U.S. Women and the Mental Load: Carrying the Weight of Caregiving

My friend texts me, worried that her husband—a federal worker—might lose his job. Even if he keeps it, he’ll have to begin commuting to an office he’s never set foot in, throwing their child care into disarray. 

I commiserate. My wife and I still haven’t found a solid, affordable child care option; our son is two. On top of that, we’re juggling the paperwork and worry of a second-parent adoption to ensure she has full parental rights to our child, a task that gained new urgency after Donald Trump’s re-election. 

Then, my phone dings again. “I made delicious chicken pot pie…and then realized I forgot the chicken 💀,” my cousin Sarah texts. “That sums up my brain, post-work, while mommin’,” she adds.

While some threats to women’s rights and opportunities are obvious—like the rapid erosion of reproductive rights, politically motivated firings at civil rights agencies, or the removal of images of women and people of color from a military database—there are quieter, but equally insidious, obstacles to women fully participating in public life. And they all stem from one shared burden: the invisible weight of caregiving, which continues to fall disproportionately on women.

“We are in an unprecedented time that we have so many collective stressors going on,” Daniel Relihan, a researcher at the Silver Stress and Coping Lab at University of California, Irvine, told Axios in February. Research suggests that women feel the collective stress even more acutely. That is likely to do with the outsized role women take in planning, coordinating, and caring for their families, which researchers have dubbed “cognitive” or “mental labor.” 

A 2023 review of relevant academic literature concluded that “women perform the larger proportion of mental labor, especially when it comes to child care and parenting decisions.” A recent study by researchers at the University of Southern California and Fair Play author Eve Rodsky found that more so than physical labor like cooking and cleaning, “the division of cognitive labor was particularly gendered.” They also found that this increased share of cognitive labor performed by women was associated with depression, anxiety, and an overall decline in mental health. Mothers consistently report higher rates of stress than fathers and are more likely to say being a parent is “stressful and tiring all or most of the time,” according to Pew Research Center.

The problem of growing stress for parents and caregivers predates the second Trump administration. In August of 2024, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory on the pressures of parenthood, noting that “between 2016 and 2019, those reporting coping ‘very well’ with the demands of raising children decreased from 67.2 percent to 62.2 percent.” The pandemic then scrambled parents’ child care arrangements and blurred the lines between work and home. 

“There are also costs to our well-being. When cognitive and emotional labor collide … they become more of a burden you carry than a task you can complete.”

In recent years, the terms “cognitive labor” and “emotional labor”—the management of someone’s emotions (think: talking your toddler through a meltdown)—have become increasingly popular in mainstream and academic conversations. Many people, especially women, find the terms useful to recognize these internal processes as work, demanding effort to accomplish a purpose: arranging good child care, getting your kid to eat dinner, or thinking through contingency plans in case your partner loses their job. That labor requires time, energy, and attention—leaving people with less of those three resources to put toward paid work, political organizing, or leisure. 

There are also costs to our well-being. When cognitive and emotional labor collide, say, when your everyday caregiving routines are suddenly saturated with uncertainty, they become more of a burden you carry than a task you can complete. University of Melbourne sociologist Leah Ruppanner calls this combination of emotional and cognitive work “the mental load,” an invisible burden that never really ends because it is tied to caring for ourselves and our loved ones. When a person carries this load for a long period of time, they may become forgetful or irritable and find it even more challenging to get through their to-do lists. 

Recently, I co-hosted a series of podcast episodes with Ruppanner for her show MissPerceived, where we dived deeper into the mental load and explored potential solutions to lighten its weight. Together with our guests, we examine innovative tools such as new apps and AI tools, as well as Better Life Lab Experiments, an initiative I lead at New America. The goal is to distill lessons about how families can more equitably share the demands of daily life and household management.

At the core of our conversation were essential policy changes—such as universal access to quality, affordable child, disability, and elder care, and paid family and medical leave. In these areas, the U.S. lags far behind peer countries and will continue to do so if the current administration keeps its promises to slash federal budgets.

Though cognitive labor and emotional labor are undeniably real and invaluable, governments and economists have yet to recognize or account for their contribution to the economy within the nation’s gross domestic product. Nor are they addressing whether the distribution of this labor is sustainable, fair, or healthy. As caregiving women experience a collective uptick in stress, this becomes a societal issue, not just an individual one.  

Sociologist Jess Calarco aptly says that while “other countries have social safety nets, the U.S. has women.” As wages stagnate and decline, women are expected to work longer hours. When child care falls through, it’s women who step in, often at the expense of their own careers. In the absence of a publicly funded child care system, women—primarily women of color—provide care for astonishingly low wages. 

But we can’t rely on women to bear this responsibility indefinitely. When their capacity is stretched beyond its limits, our whole economy and society pay the price. It’s time to reconsider who carries the load and how we, as a nation, can reduce its weight and carry it more equitably.

To learn more about the mental load and the burdens of emotional labor, listen to writer Haley Swenson on the MissPerceived podcast.

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