What is the "mental load"

[Noideamatey]

As a single parent for many years, I just don't understand the hoo ha around the "mental load" that's just remembering stuff and being a functioning adult right?

Ahhh, I see where you are coming from now. I would say most people would feel as you do with regards to meeting someone new and their family. The issue is when you have two parents, both work, both have the same children, live in the same house - but only one parent organises bills, shopping, food, appointments, Christmas presents, etc.

You’re saying exactly the same thing really, why should one person have to do this for another adult when they’re capable of doing it themselves. We can all ‘adult’, so it’s a bit shit that it falls on one individual - like you say, you wouldn’t do it! I don’t do it, my husband and I spread the load so it’s not an issue. But, I can totally see why it is an issue for other families.

Grrrr just sorted out school uniforms and school bags for tomorrow. Half tempted to leave it all and see what happens in the morning when everyone is rushing around getting up and ready to leave. Just that unsaid expectation that mum will do it.

Yep. It’s so easy to just be the driver!

How much stress and responsibility does your job entail? And how was life when your two children were primary age? I have 2 children, primary and secondary. The expectations on parents to keep up with all these shitty apps, ensure the homework has been uploaded and all that has changed massively in 5 years. I think if you were experiencing the responsibilities of parents of primary aged children now you would see a difference. The major change happened after Covid where everything seems to have gone online. I miss the days of paper communication, I can’t keep up with all of these log ins

• edited to add the words between asterisks

This!!

Mine was a keeper, so much extra kit to buy and wash! Ex also thought it was his thing but it was me getting kit ready, washing water bottles, packing bags, buying kit, cleaning boots, chivvying kid to get ready, shovelling the mud out the bath (no garden, rinsing kit in the bath). Making sure it was all done on time.

I also did a reasonable amount of the training sessions too and occasional matches.

I’m teaching my kids about mental load.
eg if my teenage son says “I need [such and such book] for school”, I’ll tell him to not just pass it from his head to mine, but to write it down somewhere so I’ll do it at a convenient time, or to ask me when he can see I’m on the laptop.

In my experience, mental load becomes a thing when you're not just managing all your own admin and scheduling and mess, but all your kids' admin and scheduling and mess, and also a very large proportion of your partner's admin and scheduling and mess...

Plus (and this is the most enraging, most onerous part) the endless, time-consuming, energy-sapping headfuckery of all the different conversations and behavioural interventions where you try in a million different ways to impress upon your partner that it's his responsibility and not yours to, e.g. order his own contact lenses so he can see to drive, or pick up his own prescriptions so that he doesn't keep getting asthma attacks, file his tax returns so he's not in trouble with HMRC...

Noticing all the stuff he's not doing, and sitting with the stress of whether he's going to sort it out before you all have to suffer adverse consequences, and having to spend your own energy and time on deciding how to broach it with him, and then dealing with all the defensiveness and sulking. That is the worst part.

I was thinking we should all be pissed off that we don’t have the robots to help us remember things that we were promised years ago that would be in the year 2000s.
Then I remembered we do, through apps, phone reminders, all sorts. My washing machine texts me to say when it has finished. Has this improved things for us? Or was it better when we just had a paper calendar? Information is coming at all us all the time.
Modern life is overwhelming. My neighbour was locked out of her own lightbulbs due to internet issues.
I feel like I need a PA and tech support on hand now I’m in peri and my memory is shocking.

This ^^

I didn't actually realise how strong it was. I always thought I had an equitable relationship.

DH did all the dentistry, the therapy, and took the children to all of their appointments and hobbies.

I thought it was ok.

And then he got made redundant and I became the main earner.

And I realised I was still doing household management.

And I went mental.

It’s the difference between ‘we’re both working but there’s only three hours ds will be on his own. That’s grand’ vs one of us organising for him to go to a friend’s house/ him going to after school club/ someone will at least pop in for a while. It’s ‘how do I get him to the cinema that night when we’re both working as him and his friends have been looking forward to it forever’ vs ‘he’ll live’, it’s basically if you didn’t do it nobody would do it so you have to remember every little thing. Great that you do it, some of us have people whose go to is ‘that’s too much effort, leave it’ or worse ‘you’re just trying to make things difficult’ when you’re trying to figure stuff out

Ok, but imagine you're there, cracking on with all the stuff you're doing to manage your own life, and the home you share with your partner, and the car you share with your partner, and the kids who are also your partner's kids.

And while you're going about all the adult life stuff - all the mortgage refinancing, chasing up medical referrals for the DC, getting all the forms in that school are constantly asking for, getting the boiler repaired, booking the kids into the dental hygienist, getting the car MOTd - your partner is snoozing on the sofa, or out playing golf, or standing in front of the fridge absentmindedly snacking on the food you've bought for the meals you'd planned for the week and the kids' packed lunches.

In this scenario, what is it that you are doing, that your partner (whose kids these also are, whose home this also is) is not doing? That's the mental load.

It is being an adult - which feels busy but do-able when all the adults in the family unit are doing it, but feels emotionally very burdensome when you've got another perfectly able-bodied, able-minded adult benefitting from all this adulting, who is just sat there watching you do it without pitching in, or even bothering to know what any of the things are that need doing, and by when.

To put it another way, imagine if you could just come home from work and just not have to think about being an adult with responsibility for your home environment or the day to day business of raising your kids.

How much more energy would you have to put into your career, your hobbies, your social life? If you just opted out of even knowing about 90% of the boring but necessary shite of daily life?

