Fresh Take: Allison Daminger, WHAT'S ON HER MIND- The Mental Workload of Family Life

0:00Hear that?

0:01Amy Wilson:That's now Crispy and McCrispy Strips meeting creamy Caesar sauce. Sounds extra crispy. Caesar sauce at McDonald's for a limited time.

0:17Amy Wilson:Hello everyone and welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell? Laughing in the face of motherhood. This is Margaret. And this is Amy. I am very excited to say that today we are talking to Alison Daminger. She is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Daminger's research is focused on how and why gender shapes family dynamics, particularly the division of work and power in couples. Alison is also the mother to a four-month-old and a brand new book that we're going to be talking about today, What's on Her Mind, the Mental Workload of Family Life. Welcome, Allison.

0:53Thank you so much, Amy and Morgan. It's such a pleasure to be here. And yes, when you put it that way, I have had two babies this year. Double babies. Book baby, real baby. So I found your work when I was researching my own book, Happy to Help. And I put it in the book. I talk about you in the book because I think that you were one of the very first people to define and study cognitive labor. People call it a lot of different things. I think everybody listening is familiar with what it is now, but not so much then. So tell us how you started to think about cognitive labor and realized it was something that you wanted to study.

1:25Yeah, so that's a really great point. I started this research back in 2017, so about eight years ago. And at the time, there wasn't a lot of discussion, right? These days, I feel like the mental load is everywhere. That's the topic in every other. So for media posts, I'm served. But at the time, we were really, both as scholars and as members of the public, talking mostly about physical chores. Who's cooking? Who's cleaning? Who's changing diapers? Who's, you know, waking up with the baby in the middle of the night? P.S. It's women, but go ahead. Well, yes, and that was what the research that I was studying in my first year graduate classes pretty clearly showed that women are spending much more time.

2:03My mom's generation was spending much more time. My generation was spending much more time. And around when I was reading all of this, I was doing some pilot interviews for a project that never got off the ground. But I was interested in how parents were making choices about where to send their kids to school. And I was in Boston at the time. And this was a context where you don't just send them to the nearest neighborhood school. You have a lot of options. I was interviewing both moms and some couples. And they kept using the word we. We do this. We did that. You know, we decided this. And as I was taught to do as an interviewer, you always push for examples, push for more details.

2:38And pretty quickly, the we fell apart. And it was, oh, well, she realized this deadline was coming up. She did an extensive search and canvassed all of her friends and came up with a two-page spreadsheet. And we went on the tour and made the decision. I said, OK, this is not getting counted in these time use diaries. Most of the statistics we had were about how much time men and women were spending. But we're not thinking about how they're using their brains differently. The amount of brain space that is taken up by the work of especially raising children. And so that kind of tipped me off to, okay, I think there's something here.

3:12And I started designing a project that could get at what I called at the time decision labor, but later renamed cognitive labor because it's broader than decisions. I identify four core components. The first is anticipating a need, scanning the horizon and saying, hey, this school decision is coming up. Summer's about to end. We got to figure out the afterschool plan, putting it on the collective radar. Then number two is identifying options for meeting that need. Oftentimes you have choices, whether it's what to have for dinner or where to send your kids for camp. You have to look through the universe of options and kind of see what's out there.

3:44Third is making a decision. That one's the most obvious. And then the fourth one came late in my fieldwork where I realized that you're not done when you make a decision. There's all sorts of monitoring and follow-up that needs to happen. If anyone other than you is involved, if you delegate it to your partner, if you send an email and are waiting for a response, if you're just waiting to see if the thing you tried is effective. So that fourth monitoring stage was the one that came in last.

4:07Amy Wilson:This is obviously something that we talk a lot about on a parenting podcast. And we often use the example of, I want you to take child A to a birthday party. That seems like a very simple task. But we often have to explain and backtrack and say, taking a kid to a birthday party involves having the right stuff. Is it a swim party or is it a dress up party of some sort? And then what is the gift that you're bringing? It's an example that I think people can really understand because I could hire a taxi to take them to the birthday party. Taking a kid to a birthday party is actually sometimes a 20-step process.

