, who cries for hours a day, likely, we’re meant to conclude, because Priss isn’t producing enough milk to satisfy him.

Back in the present day, neither breast-feeding nor bottle-feeding moms have a monopoly on judgment, guilt, and shame. Breastfeeding mothers report shame and criticism around feeding their babies in public and get side-eye when they choose to breastfeed well into toddlerhood. They feel pressure to stop breastfeeding early, or to start combo feeding, in order to meet the demands of their paid work. They feel shame around discussing the hard parts of breastfeeding, which, incidentally, leads them to avoid seeking help.

Bottle-feeding mothers face a different but no less painful set of obstacles. Their commitment to their child’s wellbeing is questioned; the specter of selfishness is raised; they are offered the dubious reassurance that “at least you tried.”

One way or another, few escape unscathed. What might a better way look like? My friend and colleague Leigh Senderowicz offers a potential model.

Leigh studies family planning in the global health realm. She noticed that aid programs and health ministries typically measure success based on the percent of women who receive contraceptives. Leigh’s intervention, which seems obvious in retrospect,2 is to ask whether the women wanted the contraceptive. Specifically, were they able to make a “free, full, and informed choice” about whether and which contraceptive to use?

In her revised model, “success” means that someone who wants an IUD gets an IUD. “Success” also means that those who don’t want IUDs…don’t get them.

If we applied this framework to the case of breastfeeding, we’d move away from a narrow definition of success as exclusive breastfeeding for 6+ months and failure as everything else. Rather, success would mean that a woman who wants to exclusively breastfeed is able to do so. And a woman who prefers to supplement or replace breastmilk with formula is also able to do so.3

Right now, we’re doing a poor job on both sides of this equation. Kerala Goodkin wrote recently from the perspective of a mom who really wanted to breastfeed her children exclusively but found the conditions of employment incompatible with doing so. “We’re not going to get anywhere,” she writes, “if ‘breast is best’ doesn’t make universal paid leave a central tenet of its argument.” Breastfeeding advocates, she argues, need to acknowledge that “women who struggle to work and pump full-time should in no way be shamed for their inability to ‘get creative’ and ‘make it work.’” Amen!

Mom, Interrupted

Where "Breast is Best" Keeps Missing the Mark

If you enjoy this story, liking and sharing it helps me reach a wider audience. Becoming a subscriber is a great way to support my work, and becoming a paying subscriber is even better! Paying subscribers enable me to offer these longer, research-informed stories for free, and they get full access to…

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9 months ago · 98 likes · 32 comments · Kerala Goodkin

On the flip side, I know many moms who don’t want to breastfeed exclusively or at all, for various reasons. Sometimes there’s a trauma history. Sometimes there are mental health conditions exacerbated by lack of sleep, such that being able to share feeding responsibility with a partner is a literal life-saver. Sometimes there’s prolonged pain. Sometimes there are problems with the baby’s latch or milk transfer, in which case “triple feeding” is often prescribed, leaving moms with no time to care for other children, feed themselves, or simply rest. These same moms often persist with exclusive breastfeeding for longer than they’d like, because they’ve been conditioned to see anything else as failure or dereliction of maternal duty.

Reading Priss’s story from today’s vantage point, it may be tempting to congratulate ourselves on our success: look how far we’ve come from the days when we saw formula as the epitome of evidence-based feeding!

But though the object of our collective ire may have shifted, the fact that we shame women for doing the best they can, often with substandard support, remains the same. That’s not the kind of progress worth celebrating.

Comments this week are for paid subscribers only! As always, but particularly for sensitive topics like this one, I implore you to comment with kindness.

Really, I am. Gratitude has been top of mind this week: I just submitted a research paper about gratitude—and resentment, but let’s skip over that part—that will hopefully come out later this year.1

The paper starts from the premise that what we’re grateful for reveals something important about our prior expectations. We’re grateful when those prior expectations are exceeded. Something happens, or someone does something for us, that goes “above and beyond.”

(If you’re wondering what the heck this has to do with my research, we look at what men and women are grateful for when it comes to their spouse’s participation in housework and childcare.)

Because I’ve been deep in the weeds on this paper, I can’t help but reflect on my own exceeded expectations. What’s on Her Mind came out earlier this week, and I’ve been so pleasantly surprised by the reception thus far.

But honestly, every week when I send out a newsletter here, I feel grateful. Coincidentally, this post is #100. Thanks for being here, whether you arrived four years or four days ago. I’m so glad to have you.

Enough sap! This week: a few highlights from the book publicity circuit, some upcoming events you might be interested in, and, for paid subs, an all-things-book AMA. (Next week we’ll be back to more regular programming - I promise!)

WOHM Highlights

One of the most wonderful and surprising parts of this whole thing has been the range of thinkers and creators who have connected with What’s On Her Mind in some fashion. To name a few recent high points:

• A fun podcast taping with and Margaret Ables of What Fresh Hell

• Reviews in Science and Christianity Today (did not see either of these coming…)

• Substack interviews with Cindy DiTiberio, who asked me such thoughtful questions, and Nancy Reddy, whose recent book The Good Mother Myth was my postpartum bible

The Mother Lode

What's Crushing Women? Cognitive Labor

My mission as a sociologist is to help people see how their individual experiences fit into a much larger story. If they come away from the book and start applying greater scrutiny to their own famil…

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9 months ago · 43 likes · 4 comments · Cindy DiTiberio

Write More, Be Less Careful

sociologist Allison Daminger on the mental load of early parenthood

Hello there! Welcome to Write More, Be Less Careful, a newsletter about making space for creative practice in a busy life. If you’ve found inspiration in the good creatures series, I think you’ll love my new book, The Good Mother Myth, about motherhood, ambition, and making art…

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9 months ago · 16 likes · 11 comments · Nancy Reddy and Allison Daminger

Still to come

Do you live near Chicago? Come say hi tonight (Sept. 12th)! I’ll be in conversation with the incisive and hilarious of Evil Witches newsletter fame.

And on the 19th, I’ll be joining a LinkedIn Live event focused on what we can learn from the men who are taking on a good chunk of the mental labor at home. (For more on this topic, see the tail end of last week’s post.)

Book/Publicity AMA

There are a handful of book-related questions I get pretty regularly: how did you get a book deal? What has publicity been like? How are you managing book promotion alongside parenting a newborn? Since some of this feels a bit personal, I’m dropping it behind the paywall.

How did you get a book deal?

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While WOHM isn’t officially out until next week, the festivities have begun. I’m fresh off a fabulous launch party at my favorite Madison bookstore,2 with more to come next week in Milwaukee and Chicago. I’d love to see you there!

If you a) hang out a bunch on Substack, and/or b) read a lot about care work and mental load, you’ve probably seen the viral post of the summer:

Other Interests

Your Husband Won't Pick Up the Mental Load If You Put It Down

I spend a lot of time thinking about the mental load and the division of labor in hetero relationships. It impacts my own life, but I would also go so far as to say that the quandary of how to more evenly divide labor is t…

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a year ago · 2330 likes · 344 comments · Diana Fox Tilson, LICSW

In it, therapist Diana Fox Tilson describes her upbringing as the child of a single father who didn’t give a sh%# about picking up the mental load his ex-wife dropped when she left their family. Tilson paints a dismal picture of life in their household for her and her siblings:

We never visited the doctor or dentist. My hair and nails were unkempt. I wore my brother’s hand-me-downs because no one was buying us clothing, and our clothes were dirty because no one was doing laundry…We never ate homecooked meals and lived on fast food and school lunches. No one threw us birthday parties, or facilitated our social life so we could attend other kids’ birthday parties. Birthday presents were generally an afterthought, purchased on the day-of. Same with Christmas presents, which were purchased in a frantic rush on Christmas Eve.

