Mothers handle 71% of household mental tasks, fathers 45%, as a mental load coach goes on CBS

Zach Watson, a father who calls himself a “recovering man child” and coaches men on the mental load, sat down with “CBS Mornings” on October 1, 2026 to share tips on taking on more at home. His pitch arrives with numbers behind it: in a University of Bath and University of Melbourne survey of 3,000 US parents, mothers handled 71% of household mental load tasks and fathers 45%.

One sentence from CBS, a long paper trail

The CBS News summary of the segment, carried on October 1, 2026 by the local site Forever Delmarva, is one sentence long, and we could not open the full segment. What Watson says there has to be read against what he has said before.

CNN profiled him on November 13, 2023. He is a father and content creator based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and his signature example involves blueberry muffins. His wife had just taken them out of the oven, and he asked her, “Are these too hot to give to the baby?”

The question took seconds. Watson’s own accounting of its cost, given in a video that the parenting site Tinybeans summarised on September 13, 2023, is that if his wife was doing anything that needed thought, “she has to switch directions with her brain, answer the question, and come back to it.” He added: “Multiply that by one or five or 10 or 100 things a day. That’s called decision fatigue.”

The alternative he proposes costs the asker a little more effort and the other partner none. Instead of an open question, he arrives with a proposal that shows his work: he has been thinking about when to leave for a party, the nap, the chairs to carry, and suggests 11 o’clock.

Watson told CNN he had read “around 100,000 comments in the past two years” on his videos. That is a large audience for a household arithmetic problem, and a self-selected one.

Comments are not a sample.

What 3,000 parents reported

The research his message leans on is more orderly. On December 12, 2024, the University of Bath announced a study with the University of Melbourne, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, on what it calls cognitive household labour: the scheduling, planning and organising that keeps family life running.

The team analysed data from 3,000 US parents. According to the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest, which covered the paper on January 23, 2025, the respondents had children aged 18 or younger and were asked about seven categories of work: cleaning, scheduling, childcare, maintenance and repairs, finances, social relationships, and cooking. For each, they said whether they handled it mostly themselves, mostly their partner, equally, or whether family and friends did.

Mothers handled 71% of these mental tasks, which Bath puts at 60% more than fathers, who handled 45%. The split depends on the kind of task. Mothers took on 79% of daily jobs such as cleaning and childcare, against 37% for fathers. Fathers took on 65% of episodic jobs such as finances and home repairs, against 53% for mothers.

Those shares add up to well over 100% because both parents can count the same job as theirs. For the episodic tasks, the Bath release reads the overlap as duplication of effort. The survey also asked parents to rate how much of the overall mental work they did. Bath reports that parents often overestimate their contribution, and that fathers do so more than mothers. Fathers were also more likely to see household mental labour as equally shared, and mothers disagreed. Both sides over-claim, then, and one side over-claims by more.

The limits sit in the method. Bath notes that the study looks at individual parents rather than couples, so the findings reflect one parent’s perspective and not a shared view. The BPS digest adds that mental effort is intangible and unbounded, which makes standard surveys poorly equipped to capture its weight. It also lists race, class and sexual orientation as factors the study leaves for future research. The digest, citing recent statistics it does not name, adds that 63% of women say they do more than their fair share of household labour, against 22% of men.

Money and hours leave the load where it was

A second paper from the same team, published on October 23, 2025 in the journal Socius, asked whether time and income change the picture. It surveyed 2,133 partnered, heterosexual US parents.

Mothers earning more than $100,000 reported 30% less childcare and 17% less housework than mothers with lower incomes. Their mental load did not fall. On average, mothers carried 13.72 tasks on their mental to-do list against 8.2 for fathers, or 67% more.

Lead author Dr. Ana Catalano Weeks, of the University of Bath, put it this way: “While paid work and higher incomes reduce women’s physical housework, they do not lighten their cognitive labour.” The authors name the pattern “gendered cognitive stickiness”: according to co-author Dr. Helen Kowalewska, once organisational tasks are assigned to mothers, they tend to stay there.

The data cut differently for fathers, and the release says so. Employed fathers reported 17% less time in care, 22% less housework and 29% less responsibility for mental load tasks than fathers who were not employed. Yet fathers earning more than $100,000 reported 17% more involvement in core mental tasks such as arranging extracurricular activities. Professor Leah Ruppanner of the University of Melbourne reads that as a sign of newer norms of involved fatherhood and of the flexibility common in well-paid jobs, and adds that it does little to change the overall pattern.

For mothers, a job and a high salary cut the physical work and leave the thinking work untouched. For fathers, a job reduces both. That asymmetry is the finding, and it holds even among the better-off couples.

Owning the task, not helping with it

Watson’s method is built on a distinction that the Fair Play author Eve Rodsky, founder of the Fair Play Policy Institute, laid out for CNN. Learning to share the load is not just for “bad husbands,” she said: “Even the most well-intentioned partners are still not doing their fair share at home.”

Rodsky’s remedy is ownership. A partner who owns a task carries its forethought, planning and remembering, without the other partner supervising. Asking a partner to produce a list fails that test, Watson told CNN, because it hands her one more task to remember.

The structure he and his wife use is a weekly sit-down they call the “boring meeting”, held around lunchtime on Monday. They go over what is coming up, what in the house needs changing and how their shared responsibilities are going. Watson says holding the talk in a calm moment helps them pick up small things “rather than waiting for it to explode out of resentment.”

They also settled a minimum standard of care for each chore. Doing the dishes means loading the dishwasher, hand-washing pots and pans, and wiping down the counters. The floors can wait until a pinch of the dog’s hair comes up twice between the fingers, because their Great Pyrenees is very fluffy.

Rodsky offered a figure from her own home. When her husband took ownership of extracurricular sports for their two sons, she said, “I gained back eight hours a week.” Her advice is to start with one task and build from there.

Two couples and a coach make a small sample.

The Bath releases report no test of a method for shifting the load, because the studies measure who carries it, not what moves it. A clinician’s view fits the survey. On “CBS Mornings” on June 18, 2025, the psychiatrist Dr. Sue Varma was asked about the 71% figure and said, “I think the number should be higher.” She observed that fathers tend to hold tasks that happen at “a less frequent cadence than the daily minutia,” such as finances and cutting the grass. Her advice to partners was practical: “Rolling your sleeves up, getting to the dishes and unloading them before you need to be asked.”

What the numbers mean beyond the kitchen

The Bath researchers tie the mental load to outcomes. Weeks said the work can lead to stress, burnout and effects on women’s careers, and that “resentment can build, creating strain between couples.” The Bath release cites a Gallup study showing working mothers are twice as likely as fathers to consider reducing their hours or leaving their jobs because of parental responsibilities.

Weeks told Bath that governments and employers who want to attract top talent need policies that support both mothers and fathers in sharing unpaid work, and she singled out well-paid, gender-neutral parental leave, on which she says the UK and the US trail the rest of Europe. The authors of the 2025 paper also call for couples to talk about the invisible labour more openly so it can be shared out more fairly.

For readers in the US, the surveys describe their own country. For readers in the UK, the evidence is indirect: both Bath studies used US parents, and the October 2025 release went out as UK families prepared for school half term, a time it describes as heavy on scheduling and logistics, without offering UK figures.

Sources

• Mothers bear the brunt of the ‘mental load,’ managing 7 in 10 household tasks, University of Bath, December 12, 2024
• Successful career women still shoulder the majority of the ‘mental load’ at home: new research, University of Bath, October 23, 2025