Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - The Mental Load of Family Life： The Work You Can’t See But Always Feel

00:00:00.000 Hey y'all, Jo here and welcome to Under the Influence.

00:00:09.580 This morning before I even made my coffee, I swear to God, my brain had already planned

00:00:16.660 three playdates, panicked about scheduling flu and COVID shots, and silently cursed the 0.90

00:00:22.360 pile of crap sitting on the stairs that no one but me seems capable of moving. 0.90

00:00:26.880 That is cognitive labor. It's the endless mental ticker tape of family life, mankeeping, 0.99

00:00:36.280 caregiving, and just generally being a woman in the world. Because if you're listening to this

00:00:42.820 show, you probably already know who does most of the cognitive labor. It's women. 1.00

00:00:49.860 Our guest today, sociologist Allison Damager, has spent nearly a decade studying this invisible 1.00

00:00:56.640 work. The planning, the worrying, the following up. And she's written a new book called What's

00:01:02.540 on Her Mind? The Mental Workload of Family Life. In today's chat, we are going to talk about why

00:01:10.000 so much of the mental load defaults to women, what happens when you try to shift it, and how 0.84

00:01:16.120 we can raise the next generation. Yes, I am looking right at my son here. How we can raise

00:01:22.800 the next generation to notice, anticipate, and take responsibility for just the care of life

00:01:29.600 and the care of a home before someone else has to do it for them. We're also going to get into

00:01:37.340 the cultural piece of all this, why our society is set up and frankly has always been set up

00:01:43.240 to dump this invisible labor on mothers, and one of my favorite subjects, how influencer culture

00:01:48.400 keeps pretending that a lot of this isn't work at all.

00:01:54.580 Hello, Allison.

00:01:56.520 Hi, Jo. Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:58.820 Thanks for being here today to discuss one of my favorite subjects, 0.93

00:02:02.660 the invisible labor that all women carry all around the world. 1.00

00:02:07.880 Yes, it is a lot of labor. 1.00

00:02:11.260 And you're right, it's very heavy and carried by mostly women.

00:02:16.360 By mostly women, you know, and it's as you write so well, it's about things that honestly, I swear to God, men just do not think about. I've been losing my mind this morning over many, many things. One of which is that my kids are home from school. And all that is running through my head is who am I organizing playdates with? Oh, okay. My mom can take them. Can they get there in time? Do they have their bathing suits?

00:02:42.920 oh my God, I just got an email for their flu and COVID vaccines. Yay, vaccines. We love them.

00:02:49.380 And we have to schedule it, but I don't know if my husband has the login or knows where to look

00:02:53.760 for the login. And oh my gosh, there is a pile of stuff on the stairs and no one but me seems

00:02:59.600 to be moving it into the place that it needs to be moved. Yes. I mean, I think one of the

00:03:05.680 challenging things is a lot of that work is happening in your head. And so it's sort of

00:03:10.260 hard for anyone else to see you and appreciate all that you're doing. But if you make that list,

00:03:15.580 it's like, oh, my goodness, of course, that's exhausting. That's so hard. And I think part of

00:03:21.420 what is challenging for so many women is saying, I feel like I'm doing so much, but it's not

00:03:27.000 visible to other people in my family, let alone to myself sometimes. It's true. It's true. And I 0.98

00:03:33.060 know, I mean, I said it all like that because I'm like, this is just like the running scroll that's

00:03:37.360 my head, right? It's constantly going. My husband does so much in this house. We are actually very

00:03:45.500 close to equal labor in a lot of ways. I do want to say that. That said, it has never been clear

00:03:53.940 to me how to transfer this ongoing, what seems like a news scroll in my brain into his head,

00:04:01.520 because I don't know if it works that way. I don't know if men's brains work differently.

00:04:04.960 I want to hear everything that you've learned about this cognitive labor.

00:04:11.320 Yes. So let's see where to begin.

00:04:14.420 First, you mentioned, you know, I don't know if my husband's brain works that way.

00:04:18.940 And that is something that I have done almost 200 interviews with parents of all genders.

00:04:26.060 And that comes up a lot, especially from women talking about their husbands. 0.57

00:04:31.260 They would see things like, I think he would just have to be a different person for him to take that on.

00:04:35.460 Or I think his brain would have to be rewired for him to take that on.

00:04:39.400 So you are not alone in raising that question.

