The Invisible Work of Motherhood: Recognizing the Mental Load This Labor Day

Last Friday morning, I spotted it, the empty "About Me" bag sitting untouched in our homework bin, due that very day for my second-grader's first big presentation. After watching a presentation go wrong last year lead to my child trying to get kicked out of school on the final day of first grade, I knew they would be crushed if they couldn't share. My heart sank. In that moment, I wasn't just seeing a forgotten assignment. I was seeing the invisible thread that connects my child's emotional wellbeing to my ability to stretch and grow in my career, and the weight of being the one who notices, remembers, and carries the mental picture of our family's needs.

Sitting in couples therapy later, I found myself explaining this pattern to my husband and therapist: "Every time I try to grow my business, we hit these points where the mental load becomes too much and I spin out." The forgotten homework bag wasn't just about organization, it was a symbol of something much bigger.

The Real Cost of "Just Remembering"

When we think about Labor Day, we celebrate workers, but there's an entire category of labor that remains invisible, uncounted, and unpaid. It's the work of building routines that increase independence while knowing exactly when to step in, ensuring you have childcare lined up for every single school break months in advance, tracking the textures your child will and won't eat, or noticing the subtle signs they're getting dysregulated before the meltdown hits. Your partner might jump in to help once you point it out, but you're the one holding the mental map of what needs to happen when and constantly scanning for what's coming next.

This is what Eve Rodsky calls the "mental load" in her Fair Play method, the cognitive and emotional labor that keeps families running smoothly. This work has substantial economic value, though it remains largely invisible in how we measure and value labor, just like the helping professions dominated by women. Childcare workers, teachers, mental health clinicians, and mothers all do society's essential care work, yet because they're not 'money touching' roles, they're consistently undervalued. The irony is that without this work, our entire economic system would collapse. Parents spend an average of 259 hours annually just on scheduling-related tasks alone, managing an average of 17.5 weekly communications about their children's activities. Add in the 100+ hours spent on holiday and break planning, and we're talking about significant chunks of time that could otherwise be directed toward career growth, personal projects, or simply rest.

Recent estimates suggest this invisible work represents $3.8 trillion in economic value, work that's disproportionately carried by women, even in households where both partners claim to want equality. Paradoxically, it can be even more challenging when your partner does more than traditional gender roles would dictate. There's an underlying message that we should be grateful, they're already doing 'so much.' Yet they often gravitate toward the visible tasks that get recognized, leaving us with the invisible, unappreciated, mental work and the additional burden of having to explain why that work matters.

The Career Consequences Are Real

Here's what I've learned in my own life: this mental load doesn't exist in a vacuum. It directly impacts our ability to show up fully in our careers. When I'm the one tracking developmental milestones, remembering that deodorant conversations are coming up, noticing when a child is getting dysregulated, and creating systems to manage the chaos, that mental bandwidth isn't available for strategic thinking about my business.

The research backs this up. Women face a well-documented "motherhood penalty" in wages and career advancement, while fathers often experience a "fatherhood premium." This isn't because mothers are less capable, it's because we're managing two full-time jobs, and only one of them gets recognized or compensated.

It's Not About Blame - It's About Systems

I want to be clear: my husband is doing more domestic labor than most dads did when we were growing up. He cooks, grocery shops, handles bills, does school pickup and drop-off. He's made genuine progress, and I see his effort. But here's the thing, he's excellent at following checklists, while I'm still the one creating them, noticing what needs to be done, and orchestrating the bigger picture.

This isn't a personal failing on anyone's part, but rather the result of different socialization. Men typically weren't trained to attune to others' needs or notice what needs doing, while women were conditioned to be hypervigilant about care work. Layer on cultural myths about women's multitasking abilities and the devaluation of women's time, and you create a system where women end up issuing tasks and being perceived as nags. My kids' recent observation that I'm like 'dad's boss' was a sobering reminder of how these dynamics play out in our children's eyes.

The invisibility of this privilege, not having to notice what needs doing, means that real change requires men to make a deliberate commitment to seeing and shifting these patterns. As research shows, many husbands describe themselves as supportive of their wives' careers and genuinely believe they are, until those careers start to interfere with their own. A Harvard Business School survey revealed the disconnect: more than half the men expected their careers to take precedence, while most women expected truly egalitarian marriages. 

The Hidden Health Cost

The more imbalanced the cognitive labor, the higher the correlation with burnout. When women try to address this imbalance, we often get labeled as "nagging" or "controlling." We internalize the message that we should just "find the time" and give away our time for free. The toll on our mental and physical health is staggering: persistent anxiety from the constant mental scanning, overwhelming guilt when systems fail, rage that has nowhere to go, and the exhausting sense that we're falling short everywhere. It's no surprise that the Surgeon General recently issued an advisory acknowledging that modern parenting, with its disproportionate burden on mothers, is a public health crisis.

Making Space for Ourselves

I was living this cycle; the constant anxiety, the guilt when systems failed, the irritability or even rage that would bubble up and I would have to shove back down when it all became too much, and the growing resentment toward my partner who didn't seem to see what I was managing. Something had to shift.

This shift requires real change, not just good intentions. For me, it meant taking my first weekend away to hear myself think, accepting that bedtime would probably be late, snacks would be forgotten, hunger meltdowns would likely happen, and the kids might not touch a vegetable for three days. But if I wasn't there, my husband would have to figure it out and take full responsibility for the outcomes. Most importantly, the mess wouldn't default back to me as the comfort parent.

Here's what I've learned: my husband's relationship with our children has actually grown stronger since I started demanding and taking these trips away. When I'm not there to buffer or step in, he has to develop his own ways of connecting with them, soothing their upsets, and managing their needs. There's still work to be done, but he 'gets it' more now, not because I explained it better, but because he's lived it.

This Labor Day, I'm thinking about what it would mean to truly value all forms of labor, including the invisible work that keeps families functioning. For me, it means recognizing that my ability to grow my business isn't separate from how we handle the mental load at home, they're intimately connected.

Maybe it means having honest conversations about who notices what in your household. Maybe it means advocating for policies like paid family leave and affordable childcare. But sometimes, it means something more radical: learning that letting balls drop can be an act of resistance.

When I step away for a weekend and accept that things won't run perfectly, I'm not failing my family, I'm refusing to be the only one responsible for holding it all together. When we stop swooping in to manage every outcome, we create space for our partners to develop their own relationships with the chaos and beauty of family life. And crucially, we're modeling for our children what healthy boundaries look like and what shared responsibility for caregiving looks like, even when it's hard.

The work of caring for families is labor. The work of managing households is labor. The work of holding our children's emotional wellbeing in our minds is labor. This Labor Day, let's start counting it, and let's start sharing it, even if that means some vegetables go uneaten and bedtimes run late.

Written By: Dr. Jen Schroeder, Licensed Clinical Psychologist

If you're in the Chicago area and this struck a chord, I'm hosting a free event for moms who are ready to explore what it looks like to reclaim space for themselves. Come connect with other women who understand this struggle and are ready to make changes. You Deserve a Breather: A Free 90 Minute Mini Retreat For Exhausted Moms