September 10, 2025

Managing the ‘Mental Load’

Every married couple has to find some way of divvying up the work that keeps the household running, whether it’s watching kids, washing dishes, getting groceries, or a hundred other tasks that need handling. In some cases, husbands and wives come together to discuss (or perhaps argue about) the proper breakdown. In other cases, they achieve a workable balance more organically, simply by gravitating toward the jobs they’re best equipped to perform.

Household labor patterns lend themselves well to negotiation and fine-tuning, since both spouses can take stock of what needs doing and decide, on some basis, who ought to do it. Much trickier to manage, however, is the mental workload of maintaining a home—that hard-to-quantify but still quite tangible feeling of being responsible for all the planning, decision-making, and trouble-shooting.

In a new book, What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Workload of Family Life, sociologist Allison Daminger explores why women still shoulder much of this weight, even in an era when men are narrowing some longstanding gender gaps related to chores and childcare.

Bonnie Kristian considers the book in her latest review for CT, asking how Christian commitments should influence the way husbands and wives share the mental burdens of life together.

“To be clear,” she writes, “it’s not my goal (or Daminger’s, for that matter) for every couple to divide the mental load equally. Striving for a bean-counting, 50-50 split reflects an ignorant, juvenile idea of marriage. The goal, rather, is honesty and love—love that ‘does not dishonor others,’ ‘is not self-seeking,’ and shows patience and perseverance (1 Cor. 13:4–7) with and for one’s spouse.

“Throughout What’s on Her Mind, Daminger shares quotes and stories from the families she interviewed. Some are quite funny—if grim cringe comedy is your thing. For instance, one grown man shamelessly recounted going on a bathroom-cleaning strike because his wife failed to buy his preferred cleaning supply.

“In another couple, the wife described her husband as ‘temperamentally ill-equipped for the frenetic multitasking and constant forecasting she relied on to juggle home, paid work, and childcare.’ The husband agreed, saying his wife is ‘much more attentive to all the things that need to be done. … I can mostly go a very long time before it hits me that now is the time to deal with it.’

“Sure, maybe—except that the husband is a surgeon. This is a job that requires grading high on measures of forecasting, decision-making, and attentiveness.

“Now, perhaps the arrangement of their lives is such that this wife should do most of the cognitive labor at home. She’s also employed, but surgeons have demanding work. Yet this husband isn’t failing to notice family needs because he’s incapable. Either he does not want to notice, or he simply does not care.”

A Fresh Angle on Augustine

Inasmuch as it’s possible to know a great deal about someone who lived well over a thousand years ago, a great deal is known about the esteemed church father Augustine. It helps, of course, that Augustine left us one of the most revealing autobiographies ever written (and by some accounts the first), his Confessions. And biographers like Peter Brown have combed over his life and times to magisterial effect.

In his review of a new book on Augustine, Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins begins by asking how much more we can really know, given the prodigious energies already spent on researching his remarkable life. Yet Jenkins applauds Catherine Conybeare, a humanities professor at Bryn Mawr College, for her originality in Augustine the African, which employs a range of scholarly tools to illuminate the significance of her subject’s cultural and geographic roots.

“Intellectually,” writes Jenkins, “we may know Augustine came from Roman Africa, with its vital center at Carthage. But what difference, if any, did that make to his life and thought? How might these have differed if Augustine had been the product of Spain or Sicily?

“For Conybeare, these origins were crucial. Augustine was absolutely grounded in a culture located in what we would today call the nation of Tunisia and its border fringe of Algeria, the region where his life began and ended.

“At every stage, Augustine’s life and career must be understood in that African imperial context, with all its implications of hybridity, of ethnic and linguistic complexity, of aspiration and discrimination. These themes pervade Augustine the African. Based on impeccable scholarship and lucid writing, Conybeare’s book reshapes our understanding of that one (crucial) saint, and her insights extend to many other figures of the early church. The book deserves a very broad audience, not least because it recounts such a fascinating life story. Adding immensely to the book’s value, this study of the saint’s ‘erased Africanness’ speaks into ongoing conversations about the long-lasting heritage of empire and colonialism.”

Matt Reynolds

Senior Editor, Books

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The Christian story shows us that grace often comes from where we least expect. In this issue, we look at the corners of God’s kingdom and chronicle in often-overlooked people, places, and things the possibility of God’s redemptive work. We introduce the Compassion Awards, which report on seven nonprofits doing good work in their communities. We look at the spirituality underneath gambling, the ways contemporary Christian music was instrumental in one historian’s conversion, and the steady witness of what may be Wendell Berry’s last novel. All these pieces remind us that there is no person or place too small for God’s gracious and cataclysmic reversal.

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Managing the ‘Mental Load’

A Fresh Angle on Augustine

A Woman’s Mental Work Is Never Done

Don’t Erase Augustine’s Africanness