To think that “mental load” is just another way to moan about normal adult life?

[ByNimbleCrow]

Everyone has responsibilities. Why do women act like keeping track of household tasks is some unique burden?

And nobody has to stand for this. Kick out the useless partner or at least stop doing anything for them. I’ve lived with a couple of partners, it’s never occurred to me to do their personal chores as well as my own. If you’re running around after another adult and not doing anything to improve the situation you’re complicit in your own “mental load”.

Surely that's more to do with the female partner putting up with or taking on the job of the "mental load" and not speaking up.

If bought up to help share the load then it comes naturally to help and continue to do so once you've flown the nest.

I do find it odd if the woman thinks the man should just know what she wants done without communicating it in any way. At what point did having to communication in a relationship become to much hassle?

Obviously it’s different if you’re up against strategic incompetence/straight up refusal to do any work.

Well women need to get their partners/husbands to step up and become an equal parent. Leave them to get on with it.

I agree OP. I think lots of people just like moaning about everything now.

Exactly. I can't imagine living with a grown man who needed me to wash his pants, or do his dishes, or book his dentist appointments, let alone marrying him and having a family with him. It's just a totally alien concept to me.

When I met DH he owned his own home. He did everything for himself and that hasn't changed just because we now live in the same house - why would it?

I feel like there is more ‘mental load’ now than in the past, perhaps erroneously, but there really does. Constant comms from school, helping children with homework (and to stay on top of it), endless emails from banks and insurance companies and the rest, dealing with all of the subscriptions and insurances and shopping around every year to get the best deals, planning and booking holidays and all of the things that need to be remembered like passports and meds, endless school events and outside of school enrichment activities for children to be planned and organised and then the many weekly comms about them, all of the admin that comes with having a SEN child and trying to advocate for them and get them diagnosed and an ECHP sorted, shopping and meal planning for multiple meals per meal because of everyone’s allergies and preferences, no more ‘meat and two veg’ because it got to be healthy and don’t forget to check the ingredients on every bastarding thing so the child doesn’t throw up after eating it, never mind the ‘is it UPF’ issue…
I do all of this. My ex doesn’t. My child comes back from his often ill, cold, and vomiting. He forgot to take her to the dentist when it was a day he had decided to have her in the holidays (the one day he took, I had to do all of the others) and gives her off to a female friend with kids instead for an all day ‘play date’, so then I had to rearrange it and it meant time off school which in turn meant asking the school and apologising and all of those comms and AAARGH! And no, there was no indication he would be like this before we had a child, he seemed like an honest and loyal and competent grown up, but here we fucking are.

I agree with that too. But society is complex, with expectations being placed on women and mothers that have been passed down and perpetuated through generations. It’s an interesting conversation, isn’t it.

If it's just a part if being an adult, why do so many men opt out of it? Because it's time consuming, takes up headspace and are thankless tasks.

Of course, they are just every day responsibilities, but the problems arise when you're the only person with these things on your radar, whilst also working full time and doing most of the parenting!

I think ‘household tasks’ is a term that kind of minimises the actual work. Probably because it’s seen as woman’s work. Lots of activities generally performed by women are demeaned, minimised. Stuff that is invisible except when it isn’t done. Cooking, cleaning, mending, organisation of lives etc,

I’m carrying the mental load for five people - paying all the bills, food, meal plans, finances, future planning, daily activities, healthcare, appointments, benefits, all their household tasks and the management of such, making sure they have fulfilling lives, personal spends, toiletries, balanced diets, suitable clothing, footwear, glasses, hearing aids, haircuts, mobility aids and safety gear, birthdays, holidays.

None of them are my partner, he does his.

Why is it up to the woman to delegate?

I see it as describing a type of overwhelm and stress that some people, often mothers and women experience, as in feeling mentally overloaded and having an unequal burden of responsibility in the home (the patriarchy) and with DC often on top of paid work.

In the context of a more even distribution of responsibility, life more generally experienced as less stressful, cushioning factors - such as supportive family, good social networks, affluence - it may not apply.

I was lucky - my DMil had a career which DFil respected so DH grew up seeing both parents making decisions about the family and home.

If it has been for DECADES why aren't most adult men now sharing all "mental loads" if they have been raised by mothers doing it all for so long? Wouldn't that be the circuit breaker?