It goes on from there. Tilson leverages this presumably painful story from her childhood to make a broader argument: if men aren’t carrying their fair share of the household’s cognitive labor, it’s not because women aren’t giving them the space to “step up.” As the sole adult in the home, her father certainly had plenty of space!

Rather, Tilson argues, men aren’t stepping up to carry the mental load because a) they haven’t been socialized to care about these issues, and b) they’ll face little to no pushback or consequences for not doing this work. Tilson recommends that her readers “quit gaslighting ourselves and reject the myth that our husbands would step in to fill the void if we just stepped back to give them more room.”

Since I keep getting asked about my thoughts on Tilson’s piece, I figure it’s time I share them here. Here’s the headline: Most of Tilson’s experiences line up extremely well with what I’ve seen in my research. I have some minor quibbles and would add a bit of additional nuance, but I think her diagnosis of the problem is spot-on.

I, too, take issue with the “maternal gatekeeping” narrative

Early in the post, Tilson describes hearing that men don’t do more at home because their wives/female partners discourage them from doing so. “Maternal gatekeeping” is the academic term of art for this phenomenon, coined (as far as I can tell) in the late 90s but still an active research area 25 years later. Contemporary scholars tend to subset the overall gatekeeping concept into two categories: gate-opening maternal behaviors that encourage father participation in childrearing, versus gate-closing maternal behaviors that discourage father participation.3

Do I think that some women say and do things that make their male co-parent less inclined to participate in childcare? Absolutely. In fact, a number of my interviewees described doing some classic gate-closing behaviors, like redoing tasks their partner already did or taking over a task from him midway through.

My quibbles are not with the phenomenon itself, but with how it’s framed, and particularly about what happens when it passes from sober academic journals to frenzied social media feeds.

When researchers talk about maternal gatekeeping, they’re careful to frame it as an outcome of cultural norms re: gender, rather than as inexplicable bad behavior on women’s part. In other words, they acknowledge gatekeeping as a symptom of a much bigger “disease”—and we all know what happens when we treat symptoms rather than underlying problems.

But I suspect most people who read about maternal gatekeeping don’t immediately situate it in its broader social context. Instead, they think, ‘Geez, women can be so controlling,’ or perhaps, ‘Ugh, if only I were more chill.’ Tilson describes her own reaction to learning about gatekeeping this way:

On some level, I absorbed the message that it must be my fault that I carry the mental load for our household because I’m just so efficient and overbearing and exacting about taking care of everything that there’s no room for my husband to step up.

Again, I don’t think the researchers studying these phenomena intend to blame women for household inequality or to suggest that gatekeeping is the only/most important factor limiting men’s involvement. But as Tilson points out, it’s really, really hard to not go directly from ‘maternal gatekeeping inhibits father involvement’ to ‘women are the problem.’

Also, there are some, let’s call them curious gender assumptions built into the gatekeeping models. I had a bit of an aha moment reading a common questionnaire researchers use to diagnose maternal gatekeeping. Imagine posing these questions to a mother:

• How often does your baby’s father invite you to help [with the baby]?

• How often does your baby’s father encourage you to spend time alone with your baby?

• How often does your baby’s father arrange activities for you and your child to do together?

It’s funny, right? The idea that a father might need to go out of his way to make sure his wife feels included in childcare, or to do cognitive labor to facilitate mother-child interactions, sounds a little silly.

And for me that’s really the crux of it. Is it pragmatic, and likely quite productive, to ask what women can do to get their male partners more involved in raising their children? Yes.

But those conversations need to more clearly acknowledge the built-in gender asymmetries: we do not, for the most part, see it as men’s job to manage women’s household involvement. The fact that we do seem to see managing men’s involvement as part of women’s job should raise some bigger questions.4

It’s definitely not about individual personalities

The second major thing I think Tilson gets right comes toward the end of the piece, when she talks about her dynamic with her husband. In her telling, he does “far more household labor than the average Xennial man,” but very little of the mental work. Early in their parenting journey, Tilson chalked this discrepancy up to personality:

I’m an overachieving, type A perfectionist who is, I’ll be honest, a little uptight. My husband is the more chaotic fun one, the guy you want at your party but probably wouldn’t trust to renew the car registration on time.

Eventually, she changed her mind about this explanation:

Over time, it became clear that these personality traits were not our individual quirks as much as the result of a larger cultural pattern in which men in hetero couples are the fun-loving, freewheeling ones, while women keep the ship afloat.

Yes! This! I don’t want to spoil my book too much (my publisher tells me I’m supposed to hold some content back…), but the heart of What’s On Her Mind is about exactly this. The main explanation couples gave me for their unequal distribution of the mental load was their individual personalities. But, like Tilson, I believe a “larger cultural pattern” is actually at work, and I devote a decent chunk of the book to trying to unpack that larger pattern.

But maybe there’s room for a bit of hope?

I promised to do a bit of quibbling with the post, so let me end with that. Tilson is pessimistic about the possibility of changing these dynamics. It’s right there in her title: “Your husband won’t pick up the mental load if you put it down.” Toward the end, she says she’s given up on redistributing cognitive labor in her own relationship and instead focuses on distributing physical labor more equitably.5

I don’t know how to say this without coming across as #NotAllMen, so I’ll just come out with it: There are men partnered with women who carry 50% or more of their household’s mental load.

They are the minority, for sure. (In my sample, it’s 1 in 5, but I suspect this is an overestimate of the figure in the general population.) Tilson’s experience is much more the norm.

And let me be really clear: Just because some men do carry the mental load does not mean that if your partner doesn’t, you have somehow failed!!!

Still, I think it’s important to acknowledge these “unicorns,” in part because they provide important counterfactual evidence to pernicious myths about women being inherently more organized, or mental load inequalities being totally intractable so why bother.

I also think there’s a lot to be gained from studying these nontraditional men and couples. What demographic factors, belief systems, life circumstances, etc. pushed them onto their unusual trajectory? I raise some possibilities in the book, but I will be the first to admit that we need a lot more research. (Because they’re so rare, it’s hard to get a big enough sample size to come to clear conclusions.)

What I hope comes out of this research are ideas for collective solutions to the problem of mental load inequality. I’m much more optimistic about those than I am about the power of individual couples to buck dominant norms.

Let’s go back to Tilson’s diagnosis of the problem: (most) men aren’t stepping up to carry the mental load because a) they haven’t been socialized to care about these issues, and b) they’ll face little to no pushback or consequences for not doing this work.

I agree with her there. So what can we do? We’re going to need to change the way we raise the next generation of children. And we’re going to need to stop holding adult men and women to different standards for participation in household life. Until we cease to see it as women’s job to manage the home—and to manage their partner’s involvement in it!—we are unlikely to get very far.

I left you last week with a cliffhanger: the Wages for Housework (WFH) movement that sprang up in the early 70s in the US, Europe, and the Caribbean had fallen apart by the end of the decade. What went wrong?

