The Invisible Labor That Sustains Relationships

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Keeping everyday life running smoothly in families and romantic relationships requires a lot of everyday remembering. In particular, it requires remembering to carry out future activities—appointments, grocery shopping, picking up and dropping off children, meals, meeting a spouse at work, scheduled social gatherings, romantic interludes, running errands.

Such memory for future activities is called "prospective memory," which entails remembering an intention to do something in the future—and then doing it.

To fulfill an intention, we may need to remind ourselves repeatedly before carrying out the intended action. We can also be cued spontaneously. Seeing a neighbor outside, for example, may cue us to remember her package that was mistakenly delivered to our house sitting in our kitchen.

Prospective memory in families and romantic relationships takes place in four stages: 1) planning, 2) reminding ourselves and others, 3) remembering and carrying out the activities, and 4) evaluating how well the activities were completed. This memory work often goes unnoticed by others and can be thought of as invisible labor.

Prospective Memory Load

In a 2022 study, psychologists Erin Harrington and Celinda Reese-Melancon focused on how prospective memory is distributed in households with children—a study with important revelations about this form of invisible labor.¹

Parents completed questionnaires about their own prospective memory work and about the prospective memory work of their partner. They also specified how frequently they engaged in each of the four prospective memory stages for their children and their partner—planning, reminding others, remembering to carry out the plans, and evaluating the outcome. Here is what Harrington and Reese-Melancon found.

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Prospective Memory for Children. Fathers viewed the division of memory labor in the family as equitable, whereas mothers judged themselves as carrying more of the cognitive load, particularly with their children.

Interestingly, when mothers judged how much fathers did, that judgment matched up with the fathers’ own judgments. But when fathers judged how much memory work mothers did, the fathers’ judgments fell significantly short of what mothers reported.

Further investigation revealed that mothers do have a heavier load of prospective memory work and that much of this heavier load focuses on the initial stages of prospective memory—planning how and when to complete a future task and then reminding children of the plans. Fathers also do this, but not to the same extent.

Indeed, a study conducted by Lindsey Robertson, Tamara Anderson, and Christina Kim found that mothers work continuously on prospective memory to keep a household running smoothly.

Prospective Memory for One’s Partner. The same pattern showed itself with the amount of memory support parents provided for each other. Fathers judged it as similar, whereas mothers judged that they stepped in significantly more to help the father with his prospective memory tasks.

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Questions and an Answer

Why is there a discrepancy between the fathers’ perceptions of the mothers' memory work and the mothers’ own perceptions of their memory work? More broadly, why is there a difference in memory load for mothers and fathers? These two questions point to the same answer and suggest possible remedies.

One hypothesis is that larger memory loads for mothers arise, to a large extent, from fathers not apprehending how much prospective remembering mothers actually do. Fathers are not knowingly pulling back on their memory responsibilities. They underestimate mothers’ memory load and then do what they think matches the mothers’ efforts.

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Out of Sight Out of Mind

In a comprehensive study of the kinds of memory work mothers and fathers do, Robertson and her colleagues found the following pattern. The fathers’ prospective memory load involves discrete, observable tasks (remembering to collect and take out the garbage, remembering to mow the lawn), whereas the mothers’ prospective memories involve many small and unobserved tasks (organizing family schedules, keeping track of a child’s medications, remembering to pay bills on time).

In this study, one mother described her responsibilities as a “background job” that needed constant attention. She also reported that when she explained her mental labor in work-related terms, her husband had a better understanding of how often she engaged in her cognitive tasks. This suggests that if fathers cannot actually see how frequently their partners support their own and their child’s prospective memory intentions, then they cannot truly appreciate their partners’ mental labor.

Moving Toward a Balanced Workload With Memory

1) Externalizing Prospective Memory. Rather than relying on spontaneous memory strategies for encoding and retrieval, families can use tools to externalize memory, with centrally located to-do lists, calendars, and chore-boards. These tools make everyone aware of what needs to be done, while taking the pressure off retrieving specific intentions at the right time.

2) Collaborative Remembering. Partners can support each other at each phase of the prospective memory process, beginning with planning. In particular, mothers and fathers can agree to prompt one another along the way, thereby doubling the chances of remembering, while also encouraging collaborative remembering.

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3) Alarm Apps. Apps can support prospective memory by working as scheduled alarms, reminding us of daily obligations that need to be carried out at a particular time.

We can also use location-based alarm apps to remind us of a particular intention when we are at the right place for carrying out that intention. If we are at the grocery store, for example, an alarm can go off based on our phone’s GPS, reminding us to pick up blueberries and heavy cream for dessert.

4) Identifying Smaller Tasks. Chore boards, calendars, and scheduled reminders can help us only if we’ve identified the many informal daily tasks that rely on prospective memory. First, we need to specify and clarify these numerous small tasks.

5) Attending to the Subject of Prospective Memory. It’s helpful to set aside regular meeting times for discussing the prospective memory demands in one’s household. The discussion times should be placed on the calendar, along with the various prospective memory tasks.

Final Words

Being required to plan, to remind your partner and children about the planning, to carry out the plan, and then to evaluate its success all contribute to the invisible load of maintaining romantic relationships and families. Making this invisible labor known and talking about it supports the interactions between mothers and fathers, while nourishing their relationship and the entire family.