Last year, our twins started kindergarten, and I started what I very much hope will not be a long-term project of trying to get their schools to talk to my husband.
Both of us are involved in their education, of course, but we want him to be the primary contact when the school needs to tell us that they’ve misbehaved or need to come home sick or have some event outside normal hours. This school did not quite take to that idea. No matter how often my husband took the lead on replying to teacher emails, speaking with administrators, and going to meetings, many messages (and there were so many messages) came exclusively to me. When the teacher started a group text for parents from our class, I was the one on the list even though she had my husband’s number too. In fact, every single parent she included was a mom.
This story would not surprise Allison Daminger, a University of Wisconsin–Madison sociologist and the author of What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life. For it is usually “her” mind, especially where children and primary education are concerned. As Daminger finds, even couples like us who want to do things differently tend to drift—or to be pushed—into long-standing patterns of female household management.
What’s on Her Mind is a succinct and enjoyable book. Daminger writes well and thoughtfully explains her research—which is built around interviews with “172 parents representing 94 distinct couples”—including in an appendix narrating her study’s development and noting potential shortcomings. Evangelical readers won’t share her views on gender and sexual ethics, but her book is of real use for Christian academics, church and school administrators, and families.
Studies of how couples allot housework and other family responsibilities are nothing new. You may have seen reports that husbands in America, though still typically the junior partners in these endeavors, do markedly more childcare and chores today than they did in decades past.
But Daminger’s interest is not the visible, physical work of washing dishes or mowing the lawn or getting the kids in bed. It’s the “mental processes aimed at figuring out what the family requires, what it owes to others, and how best to ensure that both requirements and obligations are fulfilled.” This is “cognitive household labor,” in her terminology, and it includes “anticipating household members’ needs, identifying options for meeting them, deciding how to proceed, and following up after the fact.”
That kind of work never stops, and particularly when one spouse is disproportionately responsible for shouldering the load, it “operates as a near-constant ‘background job.’” If you’ve managed a household, you know what it’s like:
While any one instance of cognitive labor might seem a minor annoyance, the cumulative effects of many “small” or split-second acts can be substantial. … “Successful” anticipation and monitoring means near-constant vigilance. A trip to the kitchen provokes a mental note to buy more eggs. The changing of the seasons inspires an email to the summer camp. Efforts to sleep are interrupted by the sudden realization that the realtor never confirmed tomorrow’s appointment.
About four in five of the heterosexual couples Daminger studied were “woman-led,” meaning the bulk of the cognitive workload fell to the wife. Predictably, this was common in relationships where the man earned more or the woman did not work outside the home.
Yet similar patterns prevailed for couples where she made more or he was unemployed. As Daminger notes, “Most women in [the] more powerful economic position—63 percent, to be specific—also completed most cognitive labor for their household.” And taking on more decision-making and planning work doesn’t necessarily mean you get a break from the actual chores, Daminger reports: For most woman-led couples, “the female partner also completes the bulk of the physical work for her family.”
It is often true, as the old couplet puts it, that “Man works till set of sun, / Woman’s work is never done.”
Neither is this research done. Daminger looks forward to additional studies with larger sample sizes—numbers that might illuminate “how cognitive labor patterns and narratives vary across” demographic differences, including “races, ethnicities, and immigrant statuses.” But oddly, she doesn’t seem interested in faith as a factor, which strikes me as a significant oversight. Religions, Christianity included, have much to say about marriage, parenting, and work.
Christian academics could explore this sociologically and theologically. How do (or don’t) Christian ideas around family life and sex difference shape our cognitive labor? Are there meaningful distinctions between Protestants and Catholics or complementarians and egalitarians? (I would hazard an educated guess that in complementarian marriages, husbands tend to exercise less meaningful authority in household management than they imagine—and that in egalitarian marriages, husbands tend to contribute less equally than they suppose.)
Christian scholars might also range further than Daminger is willing to go in their search for explanations of workload patterns. What’s on Her Mind rejects “gender essentialism,” with Daminger arguing that gender is not “a personal quality—something we are” but “more akin to an activity. In this view, ‘woman’ is not an inherent feature of who I am but rather a role I continually enact.”