I should offer some caveats here. While that first incarnation of the WFH campaign may have dissolved, its descendants live on. As one reader commented, the Global Women’s Strike is actively organizing for a “Care Income” under the leadership of Selma James, a WFH foremother. The WFH legacy is also apparent in calls for a Universal Basic Income and other programs offering unconditional cash transfers to low-income families.

And yet, three of the five WFH leaders profiled by Emily Callaci in her new history of the movement left the campaign decades ago. Several of the most active WFH “chapters” dissolved in the late 1970s. And while the idea that care work is valuable has resurged in public discourse over the last few years, the idea that we should offer payment for familial care labor has never truly gone mainstream. (I’m happy to be proven wrong on this last point – feel free to drop some counter-evidence in the comments!)

Callaci’s analysis suggests WFH 1.0 fell apart for a host of pragmatic, interpersonal, and ideological reasons:

Pragmatic:

Activism is really hard work. Organizer burnout is a major threat to any social movement, and particularly so when progress seems slow. As Mariarosa Dalla Costa, one of the movement’s founders, reflected years later, “After so many struggles and so much time spent organizing, we couldn’t detect even the outline of a transformation of our society.” Many of the original organizers simply got tired of fighting.

Relatedly, it is much easier to be a radical activist when you don’t have major caregiving demands! And the WFH constituency, as you might imagine, included a fair number of current or aspiring caregivers. As Callaci drily puts it, some activists “wanted to have children and found that the demands of motherhood were incompatible with the demands of political militancy.”1

Finally, activism doesn’t pay well (or, typically, at all). Alas, fighting back against the capitalist machine doesn’t release you from its clutches. Many who started in the movement as young students later left it because they needed to make some money.

Interpersonal:

Competing visions and clashes over leadership drove a wedge among the primary WFH organizers. Exactly what went wrong is somewhat unclear. Callaci points to two competing accounts: one camp says the movement split along racial lines, another that the conflict stemmed from frustration over some members’ domineering leadership style. Both seem plausible, and indeed it’s likely the “true” culprit was a bit of both.

These pragmatic and interpersonal factors are important, but a bit generic. Point to any social movement, and I bet you’ll find burnout, infighting, and the like.

So I want to linger today on the final, ideological category of reasons-things-fell-apart. This is where things get sticky – but helpfully so. I see two core tensions, both with ongoing significance for those of us who care about housework in 2025:

First, how do you counter the devaluation of “women’s work” without also tethering women to it?

In theory, WFH is a gender-neutral benefit: anyone, of any gender, who performs domestic labor would be eligible for payment. In practice, women would be the major beneficiaries of such a program. And if you were to start receiving a payment for your housework, would you be effectively acquiescing to it as “your job”? In the 1970s (and arguably still in the 2020s), when much of the energy of mainstream feminism was aimed at getting women equality in paid (market) work, WFH was countercultural: ‘I don’t want to be paid for my housework, I want to do less of it!’

Dalla Costa herself once advocated for “smash[ing] the entire role of housewife” rather than simply making it a paid position:

“We must discover forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives and the home as the ghetto of our existence….”

The line between valuing housework and glorifying it can be fuzzy. For example, one could argue that Tradwives and their ilk value housework extremely highly. While no one would confuse Silvia Federici with Hannah Neeleman, both challenge the paid work > domestic work hierarchy.2 The Tradwives’ project, to the extent they have one, is to show that domesticity is an art, that maintaining a family isn’t drudgery but high calling, that the home isn’t “the ghetto of our existence” but a sanctuary.

My take is that the worthy project of getting housework appropriately valued has to be paired with the equally worthy project of disentangling gender from household roles - much easier said than done.

Second, speaking of valuation, how do you assert housework’s value without capitulating to capitalist premises?

A reader summarized this tension perfectly in their comment on last week’s post:

“I think this is really funny in that, while ostensibly a movement to ameliorate the effects of capitalism, it further entrenches the logic of the markets and capitalism in an entirely social sphere.”

Callaci admits to the same hesitation:

“Perhaps the part that makes me most uneasy is the centrality of productivity…Wages for Housework reveals how women’s work creates economic value in a capitalist system, and, in that sense, they make a brilliant case for wealth redistribution on capitalism’s own terms. But should we accept those terms? Do we have to be deemed ‘productive’ to claim a share of the collective wealth?”

I, too, wrestle with this. I’m all for greater recognition—and valuation—of domestic labor. The social and reproductive labor women perform is literally keeping all of us alive! That would be true under any economic system, but the fact that within the capitalist framework that labor is deemed “unproductive” is particularly insulting.

But how do you counter housework’s devaluation? Most activists who have taken on this project, WFH included, have sought to translate its impact into terms even the most hardened of capitalists will understand: dollars. ‘Look, here is how much money women are saving humanity by doing housework for free!’ (Estimates vary, but Callaci cites $9 trillion.)

Yet this translation into monetary terms feels uncomfortably like conceding defeat. As the same, wise commenter (hi, Apoorva!) put it, we’ve seen “the collapse of all sources of value in society into economic/financial value in the last few decades, all over the world. I don’t think that has entirely been good for us.”

Me neither. One of the arguments I make in What’s On Her Mind is that efforts—by activists and scholars alike—to translate unpaid work into terms that policymakers, business leaders, and others in power will appreciate have costs. Apoorva describes it as collapse; I write about it as flattening. It’s taking this thing we call housework, or care work, or household labor, and reducing it to a unidimensional “productive” entity. Something is inevitably lost along the way.

I sympathize with the desire to have one’s contributions valued in the currency the rest of the world recognizes. (Again: $$$) Yet another commenter (y’all had great insights last week!) who’s currently working as an “unpaid mother/laborer” suggested that wages would be helpful for her material well-being, but also for her confidence. Absolutely!

I’ll admit I don’t know how best to square this circle. In the book, I suggest we resist our reductionist tendencies and instead allow multiple forms of value to coexist. Unfortunately, that means hanging out in the gray areas many of us (it me) find unsettling.3

What did I miss? Do you see a way to change the way care and housework are valued that doesn’t entail acceptance of capitalism’s terms? Or perhaps you are less worried about that dilemma than I am? As always, I’m eager to hear your take in the comments.

P.S. Check out TDD reader Elaine Luther’s incredible quilts inspired by the WFH movement! (Scroll down toward the end of the blog post.)

3

Elissa Strauss is someone who I think writes thoughtfully about the both/and of it all, e.g. in this post from earlier in the summer:

MADE WITH CARE

THE ESSAY What Both the Left and the Right Get Wrong about Pronatalism

I recently updated the format of this Substack. Here’s the deal: Every month, all subscribers will receive THE ROUND-UP, a list of curated recommendations around a theme; THE ESSAY, a piece of memoir-laced cultural criticism by me; and THE RESTACK, an often new—but sometimes old—essay from one of my favorite fellow care-obsessed Substackers…

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a year ago · 84 likes · 30 comments · Elissa Strauss

“We demand a guaranteed income for women and for men, working or not working, married or not. If we raise kids, we have a right to a living wage. The ruling class has glorified motherhood only when there is a pay packet to support it. We work for the capitalist class. Let them pay us, or else we can go to the factories and offices and put our children in their fathers’ laps. Let’s see if they can make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time. WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. All housekeepers are entitled to wages. (Men too).”

