Household tasks contribute women’s Parents often overestimate their contributions, but dads do this more than moms.
It is not news that mothers often shoulder the burden for most household tasks. From scrubbing the dishes, running errands, housecleaning, feeding the baby, to washing of used clothes, the list of household task could be endless.
But there’s an invisible dimension of household labour 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 ensure the house is clean and select which vegetables to chop.
Worrying about whether the daughter is on track at school, the son needs new shoes and when to replace the washing machine. On their own, these may all seem like small tasks – but they mount up.
Numerous studies show that mothers in many homes still do the bulk of housework and childcare. Even in couples who think that they have achieved an equal division of labour, the more hidden forms of care generally end up falling to the woman.
In fact, an increasing body of research indicates that, for household responsibilities, women perform far more cognitive and emotional labour than men.
Cognitive labour – which is thinking about all the practical elements of household responsibilities, including organising playdates, shopping and planning activities. Then there’s emotional labour, which is maintaining the family’s emotions; calming things down if the kids are acting up or worrying about how they are managing at school.
Research shows much of a household’s emotional labour, such as calming distressed children, is part of the load that generally falls on mothers.
Unfortunately, this hidden work that is hard to measure, because it’s invisible and performed internally, making it difficult to know where it starts and ends. It also takes toll on mothers’ mental health.
Dr Jibril Abdulmalik, a consultant psychiatrist and the Chief Executive Officer of Asido Foundation, in a reaction said many women when asked even in Africa will attest to household tasks taking tolls on their mental health.
According to him, “a woman who has three children below the age of five years, all rounding around will need to monitor them, even then she is still busy cooking and doing other house chores. If she doesn’t have support in the household, she’s going to be at risk of emotional exhaustion, burnout, depression and so on and so forth.”
He stated that spouses and the family need to support women with household activities to ensure they don’t get overwhelmed, especially the young mothers who may also have a career. They go to work, they come back, then they have to start scurrying around what to do, what to cook, what family will eat and all of that.
Dr Abdulmalik added, “In the olden days when our parents did most of that, they had extended family members living with them who were also additional sources of additional hands to divide the work and sort it out. But now we don’t have that.
“So, we need to prioritize and organize and provide support so that we don’t walk them into the ground and put them at risk of emotional exhaustion or breaking down or having depression and so on.”
The study published in the Archives of Women’s Mental Health, said mothers who take on a more disproportionate share of cognitive household labour reported higher levels of depression, stress, relationship dissatisfaction and burnout.
The researchers, in the study, had asked 322 mothers of young children about who in their family is responsible for 30 common household tasks. These tasks were divided into two dimensions: cognitive (anticipating, planning, delegating and thinking about household tasks) and physical (the hands-on execution of household tasks). They assessed afterwards how these tasks are shared between partners.
We found that mothers not only performed more physical housework but also carried a significantly greater share of cognitive labor compared with their partners; a striking gender disparity.
On average, mothers reported being responsible for about 73 percent of all cognitive household labor compared with their partners’ 27 percent and 64 percent of all physical household labor compared with their partners’ 36 percent.
Indeed, for every single task examined, the gender difference was larger for the cognitive dimension than the physical execution dimension. Although fathers also carried out more home maintenance tasks, but mothers did more of the related planning.
Interestingly, while an unequal division of physical tasks was linked to worse couple relationship quality, it was the cognitive labour that had a more profound impact on women’s psychological well-being.
Additional studies indicate that women experience more negative effects from child care and housework compared with men, such as higher depression rates, partly due to the heavier cognitive load they carry.
However, what is still unknown is the long-term effects of the division of cognitive labor on women’s mental health and cognitive functioning.
The unfair division of housework is a frequent source of stress in relationships and often cited by women as a reason for divorce. The cognitive load may be an underappreciated aspect of the domestic workload that warrants more attention from therapists, mental health.
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