Daminger is obviously correct that our culture’s norms, expectations, institutions, and other structures hugely influence how we divvy up cognitive work at home. But she hampers her research by treating these factors as near-complete explanations. Clearly, there are cases where bodily sex matters to household management, even at this mental level.
When I was postpartum, for example, it was easiest for me to determine what products would be helpful to my recovery. And in any season, it makes perfect sense for my husband to remember the trash and recycling pickup schedules, because it’s physically taxing to get a full, heavy bin with a broken handle down the hill to the curb. These choices aren’t about “traditionalism” or “doing gender” as a cultural performance. They stem from physical realities.
Outside the academy, however, many Christian institutions and individuals would do well to hear Daminger’s message about choice and change in cognitive labor. Though interviewees tended to describe husbands as naturally a bit helpless—scatterbrained, disorganized, bad at calendars, and befuddled by grocery lists—the reality is that “cognitive labor prowess is as much a function of learned skill as innate capacity.” We can all learn to be competent spouses and parents.
Local institutions can help. Churches should make it easier for couples to get involved by minimizing the cognitive load they share. For example, my husband and I co-lead our small group, and there’s a mandatory training for group leaders coming up. Because the church provides childcare, we can both attend, relieving me from the burden of working through the babysitting list to see who can make it on a Saturday morning.
Church and school administrators alike should remember that fathers are just as responsible for their children as mothers are. Do not default to mom! Contact both parents unless directed otherwise, and if a family tells you the husband is the primary contact, respect that.
Moreover, schools should contact parents less. Share our mental load instead of multiplying it. Sure, we need to know if a kid gets a detention or suspension. But we don’t need an email about every lost homework assignment or time-out. Christian schools, in particular, can be nimble and trusted enough to find a reasonable middle ground.
That kind of institutional change would be helpful, albeit not quite sufficient. To be clear, it’s not my goal (or Daminger’s, for that matter) for every couple to divide the mental load equally. Striving for a bean-counting, 50-50 split reflects an ignorant, juvenile idea of marriage. The goal, rather, is honesty and love—love that “does not dishonor others,” “is not self-seeking,” and shows patience and perseverance (1 Cor. 13:4–7) with and for one’s spouse.
Throughout What’s on Her Mind, Daminger shares quotes and stories from the families she interviewed. Some are quite funny—if grim cringe comedy is your thing. For instance, one grown man shamelessly recounted going on a bathroom-cleaning strike because his wife failed to buy his preferred cleaning supply.
In another couple, the wife described her husband as “temperamentally ill-equipped for the frenetic multitasking and constant forecasting she relied on to juggle home, paid work, and childcare.” The husband agreed, saying his wife is “much more attentive to all the things that need to be done. … I can mostly go a very long time before it hits me that now is the time to deal with it.”
Sure, maybe—except that the husband is a surgeon. This is a job that requires grading high on measures of forecasting, decision-making, and attentiveness.
Now, perhaps the arrangement of their lives is such that this wife should do most of the cognitive labor at home. She’s also employed, but surgeons have demanding work. Yet this husband isn’t failing to notice family needs because he’s incapable. Either he does not want to notice, or he simply does not care.
And a third man, perhaps unwittingly, told that truth. His wife takes the lead in household management though she’s employed and he’s between jobs. This, he announced, is “just how we are.” She’s organized, you see, and he’s just a laid-back dude! But in his personal hobbies and interests, this man described himself as “much more of a planner” than his wife, keeping extensive lists and schedules. “When it comes to the things that I don’t care about, we’ll deal with them when they come,” he told Daminger, consigning most of the work of family life to that category.
Now, again, the goal is not a perfect 50-50. Different career choices, skill sets, and personalities all matter. But in these families, the unequal distribution of cognitive work is not about temperament. It’s about sin. A spouse who’s a powerhouse of decision-making and organization at work but somehow becomes calendar blind at home is not a bumbler but a liar.
Yes, it’s tough to come from a full day on the job and do more work. It’s also tough to be working at home all day—parenting and teaching, cooking and cleaning—and then spend the evening working even more. We all have it tough because life in a fallen world is tough and there is a lot of work to do. We owe each other love and service, not learned helplessness or pretended incompetence. We owe each other the truth.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
