Over the past year or two, my wife has gotten really stressed by the kids, so I (male) have taken over a lot of the tasks involving the kids. I make breakfast and lunch and drop the kids at school every day, then more often than not make dinner when I finish work, and I put the kids to bed every night. My wife is a SAHM, but she’s had a ton of issues with anxiety recently, so she’s mostly been caring for the youngest (4yo) and picking up the others from school. All the kids are quite independent now and mostly play with the neighbors, and she makes dinner 1-2x/week. I do almost all of the shopping, laundry, dishes, etc, but she still stresses about those despite not doing much of it (again, anxiety).

We have a very different way of working on household tasks. When I’m short on time, I do the urgent things first and intentionally ignore the less important details to be handled later (usually the weekend). When she is short on time, she’ll stay up late and do all the details while also doing the important things, then she’s burnt out for the next few days (understandable) and things degrade back to where they were. I think the average level of tidiness and amount of work is similar between our approaches.

So she has essentially retained the mental load, even though I’ve taken the lion’s share of the actual work. Just seeing a mess stresses her out, whereas for me, a mess is just an obstacle that I can work around in the short-term. It’s not that I don’t see the mess, just that I’m a lot more focused on the task than the broader picture.

My thought is that this is a bunch of latent guilt stemming from her upbringing. She grew up in an E. Asian household, with all of the social expectations and whatnot, so when she sees a mess, she takes it as a personal attack on not being a good enough home maker. I had a similar upbringing, where my mom stayed home w/ us kids and my dad was the sole breadwinner. However, when I was a teenager, my mom started to work outside the house and my dad was able to WFH more, so they shared the household responsibilities a bit more (she still did laundry and shopping, but my dad did more cooking and dishes). My in-laws have had a similar transition (MIL works, FIL takes SS and doesn’t work), but my MIL still keeps the same responsibilities she always had.

So, I’ve been trying to have things a bit more complete, even if in just one area, rather than spreading efforts around the house, and it seems to have a much bigger impact on her anxiety than what I would normally do. I’ve also listed all of the household chores, and we’ll be assigning explicit responsibility of tasks to the kids (they had them as chores, but there was no formal handover of responsibility), as well as offering the kids incentives to take on additional tasks (in our case, that means spending money). My goal is to reduce her mental load and enable her to think about things outside of the home to hopefully get over the anxiety issues she’s been facing.