- Selma James, 1970

Arguably, the defining characteristic of housework is that it is unpaid. On one level, that’s sort of obvious. Without an employer or a customer, who would be offering payment? If I make my husband dinner or change my daughter’s diaper, aren’t I simply “caring for my family”? I’m certainly not producing goods or services for an employer.

But if you poke at it just a bit, the unpaid-ness of this work starts to seem rather strange. In a world where there was no unpaid labor, who would feed the workers? Who would ensure they had clean clothes to wear to work? That they were nursed to health when they fell ill? Heck, in a world without unpaid labor, where would the workers come from in the first place?

Without the unpaid labor (mostly) women do in their homes and communities, the entire capitalist enterprise would quickly disintegrate. Workers need to be sustained, in body and soul, between employment shifts. New generations of workers need to be gestated, and birthed, and raised, to keep the economy going (and to maintain employers’ profits).

“Housework,” writes historian Emily Callaci in her new book Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor, “is the most essential part of the capitalist system because it produces and maintains the most important source of value: the worker.”1

When an employer hires an employee, they effectively freeload off the people in that person’s life who feed, clothe, shop for, and provide comfort to that employee.

When governments fail to provide critical social services or cut existing benefits, they freeload off the people who step up to provide childcare and eldercare, often for little to no pay. (For more on this, see my colleague Jess Calarco’s recent book.)

These were among the core premises of the (mostly) 1970s-era Wages for Housework movement. Before reading Callaci’s history of the campaign, I’d heard of WFH2 but had no idea how radical it was. Nor did I realize how small it was (Callaci estimates there were only a few dozen active campaigners at any given time), how short-lived (it fell apart by 1980 or so), or how fringe (contemporaneous mainstream feminists considered the WFHers a bit…out there).

The history of this movement is intrinsically fascinating, if somewhat depressing. But it has particular resonance in 2025, as we seem to be suffering from a malaise Anne Helen Petersen recently diagnosed as “feminist exhaustion,” as the Left endeavors to reinvent itself for the Trump era, and as Tradwives and momfluencers continue to dominate certain corners of the zeitgeist.

I’m still sorting out all my thoughts on how these pieces connect. And while this is meant to be a space capacious and informal enough for half-baked ideas, some of them are more like quarter-baked. So to buy myself some time, this will be a two-parter!

This week: what exactly was the Wages for Housework campaign?

Coming next week: why did WFH fall apart, and what might 2025-era feminists learn from its arc?

Callaci structures her book around the stories of five women who were leaders in the WFH movement and each contributed something intellectually distinct to the project: Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod.

Most of these women were lifelong activists. Several got their start in another movement before growing disillusioned with its limitations vis-à-vis feminist issues:

• James was a committed Socialist frustrated with the way that party leaders ignored the revolutionary potential of “housewives” in favor of mostly male factory workers.

• Dalla Costa came up in the Italian “operaismo” (i.e., workerism) movement, where she and her fellow women experienced rampant sexism from their supposed comrades.

• Brown was part of the Black Panthers but eventually came to feel they placed too much emphasis on Black masculinity and heterosexuality, leaving little to say about her life as a Black lesbian.

But nor were these women satisfied with the second-wave feminism in vogue around them, which centered the needs and interests of White, middle-class (would-be) career women.

They were critical of the Equal Rights Amendment, for instance, arguing in one WFH publication that “equal pay for equal work is the Man’s best cover for getting us all to work more, for next to nothing.” Employment, they argued, was not a particularly appealing prize for many poor and working-class women, who could look forward to, as Callaci puts it, “degrading jobs at poverty wages.” To the extent the movement had a central protagonist, she was “a poor Black welfare mother resisting the demand that she work a second job outside the home.”

In the familiar conflict between fighting for a place within the existing system and fighting to overturn that system, these women fell squarely on the side of revolution. Though wages for housework was the centerpiece of their campaign, they defined “housework” extremely broadly. Sex work was a form of housework, as was reproduction, as was working to mitigate environmental devastation and other harms generated by capitalism.

Alongside their demand for wages, the WFH campaigners sought to change women’s understanding of their labor and of how it fit into capitalism. They sought access to contraceptives and abortion. They campaigned against racism, against colonialism and its legacy, against nuclear weapons. Over the course of the 1970s, in the UK, US, and Italy, they formed committees and coalitions; put out pamphlets and posters; and campaigned at global summits.

Their goals were lofty but, as their critics were quick to point out, they were rather vague on the specifics.

Who exactly would pay these housework wages, and how, wasn’t clear. More fundamentally, was the call for wages a symbolic provocation—closer to thought experiment than policy proposal—or an actual attempt to get more money in women’s hands? Despite all her research, Callaci never got a clear answer, though she’s confident “the wage was never the end goal but rather the first step in a much larger struggle for power.”

Looking around the U.S. today, it’s clear that they didn’t manage to accomplish that “first step,” let alone go beyond it. We’re still fighting to get unpaid labor recognized in figures like the GDP, let alone financially compensated.

Indeed, by 1980, the movement qua movement had fallen apart. What went wrong? Some of its demise can be attributed to familiar problems: activist burnout, ideological differences among movement leaders. But some of its downfall is more specific to the challenges of organizing around unpaid labor - challenges that many of us are still wrestling with today.

More on this next week! In the meantime, I’m curious: Had you heard about the Wages for Housework movement? Does it strike you as pie-in-the-sky fantasy or inspiring vision for the future? Or perhaps a bit of both…

I can now confirm that What’s On Her Mind exists as a physical object - and a beautiful one (imho) at that. (If you’re not as into physical books as I am, you can also preorder the ebook or audiobook - narrated by the same person who reads Elin Hilderbrand’s books(!!!), so you know she’s good.)

If you’re new here

What’s on Her Mind is based on eight years of research and nearly 200 interviews with parents. It’s been peer-reviewed by experts and contains A LOT of footnotes for the academics who like that sort of thing.

But as I was writing it, I mostly thought about my friends from college. I thought about the moms (and a few dads!) who’ve emailed me over the years to thank me for giving them new words to describe their experiences. I thought about the therapists who draw on my research to help stressed-out moms and high-conflict couples.

When I published my first article on cognitive labor back in 2019, my goal was to change the conversation about housework. I wanted to show how our focus on physical chores meant we were underestimating just how much women were holding for their families.

Six years later, I hope What’s on Her Mind changes the conversation about housework again. People are way more cognizant of mental and emotional labor than they were back then.1 (That’s thanks to a whole lot of people, not just me!)

But our collective discussion about the mental load is too small. We’re focused on individuals and couples. We’re talking about how men can step up and how women can step back. Those are important conversations, but they often miss the broader context. I hope What’s on Her Mind gets us talking about the social forces limiting couples’ options in new ways.

Preorder pep talk

If you follow a lot of writers, you already know the drill. But if you haven’t yet heard the preorder spiel, keep reading! Preorders matter. A lot. The exact mechanics are a bit opaque, but I’m told preorders send an important signal to all sorts of players in the book industry:

• Retailers look at preorders when deciding whether to stock the book in stores

• Publishers look at preorders when deciding how many copies of the book to print

• The algorithm looks (?) at preorders when deciding where to position the book in searches

Yes, preorders are good for authors. But even more importantly, preorders help a book connect with more readers. In this case, preordering What’s on Her Mind means more people will be thinking and talking about mental labor and gender inequality. (And unless you are hate-reading TDD, you presumably think that’s a good thing!)