00:04:43.520 And one of the things that I found was that so many couples seem to think this is a matter of personality.

00:04:50.880 I talk to a lot of women, and I would probably put myself in this category, who identify as type A, super organized, super on top of things.

00:04:59.760 And they describe themselves as partnered with a man who was laid back,

00:05:03.640 go with the flow, kind of takes things as they come.

00:05:07.340 And these women would say to me, 0.93

00:05:08.960 I cannot imagine reallocating the work, 1.00

00:05:12.820 planning and researching and decision-making and monitoring and following up

00:05:16.420 because my husband is just so not that way.

00:05:20.240 And what I try to gently do in my book, What's on Her Mind,

00:05:23.500 is to argue that some of what we see as brain differences or personality differences are

00:05:30.320 actually more about gender, right? They're more about the ways that men and women have been

00:05:36.800 trained, socialized since birth to think about their responsibilities in households and other

00:05:43.300 groups. It's about the ways that our social networks are organized so that information

00:05:49.000 often travels from mom to mom, right? Rather than to groups of parents, you know, more broadly

00:05:55.920 speaking. It's about the way that we sort of hold moms and dads accountable for different things,

00:06:02.480 right? We hold women accountable for things like, does your child get to school with their clarinet 0.98

00:06:08.840 and their sign permission slip? And if not, moms are often the ones getting the phone calls. 1.00

00:06:14.780 So I try to say some of this may be personality, but I think gender socialization, gender norms play a bigger role than many of us give them credit for.

00:06:25.340 Yeah, I mean, I definitely, definitely think that that is true.

00:06:28.900 I mean, I see that men are absolutely, I mean, they're just socialized differently in so many ways. 0.82

00:06:37.400 Is there any evidence at all that women are better at multitasking?

00:06:42.420 I hear my friends say that all the time.

00:06:43.900 they're like, I'm just better at juggling 19 things in my head at once. I have not seen any

00:06:50.700 credible evidence to this effect. In terms of, you know, I heard someone say recently that we

00:06:56.060 should call multitasking multi-switching, right? Because very, very few people are actually able

00:07:01.860 to do two things at once. And there's just not a lot of evidence to suggest that there are big

00:07:08.340 gender differences here. Now, I do think that there are gender differences in terms of who gets

00:07:14.560 practice at these things, right? When you are juggling a lot, as many women are, you develop 1.00

00:07:21.860 systems and practices for doing your best. Even if you are sort of rapidly switching from task 1.00

00:07:27.860 to task or idea to idea, you figure out, you know, a workflow. You've got your calendar set up and

00:07:34.140 you have your sunday routine where you make the meal plan for the week etc etc so what i think

00:07:40.020 couples are are seeing and reacting to is that oh she has been doing this for 10 years so she's

00:07:47.280 super good at it right and they forget that this isn't necessarily something she was born with it's

00:07:52.940 something that she has practiced and developed skills around therefore she is in fact in this

00:07:59.600 moment better at this particular task. Right, right. So you've interviewed so many, so many

00:08:09.680 couples, so many men. What do men say when you confront them with this idea of cognitive labor?

00:08:17.660 Do they generally see it? Do they know about it? Yeah. So when I started this research,

00:08:23.940 So all the way back in 2017. And I was really passionate at that time about including men's

00:08:32.300 voices in my research study. I was doing a lot of reading on things like work-family balance

00:08:37.260 and household labor. And I felt like oftentimes we were hearing from moms and not from dads.

00:08:44.460 So I designed a study where I would talk to both partners in a couple individually. So I, you know,

00:08:51.120 talk to mom on Tuesday. And then Wednesday, I would do an interview with dad. And my job as

00:08:57.800 a researcher was not necessarily to try and say, hey, you're dividing things unequally. How do you

00:09:02.440 feel about it? But what often happened was in the course of our interviews, I would ask them to

00:09:08.500 walk me through recent happenings in their household. So some of them were mundane, things

00:09:14.220 like, how did, you know, breakfast get on the table for your kids yesterday? How did you come

00:09:22.660 to find a plan for dealing with this broken washing machine? And then as we moved forward

00:09:28.140 through the interview, I would ask them to kind of explain, or rather, I would explain to them

00:09:34.100 the difference between physical chores, the common things we think about, the action-based work of

00:09:39.400 cooking dinner, driving a kid somewhere, going to the store. And I would distinguish that from

