Hi Friends,
If you ask most couples how they divide the work of running a household, they'll usually focus on the visible, physical labor: cooking dinner, folding laundry, and taking out the trash 🤣.
But what about who carries the mental load? Not the physical execution of chores, but the invisible infrastructure that surrounds the family (tracking birthday invitations, maintaining the relationships with teachers, holding the emotional center of the family). When we look at that data, the answer often completely changes.
According to a 2024 study from USC, mothers carry roughly 73% of the cognitive workload in family life, a metric that remains stubbornly sticky even when mothers work full-time and/or earn more than their partners. While physical labor can often be outsourced or shared, cognitive labor tends to be much harder to transfer, which led us into a deep conversation about the modern frameworks used to fix this imbalance.
While we found ourselves questioning whether some of the mainstream advice is the right "North Star" for every family, there were two concepts from Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play work on this topic that resonated with us:
Conception, Planning, Execution... and Monitoring (CPE+M). Most household tasks move through three distinct phases: Conception (realizing a need exists), Planning (deciding how it will get done), and Execution (the visible work). The idea posited by Fair Play is that whoever holds a household task should be responsible for it from start to finish.
Note: We would add a fourth phase this cycle, Monitoring. Who is responsible for what happens next?The Minimum Standard of Care: the necessity of explicitly agreeing on what "good" looks like for any given task (How clean is clean enough? What actually counts as a thoughtful birthday gift?) in order to align expectations and avoid micromanaging.
Armed with this solid advice, we set out to map these concepts against our own family stack, and… our brains broke a little bit!
We quickly realized that handing over total ownership of a category isn't just a logistical challenge; it's an emotional one. For instance, Greg recently tried to take the kids out to buy balloons ahead of Danielle’s birthday so that they could be involved in the planning and she could have a quiet break. But we realized there was a catch: Danielle didn't actually want a break. She just wanted everyone to be together.
It sparked a realization for us: as much as the mental load can feel heavy, it is also deeply tied to connection. Danielle actually likes being the orchestrator, and splitting that role can sometimes just muddy the waters.
We got completely stuck on the baseline assumption of modern advice: that the ultimate goal of family life should be a balanced redistribution of cognitive labor. When we looked honestly at our own relationship, we realized the situation is far more complicated than a simple ledger of tasks, particularly because the roles we find hardest to delegate are often the very ones that give us our greatest sense of meaning and purpose.
We're not entirely sure where this leaves us, but we do know that fairness and equality are rarely the same thing (<-- advice we give to our kids daily!), and we’re going to keep checking in, staying on the same team, and talking honestly about what we actually want to own as we figure it out together.
We’d love to hear how this lands at home.
Close to the code,
Danielle & Greg
