I am writing this post a day after my son’s college orientation, and I want to reflect on how the gendered dynamics of parenting influenced how I responded to this event.
As a quick refresh – mental load includes planning and organizing what needs to get done to keep a household running smoothly. It’s distinct from actually doing household labor (e.g., washing the dishes, doing the laundry) as it involves planning, tracking, monitoring, and evaluating choices. Emotion work, the tasks that are done to ensure the emotional well-being of the family, is also sometimes included in this construct. Qualitative work on mental load consistently finds that women experience considerably higher mental load (including both the logistic planning/organizing and the emotional burden of ensuring the family well-being) and often feel as though this load is a never-ending, invisible burden that others in the family don’t notice or fully appreciate.
Now, to my son’s orientation.
First, I found myself in charge of the logistics including where my husband and I would stay, what we needed to pack, and where we’d have to park. I actually failed to fully read the packing list, and we showed up without bedding, so I was immediately struck with mom guilt (even though my son also had access to the packing list so he was just as responsible as I was!). Although my husband and I solved this problem with an emergency trip to Big Lots, I was struck by how I felt responsibility and guilt for this oversight.
During the rest of the orientation, I found myself being the one who was worrying that things were going well and feeling like I wanted to make sure my son was making connections and feeling comfortable. Of course, there was nothing I could do about this, so in this case, the emotional load was unproductive and just resulted in worrying. So this led me to question: Do I take on the emotional burden in our family because I tend to worry more, because of gendered dynamics, or because of some combination of both? And do I tend to worry more than my husband because of gendered socialization, or other aspects of our personalities? I think the answer is all of the above, but it points to how these issues are often difficult to disentangle. What feels personal (I need to stop being a worrywart) is also political (the emotional wellbeing of one’s children is considered the responsibility of the mother, not the father).
So how can these observations enter the classroom and result in a productive discussion with students? I would be curious to ask my students to reflect on the following:
- Who in their family is in charge of planning and organizing? Who schedules the doctor’s appointments, researchers summer camps, organizes the car pool rotation. Do they see these tasks as different from daily household labor (e.g., cooking and cleaning)?
- Who in their household is in charge of ensuring the emotional well-being of their family?
- How much do they think the mental load of running their family is acknowledged and appreciated by other family members?
- What do they think the consequences are of carrying all of the mental load in a family if it is unacknowledged and unappreciated?
- How do they hope to share the mental load if they plan to have a family of their own (or have one already)?