00:09:44.960 cognitive labor, right? The stuff we've been talking about that happens in your head,

00:09:49.560 the planning, the looking ahead, the researching. And I would say, you know, tell me, how do you

00:09:55.240 think you currently divide that work in your household? And some of them would say, oh,

00:10:01.220 it's pretty 50-50. But that was really the exception. Most of the couples I interviewed

00:10:05.820 and most of the men in the couples that I spoke with would acknowledge some level of inequality

00:10:11.640 there. And they would say, hey, I really think my wife is doing more of this. And they would,

00:10:17.800 for the most part, sort of talk about how that was not their ideal. Now, there are, of course,

00:10:24.640 exceptions here, but in most of the couples that I spoke with, many of them were, you know,

00:10:29.780 college educated, folks who were, you know, sort of center or even left-leaning. They felt like

00:10:35.220 fair or equal was a good goal to be working toward. And so what they would tell me is that,

00:10:42.720 you know, it's not about gender, right? It's not because I have these ideas that, oh, my wife, 0.93

00:10:50.380 it's her job to do these things. They felt like it was their personalities. It was their work

00:10:56.560 circumstances. And so I think that that helped them kind of bridge the gap between these ideals

00:11:04.240 they told me about, which trended toward the equal, the 50-50, the fair, and the inequality

00:11:10.440 that they recognized through our conversations. That helps them sort of sit with the disconnect

00:11:16.220 between the two. Yeah, I think that's really, really helpful. It also requires, I mean,

00:11:23.100 the ironic part to me is that it feels like this requires more work on the part of women

00:11:29.660 to then retrain men yes that is that is the unfortunate part um that if you want to make a

00:11:40.220 change part uh and you i'm speaking to you know presumably um yeah yeah we've got two men that

00:11:47.760 listen great my husband my husband and brett awesome if you want to make a change right i do

00:11:55.440 think that you have to be prepared to put in some work. And what I hear from a lot of women is that 0.67

00:12:01.580 they just don't want to put in that work. That is a very respectable decision. I'm not going to 1.00

00:12:07.960 tell you that, you know, you need to re-educate your husband about this form of household work

00:12:14.760 that you need to invest in teaching him how to do it. But I do think that sometimes there's sort

00:12:23.120 of short-term pain long-term gain if couples can sort of get on the same page and say okay this is

00:12:30.420 a change that is not going to happen overnight because these dynamics have been in place for

00:12:35.760 years or decades we're getting all of these messages from society from our families from

00:12:41.720 you know media about how we should divide this work it's going to be hard right and i don't want

00:12:47.580 to sugarcoat that no for all the people it's still worth it because they say all right i can i can

00:12:52.620 deal with a couple of months of rocky transition because this is not sustainable for me for

00:12:57.900 the next, you know, X years of my life or my parenting journey or whatever the case

00:13:03.020 may be.

00:13:03.920 But you're absolutely right that it is often a lot of work in the present to try and shift

00:13:10.380 things.

00:13:11.260 Yeah.

00:13:11.680 Yeah.

00:13:12.000 All right.

00:13:12.180 Well, let's take a quick break.

00:13:13.200 And when we get back, let's talk about that work.

00:13:22.620 Okay, we are back. Tell me what some of the things you can do that maybe might not require

00:13:29.900 the most effort, but will result in long-term gains for you.

00:13:36.320 I think the first step for a lot of couples is to really take stock of where things are.

00:13:43.820 So a number of couples that I spoke with for the book,

00:13:47.480 talked about how their division of mental work kind of happened. It wasn't the result of

00:13:56.740 intentionality, right? If they had done some planning about how they divide up labor, it was

00:14:01.420 usually who's washing dishes, who is on night duty when we have a newborn, etc. They had not

00:14:09.240 done a lot of thinking about who is going to track the items that are running low in our pantry,

00:14:16.240 Who's going to remember that it's time to get milk?

00:14:18.940 Who's going to remember a few months ahead of time to book a flight to grandma's for

00:14:24.020 the holidays?

00:14:25.440 Those are things that they would tell me just kind of happened that way.

00:14:30.200 So it sounds sort of obvious, but I think step one is really to say, hey, what are we

00:14:35.480 currently doing?

