Welcome!

This is the very first edition of Take Care, a newsletter presented in collaboration with LOLA that covers caregiving in all its forms. Every Thursday morning, we’ll bring you: 

• Original analysis and insights on caregiving-related topics, from the hidden burden of mental load to concrete tips for taking care of elderly relatives from afar

• Highly curated recommendations of product and services, tested and approved by our team

• A roundup of the best reads on the Internet

Caregiving is undercovered in the media, and we want to be sure we’re covering topics that matter to you. Drop us a line at [email protected] with thoughts, questions, or subjects you’d like to see explored in more detail.

Today’s topic: The mental load of caregiving

I was having drinks with a friend this weekend. She and her husband have been together for six years, and though she’d be the first to describe her relationship as modern and equitable, the complaint she shared with me sounded pretty traditional.

Last week, she had asked her husband if he could occasionally scrub the bathtub. “I don’t think that’s necessary,” he told her. “It never gets dirty.”

“The reason it never gets dirty,” she told me between bites of French fries and sips of gin martini, “is because I clean it every week. It’s the same reason we always have toilet paper — I remember to buy it. It’s the same reason when we go to friends’ weddings, our RSVPs get sent and gifts on the registry get purchased. It doesn’t occur to him.”

It's not just the household chores themselves but the planning of everything that goes into running a household – minor individually but major in the aggregate – that tend to fall to women by default.

What is the mental load?

Typically applied in the context of parenting, mental load refers to the invisible labor that goes into managing a household, which women often take on. It’s not about the physical act of doing the tasks, but being the one to keep a neverending to-do list in your head, delegating tasks, and making sure they actually get done.

It’s remembering birthdays, planning meals, scheduling appointments, organizing and paying bills, and more. In short: you’re the household project manager. The French comic artist Emma (literally) illustrated mental load in her viral 2017 comic, You Should’ve Asked. 

The gender breakdown

Recent scholarship shows that even in heterosexual couples where decision-making is highly collaborative, logistical needs have a habit of being the responsibility of the woman partner.

In a 2019 paper in the American Sociological Review, Dr. Allison Daminger, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that women are overwhelmingly responsible for the planning and thinking that their male partners don’t think about.

Another 2019 paper found that almost nine in 10 mothers in relationships say they feel singularly responsible for tasks like organizing their family's schedules — and the burden makes them feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and unable to care for themselves. 

The burden of the mental load doesn’t disappear in same-sex relationships — but researchers have found it does get negotiated differently. The results of a 2023 study found that same-sex couples divided cognitive labor according to each other’s strengths, preferences and shifting needs.

That’s not to suggest that abolishing the patriarchy will result in the demolition of the mental load, but that without a traditional gender framework, these non-hetero couples communicated their needs and their changing capacity to handle labor on a regular basis more than you’d expect from a heterosexual couple. 

So what do we do about the mental load?

Though mental load is a systemic problem, it's not an inevitability for all household partnerships. Here are some steps to creating more equitable dynamics.

• Show your partner the evidence. I hope your partner listens to you and values your lived experience without the need for footnotes, but if they’re of academic evidence persuasion, show him the studies linked in this newsletter. Researchers have studied and documented this phenomenon for years.

• Give concrete examples of what your mental load looks or feels like. Explain how even when participating in chores is well-intentioned, the mental load may still fall on you, and that you don’t just want to share the chores themselves — you want to share household management too. Being a woman doesn’t mean you’re the default household project manager. 

• Include management tasks when dividing up housework. Don’t just make a plan to divide up the cleaning and cooking chores — talk about who is responsible for scheduling, planning, remembering, and holding each other accountable. 

If there were a magic bullet solution for fixing the unequal burden of mental load, a tech guy in Silicon Valley would have raised $400 million for a startup called “MNTL LD” already to monetize it. In the absence of an Allbirds-clad messiah, there are a few tactical things to do to make your partner aware of the work you’re doing — and have them shoulder some of it themselves.

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Care-fully Selected Product Recs

Every product and service listed in this section is independently chosen by us, Take Care’s highly discerning editors Maya and Eliza. We have two rules for our recommendations: We only recommend things we’d use ourselves, and we don’t earn a commission from these links —  we just want you to have the best of the best. No, seriously. 

Caregiving is physically and emotionally exhausting. Why make it any more difficult than it has to be? As much as you can, consider unburdening yourself by outsourcing some of your mental load. These services and products are a solid place to start.

• Outsource your to do list to household digital concierge service Yohana. Its team can help with everything from booking your mom's neurologist appointments, to coming up with weeknight dinner ideas, to doing the grocery shopping for those dinners. 

• This Wit & Delight planner helps keep you organized every week, and lets you set up your monthly goals and reflections as well as track your mood. Wit & Delight’s designer and creator, Kate Arends, is a mom herself and has ADHD. She created Wit & Delight because she needed a planner that worked for her brain. Our editor Maya has been using her Wit & Delight planners since 2023 and claims it’s “the only planner I’ve ever not given up on by February of any given calendar year.”

Best of Web

What we’re reading this week:

• When caring for your older parents comes at a cost for you. The Wall Street Journal reports on the 29 million Americans who work while also caring for adult family members, and the struggles of trying to do both.

• Angry birders: The union representing Audubon Society workers is pushing for equal pay for women. The union, called the Bird Union (no, really), is seeking pay equity for women within the organization, The 19th reports.

• U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy is pushing for a warning label on social media platforms. Not unlike the ones on alcohol bottles or cigarette cartons, Vivek is urging Congress to consider labels on social media platforms advising parents that social media can be harmful to teens' mental health.

• The joy of volunteering as a telephone friend. An essay from a man in his 30s named Sam about his unlikely friendship with an elderly woman named Pauline, started during the height of the pandemic when Sam decided to start volunteering for an elderly nonprofit seeking to combat social isolation through weekly telephone calls.

— Maya Kosoff, Take Care Editor-in-Chief