Where you preorder doesn’t matter a ton. You can find the book on Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or via Princeton University Press. Lots of local bookshops offer preorders, too!

If buying the book isn’t in your budget, consider recommending the book to your local library. (Here’s an example from the Madison Public Library system.)

As a sign of my gratitude, everyone who preorders the book will get a six-month paid subscription to The Daminger Dispatch. Simply fill out this form by 11:59pm September 8th, and on pub day I’ll add you to the paid subscriber list! (Note: the form requires Google sign-in. If that’s a problem, just email me and I can add you manually!)

Coming to a city near you

I would be absolutely delighted to meet TDD readers this Fall. If you live in or near Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Boston, Philly, or Princeton, come to an event and introduce yourself! (And if you know people in those places who would be interested, spread the word!)

I’ll be honest, self-promotion is not my favorite. I have a strong desire to “let the work speak for itself.” But a mentor reframed this weird publicity phase for me: “So many people took the time to share their stories with you. You owe it to them to get the word out.”

To quote Taylor Swift, this is me trying! My sincere thanks in advance for all of your support along the way.

Welcome back to the What’s On Your Mind series, where I interview interesting folks about the to-do’s we don’t talk enough about. If you’d like to nominate someone - or yourself! - for an upcoming interview, please reach out.

When this post drops, I will (if all has gone to plan) be in Montreal to celebrate my dear friend Chloe Bordewich’s wedding. We met half a lifetime ago, as college freshmen, and reconnected in 2016 when we ended up in the same grad school. For this month’s edition of What’s on Your Mind, I asked Chloe about how she and her partner are managing wedding preparations.

Planning a wedding is one of the most cognitive labor-intensive activities a couple can embark on. But Chloe and her partner have a particularly high degree of difficulty. As she puts it below: “We are trying to host a wedding that blends two cultures in a country neither of us is from, where we have lived only a few years and not attended any weddings.”

Some context: Chloe was raised in the U.S., but her partner grew up in Syria before being displaced by the civil war there. He eventually found refuge in Canada, but his citizenship status prevents him from traveling to many countries, including the U.S. As a result, the couple has spent the majority of their decade-long relationship living in separate countries.

Chloe and I have had fascinating conversations over the years about how certain approaches to planning (and general life management) may be cultural as well as gendered. And about how hard it is to tease apart all the factors that may be at play for any given couple: what’s gender, what’s class, what’s culture, and what’s individual idiosyncrasy?

Read on to hear how Chloe’s managing all of this alongside challenges big and small. Thanks, Chloe, for taking time out of this hectic period to share your experiences!

Who do you carry mental load for – and who do you share it with? 

My partner and I do not have kids yet and my parents are, fortunately, in good health–I don’t have any dependents besides my anxious rescue cat. I’ve carried most of the mental load when it comes to shared household financial management and, recently, wedding planning, though we have reshuffled those tasks somewhat since both my partner’s and my employment situation changed this summer. Also, I have a standing weekly meeting with a good friend with whom I share a years-long task management Google doc. It started as a way of tracking our creative and professional projects, but we’ve added personal goals and decisions over time. It helps to have somewhere to externalize my interior chaos that isn’t dumping on my partner. (Ed. note: Genius!)

What tasks, issues, or problems are occupying your mental real estate these days?

My postdoc contract ended about a month before our wedding, so I am headed into the final stretch of wedding planning without a reliable paycheck. On one hand, this means my time is technically my own. On the other, much of my mental real estate is taken up with financial anxiety and concerns about staying afloat professionally, knowing that I won’t have time to recommit to a full-time job search until after the wedding.

As a semi-freelance historian, editor, and translator, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to juggle seven or eight very distinct creative projects (paid and unpaid, a frustratingly gray area) and remain accountable to collaborators on all of them. Until two months ago, I was also commuting every week between Montreal and Toronto, about 6 hours each way. Those logistics took up a huge amount of real estate–and time!

Living in Canada but working on projects both here and in the United States, I deal with mounds of paperwork and have to keep especially meticulous tax records. Last year I also launched an editing business, Stray Cats Ink, with some grad school colleagues, and I would like to dedicate more time to expanding our client base. We love living in Montreal, but the difficulty, for both me and my partner, of finding reliable, full-time employment here has left us contemplating yet another move—at least temporarily. 

We were eager for my partner’s family and close friends to travel to North America for our wedding and see a piece of our lives here. We went around in circles trying to make this happen, but his best friend’s, mother’s and sister’s visa applications were all refused. Heading into the final stretch, we also had a sudden pest infestation that forced us to pack up our whole apartment in less than 24 hours! (Ed. note: Omg)

If you could find a way to offload one wedding-related mental labor task (or category of tasks) – and, critically, you knew it would be handled well - what would you most like to let go of?

Our venue setup is very DIY, which has meant we are responsible for every single little detail. I’ve been using lots of spreadsheets to manage them, yet they bring me no joy at all. I hate opening them to do any kind of tracking–recording payments, revising budgets, keeping things on schedule, etc. I have just enough will to make these trackers functional and not enough to optimize them to truly work for us. 

What’s one wedding-related mental labor task you’d want to hold onto, even if you had the opportunity to let it go? 

Making design choices—choosing invitations, vases, napkins, etc.—anything where there is room for creativity. This is what will make our wedding feel like us. The design might be more chaotic than cohesive, but so are we! 

Do you feel like your current division of wedding-planning labor matches your ideal? If not, what are the biggest obstacles to reaching that ideal? 

We are trying to host a wedding that blends two cultures in a country neither of us is from, where we have lived only a few years and not attended any weddings. In fact, my partner has hardly attended any weddings at all because, for much of the decade we’ve been together, his citizenship status seriously restricted his travel. This means few common points of reference for what we did and didn’t want, or of guest expectations. (He loves to cite examples from Friends, which, despite my being the American, I’ve barely watched!) I also have a tendency to over-research decisions, and I struggled to relinquish control of this part of the process. 

As a result, more of the planning fell to me, though my partner relieved a lot of the burden of execution and follow-up. I realized that I needed to ask him explicitly to take on specific decision-making tasks, and we were able to distribute these better in the final stretch. I wish I had asked sooner! But I needed to be okay with letting go of certain things I thought I cared about being a certain way. 

What are your favorite tools or techniques for managing wedding logistics with your partner? 

It was easiest to take joy in the process when we made planning discussions into dates, especially when we focused them around discrete tasks and, ideally, decisions: “compare caterers and choose one,” “walk through the wedding day timeline,” and even, “write our vows.”  These dates were simple: a grilled cheese at our favorite coffee shop or, once the weather was nice, a picnic and a bottle of wine in the park. This helped restrain my tendency to dump loads of wedding information all at once and connected wedding planning to the rituals of daily life together that make us happy. (Ed. note: Awww)

Chloe Bordewich is an editor, translator, and historian focused on the modern Arab world. Based in Montreal, she co-runs the Boston Little Syria Project and recently wrote a bilingual play. Learn more here.

As I wrote then, I love reading this sort of thing. I’ve never met a food diary, spending diary, or day-in-the-life I didn’t devour. I’m nosy, yes, but more charitably I’m eternally fascinated by how people choose to use their limited time, money, attention, and other finite resources.