00:14:36.180 If we recognize this as work, that is different from the physical chores, but equally important,

00:14:43.280 what is our current division and for many couples when they have this conversation

00:14:50.140 not in a moment of high conflict right because i think this comes up for many people but usually

00:14:56.120 when they're mad at each other and they're fighting about it so if in a moment of lower

00:15:01.240 sort of uh you know emotional valence you can talk about what you're currently doing

00:15:06.560 and then talk about how that maps onto what your ideal is right for some couples i'm i'm not going

00:15:15.320 to argue with you if you say hey it's mostly on her plate but we're fine with that right if that's

00:15:20.900 you then okay stop there right no problem but for many couples i think when they talk about the

00:15:27.140 current allocation they feel like this is not what we would do in our dream world um in my book

00:15:34.200 what's on her mind, I talk about how I gave each interviewee a question about a magic wand. I said,

00:15:41.080 if I had a magic wand, I could wave it and poof, suddenly you would have your ideal division of

00:15:46.300 cognitive labor. Would it be the same as what you were currently doing? And a lot of them told me,

00:15:51.940 no, it would be different, right? So if you were in that situation, as many of my interviewees were,

00:15:57.540 then the next step is to sort of talk about, okay, what is the gap, right? How big is the gap?

00:16:04.200 What are the areas that are causing the most pain? Right. I am doing X for our family. I really hate X. How can we reallocate? And I recommend that couples think strategically about which tasks to start with.

00:16:21.460 what I mean is that some things are going to be easier to reallocate than others

00:16:27.040 oftentimes things that are social right things that are about coordinating with extended family

00:16:35.040 or making the play dates as you talked about earlier joe or planning the child's birthday

00:16:40.080 party those are going to be tasks that are going to be really hard to start with because as I said

00:16:47.120 women are often held accountable for things with other people, right? Women are held accountable 0.99

00:16:53.840 for did the gifts get mailed on time? Did the thank you cards get sent? Women, mothers specifically, 1.00

00:17:00.820 also tend to be the ones who are interacting with their mothers, right? And so for those reasons,

00:17:07.080 I think starting with lower hanging fruit, starting with things that are a little bit more

00:17:11.740 internal, things that she doesn't have quite as much fear or anxiety around something changing

00:17:18.960 or going wrong tend to be a better starting point for many couples. I'll pause there in case you

00:17:25.800 have questions about that. I do. I do. I mean, because my issue is that I actually have no fear

00:17:32.380 of anything. I literally just want to leave and have it done. My pain point is I don't feel like

00:17:40.380 explaining things anything and that's my thing I'm like I just don't want to have to put in the time

00:17:46.040 of being like this is exactly what's running through my head and then also also this is a

00:17:51.480 big one and I'm curious if it came up in your interviews the justification that this is a big

00:17:55.340 deal that happens a lot whereas it's like he's like oh it's not that big a deal we can make this

00:18:03.100 we can make this plan 15 minutes before and I'm like actually no we can't because you know the

00:18:08.220 other kids schedules book up or hey can you take the stuff up the stairs he's like it's not a big

00:18:13.400 deal if there's just if there's some stuff around so I think that is my big issue it's the convincing

00:18:19.200 that this stuff matters yeah that is a hard one that is a really hard one and it definitely came

00:18:27.220 up in my interviews right both your first point about it's so much work to explain all the things

00:18:33.960 that I've been thinking through and how do I convince you that it matters so let's take that

00:18:37.920 meet in turn. The first one on the, you know, how do I communicate all the stuff that's been in my

00:18:44.060 head? I think that it's important to recognize that a lot of cognitive labor is built on

00:18:50.660 relationships. It's built on systems. It's built on practice, right? Pretty much, I don't know,

00:18:56.380 I don't want to say anybody, but most people, if they see someone changing a diaper, if they

00:19:01.540 watch a YouTube video or whatever their preferred learning method is, they can get it. There's not

00:19:06.780 a lot of handoff required there. But, and this is top of mind because I have a six-month-old,

00:19:12.620 if we are talking about managing a child's sleep cycle, right, that is much harder to hand off

00:19:20.320 because, okay, there's certain week windows. We have a particular routine around bedtime and

00:19:26.640 around naptime. And, oh, if you see X, that means Y. That is a lot harder to easily transition.

00:19:34.480 And so I think your options are to either say, you know what, that is too much work. Let's find other stuff that my partner can take on. So some couples choose to do sort of an offsetting thing where she does more of the mental work, but they compensate by having him do more of the physical work.

