Being the Default Parent: The Mental Load No One Can See (But Everyone Feels)

This blog actually started, very unglamorously, in a conversation between three successful women with demanding careers sitting at the lunch table.

We were talking about dinner.

Not in a “what’s your favourite recipe” kind of way.

More in a:

“What are you cooking?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Same.”
“He just text me ‘i’m going to the shops, what do you want me to buy for dinner?’ and in the 5 minutes it took for me to send him a recipe he has sent ‘did you get my text about dinner?’ Seriously, how hard is it to pick something and just buy that?!”

And there it was.

That familiar shared moment of:

• Why is it always me that has to decide what’s for dinner?
• I’m so sick of having to think about what to cook!
• Why am I also responsible for planning what everyone else is eating?
• Do they really need to eat three times a day?

It wasn’t even about dinner, really.

It was about the mental load sitting underneath it all.

And the quiet frustration of being the person who is always expected to know, to think, to decide and to action.

So let’s talk about that.

So what actually is the mental load?

The mental load is the invisible work of running a household.

Not just doing things.

But:

• noticing things need doing
• remembering them
• planning them
• coordinating them
• and anticipating everyone else’s needs before they even ask

It includes things like:

• school schedules, notes, uniforms, and last-minute “wear red tomorrow” chaos (or in my case ‘oh far out, what day does school go back after the holidays?’)
• appointments (booking, rescheduling, remembering to actually attend them, remembering to remind everyone they need to attend)
• meals (planning, shopping, deciding… always deciding)
• emotional needs of multiple humans at once
• and the general background process of keeping life functioning

It’s the difference between:

• doing dinner

and

• being the person who is responsible for deciding what dinner even is, every single night, forever.

There is an old joke about going to a friend’s house for a bbq, she invites everyone, plans it, does the last minute mad dash clean so it’s habitable, rechecking the kids toilet minutes before people arrive because – well you know why, buying the food, buying the drinks, prepping the food, prepping the utensils, making the salads, taking the food out to the bbq, getting the plate to put the food on after it’s cooked, working out seating arrangements, etc etc etc. BBQ is cooked by husband and everyone say’s ‘Gee thanks for this Dave, you’ve outdone yourself again!’ and no one is saying it in irony. Poor wife did everything, she’s totally exhausted and husband gets all the credit because he ‘cooked’ the meal. 

It’s exhausting

Because the mental load doesn’t switch off when the tasks are done.

It just moves to the next thing.

I was at an event recently and the speaker suggested ‘have a back up meal, your favourite meal so that you can cook it without thinking on those nights where it all just feels a bit much’. She asked me what my favourite meal was, ‘one that I don’t have to cook or THINK about’, 108 women in the room cheered in agreement!

Signs you might be carrying the default load

You might recognise this if:

• You are the “ask mum/dad” person for everything
• Household decisions somehow always land with you
• You are constantly thinking ahead for everyone else
• You feel like you’re managing life rather than living it
• Everything is “fine”… but you still feel overwhelmed
• You cannot remember the last time something was planned without you initiating it

And the big one:

If you stopped thinking about it all, things wouldn’t just slow down… they would stop happening.

The invisible frustration underneath it all

What came up in that conversation over dinner decisions wasn’t just tiredness.

It was this deeper frustration of:

“I’m sick of being the one to make all the decisions.”

Because decision fatigue is real.

And when one person becomes the default decision-maker for:

• meals
• schedules
• logistics
• planning
• emotional management of the household

…it stops feeling like teamwork and starts feeling like management.

Without the job title.

Or the salary.

What sharing the mental load actually means

Sharing the mental load is not:

• “Just tell me what to do”
• “I’ll help if you ask”
• “I did one thing, so we’re even”

That’s task-sharing.

The mental load is something different.

Sharing it means both people are responsible for noticing, planning, and owning the running of family life, not one person being the project manager while the other waits for instructions like a very well-meaning intern.

What actually helps (in real life, not theory)

1. Move from “helping” to ownership

Instead of:

“What do you want me to do?”

Try:

“I’ve got dinners this week.”

Not just cooking them.

Planning them.
Deciding them.
Buying for them.
Remembering them.

All of it.

2. Make invisible work visible

A lot of tension comes from work that is never seen, only felt.

Shared calendars, lists, or even a simple weekly sit-down can help make the mental load less one-sided.

Not because it’s fun, because if it’s only stored in one person’s head, it will always feel like their responsibility

3. Stop outsourcing decisions back to the default parent

If someone texts:

“What should I buy?”

That is not collaboration.

That is a decision being handed back.

A better version would be:

“I’m picking up dinner—any preferences I should know about?”

Small shift. Big impact.

That is all well and good if the person sends you a text asking for preferences, but that ‘what should I buy?’ runs deep. Instead of sending back a recipe, how about sending back ‘youre buying, you decide. Remember I don’t like lamb and I can’t eat pasta, other than that, have at it!’. We need to stop enabling the behaviour and start sharing the load.

The truth about why this hits so hard

The mental load isn’t just about being busy.

It’s about:

• being the one who notices everything
• being the one who anticipates everything
• being the one who remembers everything
• and being the one who is expected to decide everything

And over time, that becomes exhausting in a very specific way, not loud, not dramatic, but constant.

The takeaway

The conversation that sparked this blog was about dinner.

But really, it wasn’t about dinner at all.

It was about the shared experience of capable, successful women still finding themselves in the role of the household decision-maker by default

The quiet frustration of realising it’s not the cooking that’s hard… it’s being the only one who has to think about it.

Sharing the mental load doesn’t mean perfection.

It means participation.
Ownership.
And actually removing the expectation that one person will always be the system that holds everything together.

Because no one should have to be the family’s full-time operations manager… just to decide what’s for dinner.