Abstract
The tasks necessary to keep a household running smoothly often go unnoticed and are referred to as invisible labor. One underlying cognitive construct that may help to quantify the mental component of invisible labor is prospective memory (PM), or memory for future actions. In the current study, parents completed self-report measures of their own PM demands, perceptions of their partners’ PM demands, and frequency of their own and their partners’ prospective and retrospective memory failures. Mothers reported maintaining greater PM demands than did fathers, particularly for their children’s PM intentions. Fathers’ and mothers’ PM demands did not differ for tasks that benefitted their partners; yet, mothers perceived themselves to provide more mnemonic support to their partners than their partners do for them. Mothers and fathers also differed in the extent to which they perceived their partners to carry the cognitive load related to their children. Finally, parents who perceived their partners to have potentially poor PM appear to take on more PM demands and doing so comes at a cost for fathers. The current work unifies themes within the mental labor and PM literatures and provides a framework through which researchers and clinicians can better understand parental cognitive demands.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Drs. Jennifer Byrd-Craven, Lucia Ciciolla, DeMond Grant, and Brandt Gardner for their insights and expertise shared during the conception of this study. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on a previous version of this manuscript.
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Funding for this study was provided by the Robberson Summer Dissertation Fellowship through the Oklahoma State University Graduate College, as well as the Department of Psychology at Oklahoma State University.
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Harrington, E.E., Reese-Melancon, C. Who is Responsible for Remembering? Everyday Prospective Memory Demands in Parenthood. Sex Roles 86, 189–207 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-021-01264-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-021-01264-z