I don't like the term, @Noideamatey, or the discussion around it.
I'm trying to organise my thoughts about why. I think it's because, I don't know if it's an indirect, less confrontational way of talking about coercive control and other abusive dynamics in marriages. i.e. Women are scared of what their husbands would do to them if they stopped doing the mental load. In which case I think the conversation should shift to be more clear and direct: name the abuse as abuse.
If there's no fear of not doing the organising, or whatever the mental load involves, and you don't want to do it, then don't.

When I put it down like that I can see I'm being very black and white. So maybe I'm missing something.

You're definitely missing something. Women don't do all of this stuff because of fear of what would happen to them if they didn't.

When one person in the relationship opts out of doing any background work then the other person either has to do it themselves or create an extra job of trying to ensure their partner picks up their share, which is massive because it involves repeating yourself no end, writing lists, setting reminders, explaining reasons and processes.

Or it doesn't get done and family life grinds to a halt.

It's what bored SAHM like to harp on about to justify them doing nothing all day

I think you're missing the fact that it's women who will be judged and found wanting if the child doesn't have a world book day costume or a water bottle or the right kit and it's the child that gets in trouble or misses out. It's not about fear of the man or coercive control I think it's just simply not on most mens' radar ..possibly due to mat leave establishing a pattern that never quite gets redone when mum returns to work. I also think k men often don't really see the big deal if kid doesnt have the costume or whatever, they just dont grasp that it matters so they dont care. If they aren't the ones shoving the shoes on child's feet as you rush put the foot they don't notice they're too small or falling apart.

And yet, most examples here are from working mothers. Funny that.

It's not a term I use but some people do have more of it than others. Eg I have just spent a hour on the phone again because the DWP have messed up my disabled adult son's benefits again.

When you’re single, yes it’s all the things you do to keep life running. However when you’re in a relationship with another adult (the other parent) and you do all this, it causes imbalance and therefore an unequal mental load. When I holiday solo with my DD, I find it incredibly easy but get frustrated travelling with my partner as they don’t share the stuff that needs doing, that’s imbalanced

It wouldn’t be your life or your kids as such if you had a partner. If you were with the kids 2nd parent, they’re both your kids and it’s both your life, therefore a joint responsibility. If you’re the only one doing the things, it falls to you as mental load to remember as the second parent and adult in the household doesn’t think to remember those things that need doing

It really isn't. Have you read any of the articulate explanations on this thread?Most of the time it's precisely because the mum works that the problem arises. Both adults working full time, but only the woman doing all the thinking, prep, tracking and diary management.

But surely it’s what women holding down a full time job complain about when their partner leaves all the boring household shit to them?

imagine coming home from work at 6pm, you both walk through the door at the same time. But he never thinks about what the kids will eat for tea so you have had to plan it all out. You need to think about what activities the kids have that evening because he has no idea. You know that the PE kits is needed for tomorrow so you wash it. You know the school dinner menu, you know the kids won’t eat tomorrow’s meal so you have to make the packed lunches, and make sure the food is in. You are expected to check the school app, you need to pay the cleaner, make sure the dog is wormed, check the passports are valid for the next holiday. He just agreed to a holiday with his mates without looking at the family calendar 1 which he never puts anything in anyway!

If you were a stay at home mum this would be much easier, but you have a full time job and out earn him! Yet he still doesnt do his share - or even think about what needs to be done.

I don’t understand why so many people struggle to understand this and are so quick to reject it as “bollocks”.

If one person is doing the lion’s share of the planning and strategy behind running a household and the other one is doing nothing it’s going to cause resentment on a large scale. Why are people so dismissive of this?

Oh and its not just “paying bills”. Its so much more than this. Its failure to anticipate the burden on our partners of out own lack of consideration.

Women who complain about the mental load aren’t normally complaining about having it harder than single parents, they are complaining about having it harder than their partners.

But it’s also very different to be the singular authority and to have to negotiate authority.

It’s not as big a deal to you because you don’t have to account for another adult. You get to decide what you will do and lay down the limits within your capacity and manage it as you please. You don’t have take account of a peer who has a say over things and you don’t need to plan for them promising to do something and not delivering. You may also be above average on executive function and so better than average at keeping everything ticking over and not dropping the ball, but you may just have limited what you do more than average.

But it’s also worth pointing out that, despite the way single mothers seem to see themselves, they aren’t doing it all. The reason children from single parents households do worse on average than children from dual parent households even when you take income into account, is because single parents don’t do as much as two on average - and that appears to be the case even when the father is shirking significant aspects of domestic life.

If you are a single parent, you have your own stuff to sort out and that of your kids. If you are in a partnership, quite often it seems that one person has to deal with everyone's stuff. In the same way an extra adult increases the laundry load, they also increase the mental load. There is another job/career to talk about and potentially stress about, there is another family of birthdays, etc. to remember and deal with, there is another adult's schedule to remember and work around. It is all good if that other adult deals with all there stuff and takes on their share of the kids' stuff too, but, yeah, too often they don't. That can leave the mum with her stuff, the kids stuff, and the partner's stuff, which is too much stuff for the person to deal with. Of course, it also depends what is in the stuff. As above, if you have kids with particular needs, or a partner who does, in-laws who are ill, lots of extended family to remember, you or your partner having a stressful job, then it can all increase the load. Plus, just an extra adult in the house usually means a lot more food shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc as anyone whose kids have gone from a kid to a teen will know.