Majority of the time it's women that raise DC, yet a majority of the time its women complaining that men don't do their fair share.

Sharing the mental load should start when men are boys...then it won't come as such a shock to them that its only natural to help out.

So you want women to be responsible for that as well? Why can't the men in question bloody well step up on their own?

My DH is similar, so the mental loud isn’t too much of a problem in our house. But I think me and you are lucky! A lot of my friends have a very different experience, which is sad to see.

Generally when people moan about taking on the mental load it's because they are taking on more than they should. For example one parent managing and knowing when all of the children's appointments/activities are. If something gets forgotten they'll get the blame but the other parent should take responsibility for knowing.
Some couples have a similar mental load problem where one partner (usually a man) expects the other to remember and manage things like birthdays and chrismas, even mothers day for their family.
So no, mental load is not adult life. I've never heard single and childless people about taking on the entire mental load for themselves as that is adulting.
I suspect you misunderstand what mental.load is.

Nope, because they see their mother doing it all and expect their female partners to be the same. My grandmother worked and my dad still expected my mum to do everything, just like his mum had. Mum tried not doing it and everything fell apart, so she started doing it all again.

a small example.

My DS is 18. He has an eating disorder, part of which is he doesn't eat sweets/chocolate. He hasn't eaten them in his whole life and would rather poke his eye out with a compass than anything chocolate pass his lips.. he won't even touch it. So easter i think outside the box and get him something else, i've always tried to involve him without making him deal with the chocolate obsession.

His Dad just bought him an easter egg...

As I posted - leave them to it.

I partially agree with you, op, but I suppose I might feel differently if my husband was totally useless. I do more of the household tasks (including being responsible for knowing what needs to be done), he works longer hours so overall it works out pretty fair. Certainly think that there are people who waste time fretting about the mental load when the underlying issue is that they’ve married a loser, and who remembers the MOT and ballet lessons is just a symptom of the bigger problem.

I’ve seen people recommend these strange cards which are supposed to break all the tasks down, so cleaning the loo isn’t just cleaning the loo, it’s also remembering to buy the bleach, rubber gloves, knowing when it needs to be done etc. But the problem with these things is that, if your partner is a lazy man child, he’ll just think you’re a nag anyway and a petty one at that. There’s no fixing useless.

Areas where I take on all the mental load are things like Christmas- I like it and like planning it all. But if I were to drop dead tomorrow, Christmas would still happen. DH probably wouldn’t do it like I do it- but maybe he’d do it better? Too many people on here want to control everything while simultaneously resenting the fact they’re responsible for it all. Recipe for unhappiness.

Okay. Well I wasn't talking about food preferences, so.

And honestly, if you can't trust your husband to cut up grapes or feed your child appropriate, safe foods, then you have much bigger problems than the "mental load".

You know, this kind of comment is really typical of these mental load threads and it's saddening to see it rolled out again and again as some kind of gotcha. We're talking about a societal problem here. In my case, my husband does a lot for the family and works very long hours, so the mental load of day to day life falls mostly on me. It's not that he's not bothering, it's that he's off doing other things. When it came to weaning our kids, I was on maternity leave and I had time to do all the research and cooking. I was also the one doing the feeding so I could keep a mental tally of things tried, keeping the diet balanced etc. Then when my DH had some annual leave for example, he had no clue. Why would he? But then that means feeding has already been established as my job, and it's hard to get out of that unless you really make an effort to. There is always nuance, and this kind of "omg leave him" comment is really not useful. While I might not have the same issues, I can quite easily see how this kind of imbalance might be increased a hundredfold if it applied to every little thing in a couple's daily life, and therefore result in the woman being frustrated that she's taking on the mental load for the whole family. Rather than getting bogged down in nitpicky arguments about specific tasks and whether they're necessary or not, I think it's more useful to acknowledge that this pattern does exist, think of it a sociological issue, and discuss how it might be changed.

It’s not (or shouldn’t be) the majority of time women raising the DC’s - it’s both parents.

Do parents not talk to each other about what is happening in the coming week? Check with each other who is working late and can’t do the after school activities on Tuesday this week or which DC’s have a party invite which clashes with the other DC’s being at sports practice?