This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Mariel Segarra. LifeKit reporter Andy Tagle. Hi. Hi, Mariel. Good morning. One of your favorite topics I feel like on Life Kit is the mental load. What does it mean? The mental load. The mental load is so many things. It's sometimes called invisible labor.

It's all that behind the scenes thinking, planning, organizing, executing. It's everything it takes to keep a household running. And oftentimes it falls on one person more than the other.

Yeah, I feel like when we talk about the mental load, we're often talking about women and moms.

Why is that?

Because, you know, in aggregate, that's what the data shows.

You know, in most heterosexual relationships, it's the

female that takes on the lion's share of the work, because, you know, socialization. Even when

both partners are working, even when both partners make the same amount of money, that's not the

truth of every individual relationship or every individual family. I know lots of super involved dads.

My dad is one of them. My husband is one of them. I know dads who are the primary parent.

But in aggregate, overall, that's what the data shows. Yeah, the data doesn't tell the whole picture.

And I guess that is something that you heard after you did your last episode

on the mental load. You heard from a bunch of dads, right? Yeah. So a big inspiration for today's

episode is a recent story we did that wasn't exclusively for women and moms, but because it was

about the mental load, a lot of the language was directed toward only them.

And some of the examples were gendered.

So I heard from a lot of men and husbands and fathers being like, hey, you know, we want to be a part of this conversation.

They felt, you know, excluded.

They said, you know, like we are really involved too.

You know, we are here, we contribute, what gives?

And I was like, fair.

And you know, the research backs these guys up.

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