Given all this, I’m not sure why it’s taken me more than 18 months to revisit this genre, but better late than never? As before, think of this as a series of excerpts rather than a comprehensive time diary. Here goes…

Monday

8:35am – K. (my 4-month-old) was up earlier than I’d prefer, so I am several hours into my day by the time I sit down at my desk. I realized upon waking that we were out of cold brew and my husband disassembled the coffee grinder to clean it, so today also involved an early morning coffee shop run. I’m finally caffeinated enough to start my weekly planning ritual. The specifics are always in flux, but in broad strokes it entails a) brain dumping all the tasks I hope to get to this week, b) checking my calendar, goals list, semester plan, inbox, etc. to collect additional tasks I forgot in my initial dump, and c) assigning each task to a day in my planner (or pushing it back to a future week).

Parenthood hasn’t (yet) rendered this system obsolete, though it has forced me to scale back my ambitions. Actually, no. I’ve concluded that I should be scaling back my task lists, but I keep failing to do so and ending up disappointed when I inevitably don’t get to everything.

After the brain dump, I realize this may be a very book launch preparation-heavy week. I consult the calendar, realize there are only six weeks until pub date, panic, and create a separate list of launch-specific tasks. (Do I have other such lists elsewhere? Yes I do. Is this necessary? Probably not, but list-making is a core anxiety coping mechanism.)

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Tonya Lester wants you to get mad. Preferably in a big way:

“Women sometimes try to indicate their unhappiness at the margin, hoping that small changes will get them on the right track. Maybe for small problems, that works, but not for big problems.”

Lester, a couples therapist, believes that to break out of longstanding relational patterns, “you have to burn down the existing structure and then rebuild. How you rebuild isn’t as important as starting with—not quite a blank slate, but starting with the idea that we have to rebuild something together, because what has existed isn’t working.”

Lester’s forthcoming book, Push Back, is the rare self-help text that actually reckons with the broader social context each “self” must operate within. And because her primary audience is conflict-averse women, she devotes considerable real estate to gender socialization.

Many women have been socialized to keep the peace at all costs, but Lester believes that instinct actually makes our relationships worse (to say nothing of our own well-being): “Conflict and anger, that’s what causes change. We don’t change if we don’t have that kind of energy behind it.”

I was in the middle of an advance copy of Lester’s book when I read Cindy DiTiberio’s recent post on how couples therapy can harm women, even perpetuating abuse, if the therapist is more attuned to saving the relationship than ensuring the wellbeing of both parties.

The Mother Lode

When Couples Therapy Turns Cruel

I first broached the concept of the destructiveness of couples therapy in a conversation with Kate Hamilton about her book Mad Wife. She, in an interview with Gemma Hartley, said couples therapy can be abusive be…

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a year ago · 182 likes · 91 comments · Cindy DiTiberio

Previously, I’d imagined a “good” couples therapist as impartial, giving equal weight to each party’s perspective and asking both to change in equal measure. Now, that struck me as naive. I of all people should know that no couple is an island! And when working with different-gender couples in particular, it would be silly—and, to DiTiberio’s point, potentially harmful—for a therapist to ignore the broader patriarchal context.

So I invited Lester to speak with me about how she avoids the therapeutic equivalent of bothsidesism when working with different-gender couples who struggle with power and/or labor inequality.

Lester agrees that women partnered with men are much more likely to be the party in a “one-down position”—that’s just the reality of life in a patriarchal society. And traditional couples therapy, she admits, isn’t designed to acknowledge that. Instead, “there’s a huge emphasis placed on harmony. And harmony in relationships nearly always requires women to put up and shut up.”

Lester started her training as a couples therapist under the supervision of someone who viewed his role as “trying to protect the relationship,” but she quickly concluded that this was a recipe for “really, really bad couples therapy.” She eventually found her way to Terry Real, arguably one of the most famous contemporary couples therapists, whose therapeutic model takes gender socialization into account.

Real taught Lester that her job is “to go into the therapy room and tell the truth” rather than “advocate for the relationship.” “I consider it my job,” she says, “to help people articulate what they’re feeling, to reflect what I see, to call out dynamics that people might be avoiding, to name the obstacles, and to then see if there’s a pathway through them.”

She starts by asking her clients, ‘What does it feel like for you to be in this relationship right now?’ One of the most common issues that brings different-gender couples to her couch is “gender role frustration,” particularly among couples with young children. Often, they were fairly equal before kids, she notes, but once kids come “that will just completely fall apart.”

How, I asked, does Lester work with couples in this position? Step one – somewhat to my surprise – is “to really help her surface how angry she is.” When women’s anger is confined to “small flare-ups,” it’s easy for him to “just kind of turtle, like put himself under his shell until she’s not angry anymore, and then come up for air, and everything resumes.”

Lester describes her goal as providing “a little bit of an ice bucket, like, ‘Wake up!’” He needs to understand that “this is actually threatening the relationship. Him doing more than his dad does is not even close to solving the problem.”

She talked me through a common scenario, where a couple comes to her when their kids are young:

“I will absolutely say, ‘You have a 1yo and a 3yo, it’s a very hard time of life. But this is such a chance for you to get this right. By the time they’re 10, and she looks up, and she’s kind of got it figured out, she’s been doing everything anyway, she’s working and so isn’t worried about the financial ramifications of leaving—like, you’re kind of working yourself out of a job here. You’ve made yourself highly dispensable.”

For this gambit to work, “he needs to be rattled by how clear she is, rattled by her clarity, and then want to make a change. And this is the hard thing: sometimes he doesn’t actually care enough. He isn’t invested enough. And I think the earlier she can find that out, the better.”

If that sounds like a hard pill to swallow, Lester tries to couple this tough-love approach with deep empathy for both parties: “I care about how he feels…I have a lot of empathy for everybody who comes into the office. I think it’s really hard. It’s really emotional. As someone who loves their wife, they’re not necessarily trying to get away with something.”

Lester has less empathy for the idea that the woman partner’s high standards are the problem:

“It’s a red herring. It’s a misogynistic trope. I don’t buy it that that’s usually the case. It’s like, we’re adults. Two adults should be able to figure out what Eve Rodsky calls the ‘minimum standard of care’ and be able to move forward.1 If her standards really are too high, then we have to look at, well, she must have a lot of anxiety to need to keep things so tight. And certainly we might talk about shifting standards, if two people are going to be doing something instead of one. But almost always, my knee-jerk response is that saying, ‘Well, I won’t do it the way she likes it’ – I don’t buy it. I call bullshit.”

“Some relationships shouldn’t be saved,” Lester continued. “If someone is lying to you, if someone is narcissistic, if someone doesn’t care that you’re in pain, if someone has chance after chance to improve things and they choose not to, then the relationship shouldn’t be saved. The idea that we should go to the mat for every marriage, we have to let that go.”

On the bright side, Lester also believes that “couples therapy with a good therapist can be really, really life-changing and bring you so much closer, and help you be known so much more thoroughly by each other.” Lester’s advice for those contemplating therapy is to interview any potential therapist about what they see as their role. Ideally, she says, you want someone who will help you “create clarity around the issues that have happened and see if there’s a way to move forward that honors both people’s needs.”