4:47Amy Wilson:I have kids who come to our birthday party and know that my child is into wildlife and get them a platypus-themed t-shirt. You know, that's a lot of cognitive labor involved in that process. You had to think about it a month out. Absolutely. And, you know, in some of my talks, I have a big picture of an iceberg on the slide. Right. Because I think we're so used to seeing the visible result. The child ends up at the birthday party. And there's a lot, arguably even more, happening beneath the surface. And I think what you're pointing to, Margaret, is part of why it's so hard to share this cognitive work is because often it involves the transfer of knowledge.

5:24It's not a simple matter of, OK, child's with me, now the child's with you. It's who has the relationship with the person who's hosting the party, who got the invitations, who has been to other birthday parties and sees what the going gifts are. And so it's really hard, I think, for a lot of couples who have gotten into these patterns to transfer them because it's not just a matter of execution. It's built on knowledge and relationships and skills. I'm just thinking of a text you're going to get 5, 10, 15 minutes after the birthday party starts. Where's this birthday party? Where am I supposed to be going?

5:52Because that wasn't considered as part of the job.

5:55Amy Wilson:And also the pressure of expectations that when the child shows up late without a swimsuit, without a towel, without the form that was signed that was supposed to let them go go-karting, it is a rare person who's like, what's wrong with their father? Absolutely. I think there's a lot of talk. I hear a lot of talk about how moms have really high standards. And I want to push back on that because it's moms who get the phone calls when the kid doesn't show up with the permission slip or with the swimsuit. It's moms who are judged aggressively or passive aggressively by the teacher, by the other parents.

6:31And so these high standards are really self-protective. We know who's going to be held accountable. And so we try to prevent those bad things from happening. So tell us about the decision diaries that you created and what happened when you started going to couples and really trying to track cognitive labor. A big challenge was, as I said at the time, this was not a conversation that was really happening out in public. And so I tried to think about what is going to be the most salient to people to get at this stuff that I know they're doing, but they're probably not thinking about. and how can I get them to talk about it?

7:06So what I figured out was that the decision is probably the most visible part of this process. That's usually tied to some sort of visible outcome or conversation, et cetera. And so instead of asking people to track their time for a day, which, you know, a lot of other studies of housework do, I asked parents, please track the decisions you're making for your family. And I broadened it a little bit to say it could be something that you're thinking about making, even if you haven't finalized it yet. So for about 24 hours before I showed up for the interview, both partners in the couple, I interviewed them both separately, would fill out this decision diary.

7:40And then when I got to the interview, usually it was at their house, I'd sit down across the table from them, they'd hand me the diary, and we'd start going through it together. And they'd write things like, decided to feed child Cheerios for breakfast. And I would say, Great. How did you know that there were Cheerios on hand? Did you consider any other breakfast options? What were you prioritizing in terms of nutrition or convenience? Cool usually keeps the Cheerios stock in the cabinet. And so each decision was a gateway to a number of other processes, kind of like this iceberg we were talking about.

8:13I was just going to say, there's the iceberg, right? Exactly. And it was something that most people were able to talk in very concrete, specific terms. Well, I usually make a grocery list on Sundays and I know that my kid likes Cheerios, but we want him to have more protein. So we try and also they could talk through this whole spiel. And so what I did was I used the decision diaries and then I had a couple of more one-off things like tell me about the last time something broke. Tell me about the last time your kid was sick to try and get at these things that probably wouldn't show up in your average 24 hour period, depending, you know, sometimes it feels like they come every 24 hours.

8:48And I used what the couple told me to sort of put together an image of, okay, with food-related stuff, she is usually the one who is planning ahead, thinking, following up with maintenance-related things. Maybe he does more of that work. I could kind of painstakingly piece together their division of cognitive labor based on all of these little inputs. And then there was one common finding, however, which was the cognitive labor was in a man-woman couple way imbalanced towards towards the woman to absolutely nobody's surprise, right? That was what you found. And what's really interesting is what happened when you brought that to these couples' attention, what they said next when you said you see this imbalance.

9:27Yeah, I'm glad you're pointing to that, Evie, because this is the part, this is my favorite part of the research, the part that I found surprising and interesting and that I really want to tell people about. Most of the couples that I interviewed were not intentionally setting out to divide this work unequally. In fact, many of them told me that they would like to do it fairly close to 50-50. And I would ask them, well, why do you think you're having trouble with that? And they would over and over again tell me, oh, it's just my personality. I'm just so type A. I'm so organized. And he's just so laid back and go with the flow.

