The mental load — the unseen stress and emotional labor that often falls on women — isn’t a new concept for most moms. It’s things like meal planning and cooking, planning birthday parties, making sure school lunches are packed, and keeping a mental schedule of everyone’s appointments and special events. So when one mom turned to the Internet for advice on how to cope with the stress of managing her household, they were ready with some seriously great answers.
The unnamed working mom started a thread on Reddit, in which she confessed that the burden of caring for her children, doing housework, pumping breast milk for her youngest child and having to constantly ask her husband to do more to help was becoming too much to bear.
“My husband does help out and I am thankful for him, but I have to ask him to do the majority of the stuff he does around the house,” she wrote. “If I don’t ask him it doesn’t get done. And when I ask him he’s annoyed that I’m asking … so either I do it all and am pissed off, or we do it together and we’re both pissed off. So it’s a lose lose situation.”
Her post quickly generated dozens of comments with smart tips on how to divvy up the housework and relieve some of the mom’s stress. Here are a few helpful ideas that were shared:
Tip #1: Make a chore ownership plan
Redditor Zozothebobo wrote that one major thing that’s helped her marriage is to make sure that she and her husband each have assigned chores. “If I or my husband agrees that 100% of the time, a certain chore is our responsibility, then the responsible person is more likely to do it, and it doesn’t need to be a fight when it doesn’t get done,” she explained.
Tip #2: Outsource your to-do list
Another mom who goes by the handle CaityFace said what’s helped her and her partner the most is finding ways to offload some of their to-do list. “One thing that really helped us was identifying what our limiting resource was. For us, that is time. If we can we pay someone to deal with it for us at a reasonable cost that will give us infinitely more time, then we pay for it,” she wrote. “That goes for cleaning, shopping, dealing with no longer needed items in the house, activities, social engagements, etc.”
Of course, paying to hire a cleaning service isn’t an option for everyone, but getting outside help can be as simple as planning to order take-out instead of cooking a couple nights a week, or paying a small fee to have groceries delivered. Even on a budget, there are small ways to make life more convenient. And make sure both partners take their turn at doing the hiring or outsourcing too — because that can be a job in itself.
Tip #3: Build a to-do list together and split the jobs
Lastly, user chailatte_gal suggested using a shared app or spreadsheet to track what needs to be done. Both partners can set up the list together, and then access it regularly to see what’s coming up and mark off what’s already been taken care of–that way the burden of managing everything isn’t only falling on one person. “Try the app OurHome,” she suggested. “We listed out all the tasks that need to be done and assigned them. We split them up, and so his job is to check the app and do the tasks on there! I’m not nagging and stuff gets done.”
Obviously, one can’t say that only women take on these tasks, but it is a common problem in many households that moms are treated as the “default parent.” Even in households in which both parents work full time, the majority report that moms are doing the bulk of household and child care duties. That can take a toll on moms’ energy and wellbeing, in addition to setting a poor example for the kids. As journalist Gemma Hartley wrote in a 2017 “Harper’s Bazaar” essay on the subject of the mental load, “It is difficult to model an egalitarian household for my children when it is clear that I am the household manager, tasked with delegating any and all household responsibilities, or taking on the full load myself.”
Not every parent grew up in an egalitarian household, so it’s normal to expect that modern couples may struggle to get on the same page. While things like to-do lists and chore charts won’t solve the problem completely, they are reasonable steps that a lot of families can put into practice to hopefully create a more equitable division of household labor — and a lot less stress for moms.