And if you feel like you’re not being understood and validated, trust that instinct. “A big red flag is if you say, ‘Well, this happened and I felt really upset,’ and the therapist takes the position of, ‘I don’t think he really meant it that way.’ To me, that’s a couples therapist who’s afraid of conflict.”

Keeping the peace might make for a more pleasant session, but it defeats the purpose: “The whole point is to have a really hard hour, in order to slowly build up to the lives they have outside the therapy room being satisfying and fulfilling for both of them.”

If you’ve tried couples therapy, I’d love to hear about your experience - Leave a comment or send me an email!

Tonya Lester, LCSW, is a psychotherapist, writer, and Psychology Today contributor known for her bold, compassionate approach to helping women reclaim their voices. In her therapy practice and upcoming book Push Back: Live, Love, and Work with Others Without Losing Yourself (New World Library, October 2025), she challenges the myth that women must be easygoing to be lovable—and offers a powerful new path grounded in self-respect and clarity. Tonya lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and St. Paul, MN.

Okay, sure, but who’s going to actually do the work to make things more equitable? Aren’t you just putting more on women’s already-spilling-over plates?

Alas, probably. Many women partnered with men are forced to choose among several not-great options:

Option A) accept the inequality and take on most of the domestic labor

Option B) put in a ton of effort to try (and possibly fail) to make things more equitable

Option C) leave the relationship

I was thrilled to come across a new paper that gives a name to the effort required under option B, and even more thrilled when the researcher, Inés Martínez Echagüe, agreed to answer a few questions about their study - and about how they manage cognitive labor in their own life.

Alas, Martínez Echagüe hasn’t solved the conundrum for us. But there’s still immense value in having a label for a problem you’re facing - and confirmation that if you find yourself working hard to…try to do less work, you’re far from alone. And that’s not nothing!

Fair warning, this one’s on the longer side, but totally worth it.

Let’s start simple: what is ‘equality work,’ and how did you come to study it?

Equality work is literally the work of creating and maintaining a more egalitarian division of household labor. Unsurprisingly, in my research – which focuses on cisgender different-sex couples, where inequalities are most pronounced – I find that this work is mostly done by women.

Clearly, women have more incentives to be invested in the work of making the division of labor egalitarian. Unequal divisions tend to disadvantage them and privilege men, so women have more personal stake in achieving greater equality.

Only in 3 of the 20 couples I studied were men were doing this work alongside women, and in 2 of those cases, women had first educated them on the importance of equal sharing.

Despite the fact that most men and women in the couples I interviewed embraced egalitarian ideals in the abstract, it was women who were thinking about how to achieve those ideals in their relationships. They were worried about inequality long before living with a male partner or having children and had been strategizing around it ever since.

Men, on the other hand, were less concerned about inequality, tended to think of it in abstract terms, and often assumed that equality would simply follow from good intentions – failing to acknowledge how often people fall back into unequal patterns without meaning to.

In my research, I find that the work of making the division of labor more egalitarian – equality work – is both emotional and cognitive. It is cognitive, as it entails significant planning and decision-making, and emotional, as it involves navigating feelings of injustice with someone you care about and feelings of guilt about raising issues within a relationship.

I came to study equality work because I was interested in the contradiction between research arguing that most young men and women want egalitarian relationships, and other studies showing that few couples actually achieve them. I was curious about how couples made sense of equality in their relationships: whether they talked about it with each other, whether they actively worked toward it, and what obstacles they encountered along the way.

I was not entirely convinced that folks were simply justifying inequality, especially women. I asked, why would women give up on their egalitarian goals? It turned out that, for them, achieving equality also entails work.

Equality work does add to women’s already-spilling-over plates, but it may be worth it when men collaborate. But if they do not, this work can become so taxing that it is eventually easier to do whatever he is not doing, rather than try to convince him to do his fair share.

Some of my own research focuses on how couples justify existing inequalities. When I was interviewing women for that study, I often got the sense that justification wasn’t their first strategy, but rather a fallback they turned to after they’d tried and failed to get the equitable division of labor they really wanted. I didn’t have the data to support this hunch, but you do! Can you walk us through the typical sequence of events, from lofty ideals to acceptance of inequality?

That is exciting – you got the hunch too!

I’ll walk you through the experience of Bella, a 26-year-old White and Asian American grad student. Growing up her mom “did everything;” cooking, cleaning, and everything else. But Bella didn’t want that for herself; she wanted equity in the division of labor with her future partner. As she puts it: “A lot of girls grow up with their moms doing everything, and you kind of have to unlearn that and make sure that you put some of the responsibility on your partner if you want some type of equitable distribution.” She talked about how men are not raised to do these things, so she felt she had to take on the role of trying to make her division of household labor more equal. Here, she was anticipating inequality.

However, Bella only began strategizing to achieve equality once she had moved in with her partner, Tom, a thirty-something White researcher. She found herself doing everything and thinking: this isn’t going to work. “I made him a little list in this app that we have called Cozi…I have a list of things to check daily, things to check weekly, things to check monthly,” she explains. That’s also when Bella initiated conversations with Tom and began speaking up about inequality.

When Bella began monitoring equality in their relationship, she found that Tom was not always doing his part:

He’s the same with working out; he goes through sprints where he's great. Last night I got home at 8.30 from a girls night, and everything that I had thought of that needed to be done – all the dishes were put away (…) there was a load of laundry that needed to be folded – he had done everything, so I guess he checked the app, I don’t know. But then sometimes I’d come home and none of that would have been done!

Although Tom was contributing more than when they started living together, Bella emphasized that his contributions still didn’t reach an egalitarian level. He sometimes forgot to check the app, even though he actually works as an app developer. She talked about how they regularly have conversations about it. but things weren’t getting any better. Tom keeps “regressing,” she joked grimly. 

At this point, some women in my study would try to set up yet another system to make him do his share – another way to fix inequalities.

Another common outcome, and what happened in this case, was that Bella began revising her egalitarian ideals in light of Tom’s resistance.

That’s also when she started doubting herself and her goals. Bella tells me that their main issue is Tom not noticing when chores need to be done, a problem she tried to address with the app. Still, she excuses him, explaining that he can’t be a “mind reader” and know what she wants—in effect placing the burden of awareness back on herself. At the same time, I sensed guilt about always being the one to initiate these difficult conversations. Keeping that guilt at bay is part of the difficult emotional work that equality requires.

When I asked Bella if she thinks of her relationship as egalitarian, she said:

I wanna say no because Tom annoys me sometimes, but ... I do! I feel equally respected, equally valued, I feel like I have an equal say, and those are the things that make an egalitarian relationship, not how many more times I fold laundry than him. Because I’m concerned about making sure that my relationship is egalitarian, I try to keep score, and... I don’t think that’s the right way to go about it.

Here we can see Bella redefining what equality means to her. Instead of focusing on the distribution of household tasks, she shifts towards less tangible aspects of her relationship, like feeling equally heard and valued. This way, important but intangible feelings were substituted for material equality in the couple’s division of labor.

When, after many attempts, Bella’s egalitarian systems didn’t work (due to Tom’s lack of consistency in maintaining them) or began to feel like they required too much work to maintain, Bella revised her expectations about equality: she doesn’t “keep score” on who is “folding laundry” anymore. This was when her unequal household labor arrangement was reframed as fair, resolving the dissonance between her ideal and the reality. Now, whenever she starts feeling uneasy about their arrangement, she tells herself, “Well, he’s doing X, Y, and Z. Relax, just fold the laundry.”