00:19:52.580 Rather than, you know, try to do these handoffs that are often complicated, they find ways to sort of make sure things are fair, even if partners are doing different amounts of each kind of labor for their household.

00:20:06.340 the other thing that people will sometimes do is just sort of trust that there will be another

00:20:15.160 side right rather than delegating sort of one-off hey can you put her down for a nap or can you

00:20:22.180 manage the sleep schedule today it's more can we make a transition such that you are now responsible

00:20:28.980 for figuring out when this child should be sleeping. And if you trust that this is going

00:20:36.340 to produce long-term gains, right, it's not just going to be for today, but it's going to be for

00:20:41.720 the next six months, you know, until your child starts school or preschool or whatever the case

00:20:46.700 may be, then I think for some people, the calculus changes. How does that land with you?

00:20:51.840 i like that my husband works in sustainability uh part of the time and so i love the idea of

00:20:59.880 offsetting this makes this makes so so much sense to me i'm so curious how long how long have you

00:21:08.600 been been researching this book and what was it like for you to have a baby amidst it i mean did

00:21:15.700 it change how you were thinking about cognitive labor? Yeah. So I started the research eight,

00:21:23.080 nine years ago now. I was single. I wasn't even sure if I wanted children. I had no pets,

00:21:30.280 no car, pretty much very few responsibilities. And fast forward to September 2025, and I've got

00:21:37.700 a husband, a dog, a car, a six-month-old, a lot has changed. And I think that becoming a mom has

00:21:48.040 not really changed my mind on cognitive labor, but it has given me a lot more

00:21:55.540 compassion and empathy for the couples that I interviewed. So for example, when my husband and

00:22:03.260 I were preparing to become parents, I was pregnant, we started noticing that pretty

00:22:09.120 much immediately family members, extended family, friends, et cetera, would start going

00:22:14.680 to me for questions about the baby, questions about the baby shower, questions about, you

00:22:19.940 know, the plans for family coming to help after she was born.

00:22:24.380 And that was a moment where I said, oh, gosh, this is how it happens, right?

00:22:29.060 This is this is where it starts.

00:22:30.440 if I don't say something now, right, I am going to be the one who is responsible for

00:22:35.340 all of the coordination with our extended family for the foreseeable future, right? So that's one

00:22:41.400 small example where it was kind of a pain, frankly, to be like, no, no, please include my husband on

00:22:49.120 these text messages. Please make sure that, you know, this is a him and I decision.

00:22:55.120 but i i sort of realized how you can be as educated as possible on these issues you can

00:23:02.800 literally have written the book on cognitive labor and still it's not just about you and

00:23:09.300 your partner and your intentions there are so many factors at play in our society that 0.99

00:23:16.040 make a gender traditional division where she does more of the the thought work and the planning for 1.00

00:23:22.400 the household, the path of least resistance. Let's take one more quick break. And when we 1.00

00:23:30.720 get back, I want to talk about what we can do as a culture to try to make this better. I mean,

00:23:36.100 starting with as a mom of a boy human, I want to know the things that I can be doing

00:23:42.460 to try to shift this narrative right from the start.

00:23:52.400 Okay. We are back. We recently moved our eight-year-old boy into his own room for the first

00:24:01.460 time since he was a baby baby, since his sister was born. He is so proud of himself. He is so

00:24:06.040 happy. And one of the things that I told him he had to do, and then subsequent things is,

00:24:11.980 I was like, you're in charge of your clothes now. I never want to think about your clothes ever

00:24:16.160 again. As you are moving to your new room, you will take your clothes over. You will decide

00:24:21.500 what drawers those clothes go in. And when they're dirty, here is the washing machine

00:24:28.000 and we will work on you washing them. I want your clothes nowhere in my brain. And he has agreed.

00:24:34.320 And so far, he did a wonderful job organizing those drawers. This is something, I mean, clearly,

00:24:39.780 like I had had a bone to pick because my husband cannot put clothes away. He does all the laundry.

00:24:46.160 he does all the laundry, right? Like he takes it down, he washes it, but he does not put it in the

00:24:50.780 drawers. And he's like, but you know where it goes. And I'm like, but I don't want to. But like,

00:24:55.840 why can't this be your thing? What else can we be doing to train the next generation,

00:25:02.500 both at a granular level, this tiny in my house level, and then also culturally to share this

00:25:08.840 cognitive load? And I'm not going to say a parenthood, but a freaking life. 0.97

00:25:12.260 this is the million dollar question and i'm so glad you you asked this because i feel like a lot

00:25:20.820 of the conversation about mental load mental work really sticks on couples and couples are

00:25:28.280 absolutely you know central to all of these things but it's so much broader it's about

00:25:33.760 parenting about, you know, caring for elderly parents. It's about the ways that our society

00:25:41.520 tends to shuttle work toward individual families and then onto mothers. So I love this framing.

