Kids Chores and the Mental Load

The Mental Load

How do kids' chores impact the mental load for women?

In this full-length episode, we discuss various ways that getting kids to pitch in and do chores around the house, when managed differently between partners, can create more mental load for mothers. That's right, we’re talking about kids, chores and cooperative cleaning. AKA: getting your children to work together to clean or tidy up.

There’s a lot of reasons chores are good for kids:

• Learning time management skills
• Developing organizational skills
• Accepting responsibility in the family
• Providing an opportunity for success (especially for a child struggling in other ways)
• Learning to balance work and play from a young age
• Setting a good foundation for functioning independently

Doing chores helps children learn about what they need to do to care for themselves, a home and a family.

Ways getting kids to chores becomes part of the mental load:

• Emotional labor of avoiding meltdowns
• Managing kids’ desire for things to be “fair”
• Tension between older and younger children
• Tension between kids and parents
• Teaching independence
• Teaching initiative

Ways to help change this:

• Connect and then ask
• Say: “This is fun game! I love how everyone’s involved and I know you don’t want to stop… next up it’s dinner. And I need your help to get ready…. Who wants to put the knives and forks on the table and who wants to help me get the plates out?”
• Comment on what you see
• Kids don’t see messes the same way we see them and being able to take initiative is part of hte mental load, so helping them learn how to see by saying “i see puzzle pieces that need to get put back in their box and trash that needs to go into the trashcan” helps them learn. It also helps them to start to anticipate the needs around them.
• Help them
• Avoid the emotional labor of a meltdown by making them feel like you’re on their team
• Create visual clues
• Help them understand and work independently to create a standard of clean everyone’s happy with
• Divide chores equally among genders