Moms think more about household chores − and this cognitive burden hurts their mental health

When you think about housework, you likely think of actions: scrubbing the dishes, running errands, chopping vegetables for dinner. And it’s not news to say that mothers often shoulder the burden for most of those activities. But there’s an invisible dimension of household labor that unfolds behind the scenes: the cognitive effort that goes into anticipating needs, planning, organizing and delegating household tasks. In other words, someone has to remember to replace the dish soap and select which vegetables to chop. Our new research found that this cognitive dimension of housework, often called the “mental load,” is divided even more unevenly within couples than the physical dimension – and it seems to take a particular mental health toll on women. According to the study we published in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health, mothers who take on a more disproportionate share of cognitive household labor report higher levels of depression, stress, relationship dissatisfaction and burnout. We asked 322 mothers of young children about who in their family is responsible for 30 common household tasks. We collaborated with the creators of the Fair Play system – a book and card game designed to better quantify the division of labor within households...