00:25:47.580 There's a lot of potential for interrupting cycles of gender norms, right? Your example of

00:25:56.800 giving your kid responsibility and ownership, right, from from top to bottom of, OK, how do

00:26:04.260 the clothes get in the drawers? How do they get cleaned? How do they get organized? How do you

00:26:08.540 let me know when new clothes are needed? I think that's brilliant. So many kids do not learn these

00:26:15.620 skills and especially so many thumbs do not learn these skills. Right. And that then shows up in

00:26:21.700 their relationships. So the more that part giving your chores to children can be, hey, what is the

00:26:28.840 noticing part of these things? What is the taking responsibility for when things go wrong, right? I

00:26:35.420 think that the next test for your system, Joe, will be what happens if he suddenly has a soccer

00:26:42.480 game and all of his uniforms are dirty, right? How do you help him think through the consequences

00:26:47.720 in such a way that he learns for the future to point ahead and make sure that at least one

00:26:56.520 uniform is clean in time for his weekend game. So that I think is a big challenge is making sure

00:27:03.800 that kids of all genders are given practice and taught that noticing, making sure that

00:27:13.240 that clothes are cleaned, that meals are made, is not something that they can necessarily assume

00:27:20.260 is someone else's job. I think a lot of girls get that message in childhood, that looking around,

00:27:25.600 helping others, nurturing others, etc. is their responsibility, and a lot of boys are not getting

00:27:30.520 that message. The other piece of this, too, is really thinking beyond households. So my sort of

00:27:37.180 soapbox these days is about how so much work is put on individual families. It is really hard to

00:27:46.540 keep a family going in 2025 America. And I don't think it has to be that way, right? I think so

00:27:54.300 much of the mental load that women in particular are carrying comes from our broken, under-functioning 1.00

00:28:03.460 systems. So for example, a lot of labor that I spoke with mothers about was about finding and 0.71

00:28:10.680 keeping child care. It is really hard for parents of young children to get a spot in a daycare

00:28:19.180 that they feel good about or to find a babysitter or to piece together family care. That takes a lot

00:28:26.420 of time, energy, and effort. And then once your kids are school age, we have school schedules

00:28:33.100 that do not map at all onto many standard employment schedules. So that means figuring

00:28:39.000 out for school care. That means figuring out aftercare. That means putting together a

00:28:43.300 complicated spreadsheet for all of the summer camps that your kids will go to, right? That is

00:28:48.840 labor that does not have to be so laborious, right? There are other countries that do a much

00:28:56.020 better job of helping families to manage that work. So I think that part of what we need to do

00:29:02.120 as a culture is to say, hey, mom's heavy mental load is not just their problem to solve. It's not

00:29:07.900 just about getting dads to step up, right? That's all well and good. I'm all for it. But we often

00:29:13.380 need to talk about why it's so darn hard to be a parent in this day and age and how we can build

00:29:18.920 systems that share the load across society. I love, love that. I do. I do. I feel like I'm

00:29:28.600 screaming into the void, particularly now. I mean, not just given the fact that we are

00:29:35.180 living within a political system that seems to actively be putting more labor and more work on

00:29:41.080 women, but also in a lot of the work that I do talking about influencer culture on this podcast

00:29:47.320 and in my other reporting, we see so many women promoting the idea that caregiving is actually 0.77

00:29:54.620 not work. They erase the labor of it. They make staying home with children, taking care of a house 1.00

00:30:01.360 seem like an idyllic fantasy that does not involve hard work. And I feel like they are

00:30:07.400 hoodwinking the next generation of both men and women into thinking that this is not labor at all.

