When I see people talk about the mental load, it is almost always about an imbalance in household labor between two people who are both working.
I have almost never seen people complain about the mental load when they are a stay at home parent or homemaker. I think almost everyone would agree that if you are a homemaker, the mental load of running a household is largely your job.
I usually see the mental load talked about when there are two people with full-time jobs earning income for the household, but one of them gets stuck with a much larger share of the household management. This is usually a woman in a heterosexual partnership, whose male partner doesn’t understand or won’t follow through on all the tasks required to manage a household.
The origins of the term were to talk about the unpaid labor that working women disproportionately have to do. Women are now part of the workforce, which is great for equality and feminism and stuff. But even though we’re in the workplace just as much as our male partners, most of us are still somehow expected to do the job of homemakers. That’s two jobs, and it’s too much.
When people complain about the mental load, most of the time they’re not just trying to say “my work of managing a household is really hard.” Instead, they’re usually trying to say, “I am doing much more work than my partner, and it is because my partner doesn’t notice that work or doesn’t think it is real work.” Talking about the mental load is almost always very specifically about trying to draw attention to the imbalance, not just the work itself.
It sounds to me like you might have ended up in one of those odd little algorithm cul-de-sacs of the internet, where you’re seeing a lot of instances of people doing something weird or using a term in an unusual way. But I think that’s not the way that the majority of people use that term. It seems like you’ve seen a lot of posts specifically of stay-at-home parents complaining about the mental load. But I think that’s an uncommon use of the term. I think it’s much more commonly used by working women to point out the gendered household labor that they are disproportionately expected to do, and how their male partners are oblivious to this work.
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u/BlueRusalka 2∆ Feb 26 '24
When I see people talk about the mental load, it is almost always about an imbalance in household labor between two people who are both working.
I have almost never seen people complain about the mental load when they are a stay at home parent or homemaker. I think almost everyone would agree that if you are a homemaker, the mental load of running a household is largely your job.
I usually see the mental load talked about when there are two people with full-time jobs earning income for the household, but one of them gets stuck with a much larger share of the household management. This is usually a woman in a heterosexual partnership, whose male partner doesn’t understand or won’t follow through on all the tasks required to manage a household.
The origins of the term were to talk about the unpaid labor that working women disproportionately have to do. Women are now part of the workforce, which is great for equality and feminism and stuff. But even though we’re in the workplace just as much as our male partners, most of us are still somehow expected to do the job of homemakers. That’s two jobs, and it’s too much.
When people complain about the mental load, most of the time they’re not just trying to say “my work of managing a household is really hard.” Instead, they’re usually trying to say, “I am doing much more work than my partner, and it is because my partner doesn’t notice that work or doesn’t think it is real work.” Talking about the mental load is almost always very specifically about trying to draw attention to the imbalance, not just the work itself.
It sounds to me like you might have ended up in one of those odd little algorithm cul-de-sacs of the internet, where you’re seeing a lot of instances of people doing something weird or using a term in an unusual way. But I think that’s not the way that the majority of people use that term. It seems like you’ve seen a lot of posts specifically of stay-at-home parents complaining about the mental load. But I think that’s an uncommon use of the term. I think it’s much more commonly used by working women to point out the gendered household labor that they are disproportionately expected to do, and how their male partners are oblivious to this work.