9:55Amy Wilson:And at first I was like... Amy's like trying not to nod so hard that her head falls off. I know from reading your book, Amy, that this is it. Yeah. And at first I was a little bit worried that have I accidentally sampled this cluster of type A women. And so I started looking at their research on how different personality types are distributed by gender. And, you know, eventually it happened enough that I was like, no, this is a thing. And it's really subtle. But the interesting part, I think, is that they were not, for the most part, calling on gender stereotypes. Not a ton of people said to me, well, you know, women are just organized.

10:29Men are just a little lackadaisical. They were saying I am organized compared to my husband. And so I call this personal essentialism. It's sort of gender essentialism 2.0, where we take the old content of gender stereotypes, but put it on personal terms. And that makes it really hard to argue with because if you are a certain way and your husband is a certain way, there's nothing much you can do to change it. Right. And so each of them thought they were making an individual choice in which the woman was really had high standards and the guy was could just let things go. And so that's why it had to be.

10:59That's why she had to handle the birthday party and the spreadsheets. Yeah. And were you able to sort of walk them towards, I'm not so sure that's true, or was that not part of your work? That was not part of my work. I feel like I would need a little bit of training in couples counseling to do that effectively. I will say that some people came to that realization in the process of talking things through. And I did get a number of follow-up notes from couples I interviewed saying, thank you so much. You opened up our eyes to this issue. We had so many good conversations after you left. I have not heard from anyone who got a divorce as a result of my interview project.

11:31But I think that my hope was to sort of lay it out there in a neutral way. And then if the couple wanted to take that up, then they could run with it. We're talking to Allison Damager. Her new book is called What's on Her Mind, and we'll be right back.

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12:51Amy Wilson:Our certified packing experts can pack everything you need. From desktops to decor. Plus, when you pack and ship with us, you get our exclusive pack and ship guarantee. Your items arrive safe or your money back. Restrictions and limitations apply. To get a 20 % off packing coupon and for full details, visit the upsstore.com slash packing. So this kind of blew my mind too, because I was one of these people. This is just who I am. I'm just, I enjoy being in charge and liking how things go. But no, this is something that is both nature and nurture. you can't un-tease it, but isn't it funny that we ascribe all of these things to women in particular?

13:32So talk to us about the gendered self, because I think that's where this comes into play. So the gendered self is this idea that sociologists have where we take on aspects of our gender socialization, of the cultural norms that we are surrounded by from birth, even before in some cases, and it feels like that's who we are. So I tell the story in the introduction to the book about my best friend and her husband, where she is an elementary school teacher. He is a car mechanic. And I don't think either of them would be happy switching occupational roles, right? They feel very strongly that this is a good fit given who they are, their personalities, etc.

14:12But then when you dig in a little bit deeper, you say, what was the gender breakdown of the teachers that they were exposed to in elementary school? What kinds of activities were encouraged, right? If he's playing with toy cars and wants to help his dad in the garage, that is probably something that was nurtured in him. Not necessarily strategically, but that's something that happens. Whereas my friend, she was celebrated for the way that she was so gentle with her dolls and encouraged to hold babies and help care for the younger cousins. And so these things that are out there in the ether, we're picking up those messages and it becomes how we understand ourselves to be.

14:50I experience myself as a type A person, even though I know from doing this research that a lot of that is socialized. That doesn't change the way it feels to be me because it's so deep in there.

15:01Amy Wilson:I find this something that I'm talking, especially to the younger women in my life, who I think are coming at gender from a very different place than I did. That gender is a completely clean slate and that nature plays a much smaller role than I thought. Nurture plays this very outsized role. I think I come more from a point of view, probably based on my age, that gender informs a lot of who we are and nurture informs some of who we are. In approaching the book, how important is that belief to solving these problems? Like, can you come at it from any belief system and then just attack it at the problem?