00:30:14.740 yeah heavy heavy sigh um i am totally with you i think that the the sort of glamorizing of this

00:30:26.040 labor if i'm being very generous well let's just put on my generous cap for a minute i think it

00:30:31.680 comes from a place of saying hey this work is valuable right the work that moms do in their

00:30:40.180 homes, for their kids, to feed them and clothe them and whatever is valuable. And if your thing 1.00

00:30:47.500 is making homemade goldfish crackers for your kids, that can be equally valuable to something

00:30:53.620 you might do for an employer. That is a very generous read. I don't think that that is the

00:31:00.680 takeaway message that a lot of people are coming away with it with. I think that so often when we

00:31:07.520 talk about, you know, trad wives, momfluencers, etc. What we're seeing is this kind of whitewashing

00:31:15.480 of, oh, it's all about, you know, making homemade snacks. It's all about these picture-perfect

00:31:22.120 family settings that mothers are creating for their children. I think what we need to be 0.85

00:31:27.620 collectively better about is holding two truths at once, right? Saying that this is valuable,

00:31:34.560 right? This is important and it's work, right? Most people who do paid work can identify some

00:31:43.460 parts of their job that require effort and yet are not necessarily things that they would want

00:31:49.680 to give up, right? For me, I'm a researcher and a writer. I love writing, right? It's a lot of

00:31:55.020 effort and that's not something that I want to give up. It's something that I think is really

00:31:59.960 valuable. So I think some of that needs to be applied to home work too, right? We need to be

00:32:07.140 able to say that this is incredibly important. The work of raising the next generation, the work of

00:32:13.300 keeping households going is hard and it's valuable. And we should, you know, pay the people who do

00:32:21.560 that well we should um recognize it more socially and we should help people who are doing it right

00:32:30.320 that we we don't need to choose between saying the work that you're doing in your home is is not

00:32:36.300 important and um and see that work as laborious does that make sense no that that absolutely

00:32:46.540 makes sense. I mean, I just want us to highlight more of this labor. And the problem with highlighting

00:32:51.520 this labor is that it does often make us seem angry and frustrated because it is anger making

00:32:58.300 and frustrating. And I hear from young women a lot these days who are kind of falling into this trap

00:33:04.700 of scrolling through trad wife content. They're like, they look so happy and you're pissed off

00:33:09.820 all the time. So clearly equal marriage doesn't work. And so I do think it is hard 0.94

00:33:15.420 to create aspirational, viral content of saying, okay, this is what a real marriage is like. This

00:33:23.820 is what a real partnership is like, as opposed to the easy breezy fantasy where they're just saying

00:33:30.600 a woman should do all of the things in the home and the woman should serve her husband.

00:33:37.260 Yeah, I feel like that's a big problem with many issues in our society today is how do you create 0.88

00:33:42.800 viral content about the more nuanced and the both and that that so many of these situations

00:33:50.100 are about. I don't have a great answer for that. I am, you know, an academic who does not specialize

00:33:56.360 in making things viral. But I absolutely think that part of what folks like you and I can do is

00:34:04.260 help sort of connect the dots and say, OK, even if you wanted this, you know, trad wife aspirational

00:34:10.860 lifestyle, what needs to be in place for that to be possible, right? We need to talk about

00:34:16.420 what sort of jobs are available. We need to talk about what sort of healthcare is available.

00:34:23.100 That so many of these policies that are appealing to folks who are, you know, more interested in

00:34:30.940 that kind of lifestyle are actively undermining their ability to, you know, stay home with their

00:34:36.920 kids, et cetera, et cetera. So hopefully, I'm not sure that that's going to be able to compete with

00:34:42.180 the most viral TikTok content. But I do think having forums like this one, where you can have

00:34:48.440 more nuanced discussions, where you put the dots together in this way, I'm optimistic that

00:34:54.420 eventually that can sort of put a dent in some of these messages.

00:34:58.000 from your lips to the instagram god's ears honest taste

00:35:05.980 oh we have a lot of work to do and i don't want to do it i just don't want to do it to be honest

00:35:12.520 but we have to we really do will you tell everyone where they can find you your work and your

00:35:16.620 wonderful new book sure thing so my website is alisondamager.com you can find information about

00:35:23.680 my research. I write a Substack newsletter about gender and family issues. And you can find my

00:35:29.960 book, What's on Her Mind, wherever books are sold. It was out earlier in September, and I would love

00:35:37.160 if folks would give it a read. Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on today, Alison.

00:35:41.720 Thank you for having me, Jo. This was a really fun conversation.

00:35:53.680 We'll see you next time.

00:36:23.680 You

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - September 25, 2025

The Mental Load of Family Life： The Work You Can’t See But Always Feel

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