One of the components of equality work is monitoring each partner’s contributions to make sure they’re equal. You mention in the article that this was the step men participated in the most. Can you explain what monitoring entails and why you think men were more involved here than in other parts of the process? 

Monitoring is making sure that the egalitarian systems that have been set up are maintained, and that neither partner is doing most of the household labor alone. This usually involved keeping track of partners’ contributions, though with some flexibility. Partners often described equality as a goal they were working toward together, rather than something that had to be 50/50 at all times – otherwise, it would lead to too much conflict.

For example, Olivia, a White physician and new mother in her 30s, said that she and her partner weren’t always counting how much each one was doing, but that they did “sort of count sometimes.” She gave an example:

“When I say ‘I took care of her more than you did’, he’ll be like, ‘Well, you fed her three bottles and I fed her three bottles. So it’s 50/50’ (... ) I don’t think it’s actually possible to do an equal amount in all the different spheres, but at least to have that as a goal.”

Men were less involved in anticipating inequality and strategizing about it because they had fewer incentives to worry about household inequality in the first place. None of them mentioned knowing other men in their network who were burdened with most of the household labor – so they didn’t expect it to happen to them either. Out of the 20 couples I interviewed, only one man claimed to be unfairly doing more labor than his partner.

While many men embraced egalitarian ideals in principle, they had thought less about what those ideals meant in practice. Often, they assumed that things would just “turn out” equal by virtue of their good intentions, failing to recognize how gendered patterns get reproduced even without anyone explicitly intending them to.

When it comes to monitoring, I believe men were doing it more because it was a stage that happened after women had already done the work of anticipating inequality and strategizing to achieve equality. At this point, men may have feared becoming overburdened themselves, or they may have felt guilty about overburdening their partners, even if that guilt didn’t always translate into sustained commitment to equality. 

I’m going to do that thing where I ask you to step a bit beyond your data for this last one! Let’s imagine two different readers:

Julia isn’t in a relationship but is hoping to find a male partner who will put in the (equality) work alongside her. What characteristics would you advise Julia to look for as she sizes up potential partners?

Amanda has a male partner, and most of the equality work is falling on her. Does your research suggest anything Amanda can do (other than work harder, ugh) to change the dynamic? 

Among my 20 couples, there were three where men and women were truly working together towards their egalitarian goals. In two of those, women had educated their partners on the importance of equality and working towards it. In one case, he kept up with equality out of principle; in the other, he kept up out of convenience – he believed having egalitarian systems in place was good for the relationship because it prevented arguments about household matters.

So for Julia, this means that a male partner doesn’t necessarily need to be fully committed to equality from the start – he can learn. But it also means that the work of educating partners about the importance of equality will likely fall on her. If Julia wants to avoid that burden, I’d recommend looking for a partner who is already aware of gender inequalities and has spent some time thinking about how he would handle these dynamics himself.

I’d also suggest raising these issues early, while dating. As Ellen Lamont’s work shows, how we date can be a preview of how we’ll navigate equality in long-term relationships. Here are some things Julia could look for:

Does he assume he should pay, or is he open to talking about the gender dynamics of who pays?

How does he respond when you bring up issues like parental leave or other policies related to couples’ equality?

How does he talk about his job and income in relation to yours?

How does he care for his space? And for his people?

Even though most of my interviewees were not working together toward equality, the fact that 3 of the 20 couples were doing so is, in a way, a hopeful finding—it suggests there are men and women actively committed to building egalitarian relationships together.

For Amanda, I’d say she has the option of initiating a hard but necessary conversation with her partner. She could lay out how the work of making their division of labor more egalitarian is falling mostly on her and ask whether he truly values equality—and if so, whether he’s willing to take on his part, which includes his share of equality work. 

Many women I interviewed found themselves in tricky situations: their partners might improve some, but also resist some of the changes.

I also spoke to men who, despite wanting to prioritize family over work, still struggled with internalized expectations about being the “provider,” or gendered ideas of what makes a man valuable, like excelling in a career. Some men were willing to compromise and meet their partners halfway. Others were not. That’s when the difficult decision fell back on women: whether to stay in the relationship or move on.

And I want to acknowledge: part of what makes this decision so difficult is that the pool of men who are both willing and able to take on the work of equality still feels small. (This makes me think of South Korean women and the phenomenon of heterosexual refusal, a trend Meera Choi has written about.) There is no easy answer.

I do hope my research helps to validate something important: that creating and maintaining an egalitarian division of labor does take real work, and that while there are many women taking up this work, it requires both partners by definition. That fact, in itself, can become a talking point in a relationship. Though I can’t guarantee it, I’ve had friends share my writing with their partners, and it has opened up meaningful conversations about their dynamics.  

Inés also gamely agreed to answer a few questions about her own life. Here’s the latest installment in the What’s on Your Mind? series, where I interview interesting folks about the to-do’s we don’t talk enough about. As always, if you’d like to nominate someone (or yourself!) for the series, please reach out.

Who do you carry mental load for – and who do you share it with? 

At the moment, I mostly carry my own mental load and share the mental work for housework (mostly cleaning, tidying, and some shared groceries) with my roommate, who also identifies as a woman. While there are still some challenges in keeping our loads egalitarian, they’re different from those faced by heterosexual couples, given the absence of gendered expectations. 

What tasks, issues, or problems are occupying your mental real estate these days?

As a Latina immigrant in the United States, I often find myself navigating the complexities of staying safe while also trying to support others in my community facing similar challenges. There’s a great deal of logistics and emotions involved in maintaining legal status and participating in everyday life and community efforts in ways that feel secure. Thinking about this through the lens of equality work, it’s clear to me that addressing marginalization isn’t passive – it takes work, and that work often falls on those who are already carrying the burdens of inequality, creating new forms of emotional burdens.

What are your favorite tools or techniques for managing household logistics with your partner (or whoever else you share the load with)?

I am a big fan of checking in, especially when I feel like I’m doing less than I should, or more than I want to be doing. I do engage in monitoring equality and speaking up.

I’m also a fan of household systems. I think having assigned chores and specific days helps a lot. For example: I’ll do the kitchen on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; you do it on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays; and on Sundays, we either take turns or do it together. Or we might switch who does the living room and bathroom each weekend. I believe systems help reduce both the cognitive labor of having to notice when things need to be done, and the equality work of having to speak up for the other person to act.

Systems give me peace of mind – they make me feel less worried about inequality, whether that means overdoing it myself or accidentally under-contributing compared to my roommate.

That said, not everyone likes having established systems, so this has sometimes been tricky. This is when conversations become really important, and so does having a shared sense of balance. For example: maybe I clean the floors every other day, but you take out the compost every other day as well. That kind of tradeoff can also help.

Inés Martínez Echagüe (she/they) is a Doctoral Candidate in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds an MA in Gender and Public Policies from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO). Their research focuses on gender, family, feminism, and social change. She grew up in Uruguay during the rise of The Feminist Tide, the most diverse and widespread feminist movement that Latin America has seen, which inspired her to better understand how feminist and egalitarian ideals shape the pursuit of more just social relations. Learn more and follow along on Bluesky or X.