15:41So it's a really good one. I would say that I'm typical of the sociologists in that we like to say that gender is socially constructed. There are body parts and hormones and things like that that are more nature. But a lot of the stuff that we put on top of that is nature. And the thing that I think is really tricky. So I have a lot of, because of where I am in the life course, a lot of my friends have small children. And I hear from them, I've got this little boy and he just wants to play with dump trucks and run around. And I didn't do anything to make him that way. And so, you know, I haven't been in their house from day one, but I do think that it's really hard to separate out because so much of her understanding of who we are, of how we interact with other people is just baked into our language, the pronouns we use.

16:32Right. It's baked into the stories we read. You know, I'm in the midst of starting to read board books to my child and it's always the mama who is featured in the story and interacting with the little one. And so I think these gender messages are so subtle and that they interact with our natural, quote unquote, temperament, our natural personality and disposition in ways that it's hard to tease out. So the thing that I try and say in the book, I don't want to convince you that nature doesn't matter at all. It's not about like 59 percent. Right. Exactly. It's not that. Yeah. Yeah. But I am trying to say we don't pay enough attention to the nurture part of things when it comes to these household dynamics.

17:09And I think if we could shift slightly, we can still think that maybe there are some gender differences on average, wherever they come from doesn't totally matter. They're not baked in. We have more agency than we think in, for example, learning new skills and getting better at the things that we're not so good at currently.

17:26Amy Wilson:I have found in my own marriage, breaking this down and talking about who's doing what. Because when you're busy, I had three kids in four years and had busy, busy times and had not known my husband very long when we got married. And the rivers that start carrying you through life, I think they come up so fast and we're too busy paddling. We cannot analyze the structure of a house that is on fire. Just grab a hose and help me, basically. But as we often say, you don't do it because it's another task that you have to do. It actually makes life easier when you can have these conversations. Sometimes I feel like the quarterback where you're like, I'll catch any ball you throw.

18:09Amy Wilson:And I'm like, I don't want to be the quarterback or the coach. I don't want to be the general and you're really good at executing orders. I want us both to be making the big plan. Yeah. No, I feel the same way. The river metaphor is apt, right? Where I am in early parenthood. It does feel like a house on fire a lot of the time. That's it. We've talked to other experts about how people who think that they have a very egalitarian split, the arrival of a child really tends to double down on this because everybody around you, when the baby goes, they're going to say, oh, he wants this. Mommy, it's so reinforced by every moment of every day all around you.

18:45And that's not good or bad. It's just true. It's just part of it. And acknowledging that that's happening, which we have to do to acknowledge that some part of this we're performing. I am not perfect by any means on this front, but my husband and I, one of the things that works well for us is to name the social forces that are working against us. Because it's really easy to get into the, you know, you're doing this and it's not fair and why am I? And to say, huh, everyone is texting me about baby stuff. So it makes sense that you are not as informed on what's been happening. Or everyone is kind of using mom-centered language.

19:20So it makes sense that you wouldn't necessarily think that this was equally your responsibility. So sometimes by sort of naming the problem and locating it outside of our relationship, it depersonalizes it in a way that actually enables us to problem solve more effectively. That's helpful. Can you tell us about LGBTQ couples that you study? Because, of course, I have an also completely gendered expectation like, well, that would be the la la land of milk and honey where everything's perfect all the time in 50-50. So what did you actually find? Yeah, I think that is the kind of misconception among folks in different gender relationships is, oh, if only I was married to another woman, right?

19:56It would be totally 50-50. The bad news is, no, that's not what I found. I think that cognitive labor, mental work is just hard to divide totally equally. Often it's easier to have one person lead and the other follow. So most of the queer couples that I interviewed were not totally 50-50. The better news is that the gaps between partners in queer relationships were a lot smaller than the average gaps between partners in straight relationships. So, for example, in a straight relationship, maybe 80-20 was a common division. In the queer relationships, it looked more like 60-40. The other thing that I found really interesting was that for the queer couples, they didn't divide cognitive labor and mental work into male and female roles.

20:38It was more common that, okay, partner A would take on the mental work related to meal planning and the mental work related to finances and the mental work related to decorating a house. And partner B would have another bundle of tasks that was crossing gender lines. And so it seemed to me like they were doing more to mix and match based on their circumstances, their interests, their background, etc. And the final piece that I noticed is really different was the queer couples were much more likely to have talked about these issues with each other. Whereas the straight couples, they hadn't had the conversation or they'd only had the conversation in a fight or she had complained to her friends.