By AJ · April 2026

A dad's honest take on the mental load

A couple of Saturdays ago I was late dropping the kids off at drama class. Not because of traffic, or because we couldn't find shoes, or any of the usual things. I was late because I didn't know what time it started — and I didn't want to ask my wife. Again.

She'd have told me. She'd have told me without any edge. But I'd already asked her the week before, and the week before that, and at some point "what time is drama?" stops being a question and starts being a small confession: that this piece of our children's lives still lives entirely in her head, and I need her to open it every time. So I guessed. I guessed wrong. We rolled up ten minutes late, and I felt like an idiot — not because I'd forgotten, but because I'd chosen pride over a text message.

I've read the mental load stuff. I've read Dineke's post on this blog. I nodded at all of it. And I was still late to drama. So I want to write the version of this piece I haven't really seen anywhere — the one from the other side of the kitchen. Not a defence. An honest account.

We are doing more than our dads did. It is still not enough. Both are true.

Time-use surveys in the UK and US have tracked this for decades. Fathers today spend roughly three times as many hours on childcare as fathers did in the 1960s. That's a real generational shift. But mothers' hours also went up over the same period, so the gap narrowed without ever closing. Which means a lot of dads, me included, end up in a weird place: doing genuinely more than any male generation before us, and still being the lighter half of the load.

Both of those things are true at the same time, and I think pretending either one isn't is what makes the conversation so brittle. If you only say the first, you sound like you want a medal for doing half. If you only say the second, you write off every dad who's actually trying. The honest version is: we've moved, we haven't moved far enough, and a lot of us don't know what the next move looks like.

"Just tell me what to do" is a trap

For years my default setting was: I'm here, I'm willing, just tell me what needs doing. It felt generous. I thought I was offering to take things off her plate.

What I was actually doing was handing the planning back. "Tell me what to do" means someone has already noticed the thing, already worked out what needs to happen, already sequenced it, already picked the moment to ask. All I was volunteering for was the final step — the bit with the hands. Everything upstream of that, the invisible bit, stayed exactly where it had always been.

The trap is that it feels like helping. It even looks like helping from the outside. But if "help" always arrives after someone else has done the thinking, you aren't sharing the load — you're being dispatched to it.

How dads end up in learned helplessness (without meaning to)

Here is the bit I'd like to say carefully, because it can sound like an excuse and it isn't meant as one. A lot of dads I know aren't lazy. They've just been gently corrected out of trying.

You plan the birthday party and it's the wrong cake. You buy the school shoes and they're the wrong brand. You pack the bag and you forgot the reading record. Each correction is small and usually fair — your partner has more context, because your partner has been holding the context for longer. But the cumulative effect is that planning starts to feel like a test you keep failing, and executing feels safe. So you stop planning.

The partner who cares more accrues more context. More context makes them care more. More caring makes the other person hesitant to step in. It's a loop, and naming it isn't absolution — it's a starting point. If you're the dad in that loop, the way out isn't to try harder at guessing. It's to get the context onto a shared surface, so neither of you has to be the keeper of it.

I don't want tasks. I want to own something.

The framing that finally made something click for me is Eve Rodsky's Fair Play. The gist: every recurring family job — birthday parties, school admin, holidays, meals, the tooth fairy — is a "card," and whoever holds the card owns the whole thing. Not just doing it, but noticing it needs doing, planning it, and following up afterwards. Conception, planning, execution. All three, or none.

The first time I read that, my instinct was defensive — another framework asking dads to do more. On second reading it was the opposite. It was the first thing I'd read that offered me a way to stop being managed. Give me the card. The whole card. Don't hand me a task on a Tuesday; hand me the domain and let me run it. If I mess up the first birthday party, I'll learn, and by the third one I'll be the person who notices the invitations haven't gone out, not the person being reminded to post them.

That's a much better deal than "help more." It's also harder, because ownership means you don't get to put it down when you're tired. But it's the only version of sharing the load that actually removes weight from the other person, rather than shuffling it.

And if you're the mum reading this — here's the reciprocal ask, and I only feel entitled to make it because of the paragraph above. For any of this to work, the first few attempts have to be allowed to be imperfect. The wrong cake. The shoes a size too big. The reading record we forgot. We'll learn from our own mistakes a lot faster than we'll learn from your corrections — and if every attempt gets graded, the safest thing for us to do is stop attempting. The version of us you want is the one who notices the birthday is coming without being told. That version only exists on the other side of a few botched first tries.

The dads who can't offload, ever

There's a group of dads I keep thinking about when we design this stuff: the ones running a household alone for half the month. Separated, shared custody, school runs and dentist appointments and parents' evenings landing squarely on them every other week. For them, "just tell me what to do" isn't even available as a crutch — there's nobody on the other end of that sentence. They have to hold the whole mental load themselves, and then hand it over intact every Friday to someone who is also holding their own half of it.

I'm not in that situation, but building software for families means building for them too, and they've shaped a lot of how we think about this. If the tool works for a dad who has no one to offload to, it'll work for the rest of us. More on that in a future post.

What I actually want from a family app

I'll speak for myself here, but I've had enough of these conversations with other dads to think it generalises. What I want is not a chore chart. It's not a nag machine. It's not another app that makes me feel like a junior employee in my own household.

Drama class starts at 9:30

I don't want to end this with a neat bow, because we're not finished figuring it out and I don't think any family really is. But I can tell you that drama class starts at 9:30. I know that now without asking. It lives on our parte. calendar, where both of us can see it — and that turns out to be a smaller change than it sounds, and a bigger one than I expected.

It felt enormous. The not-having-to-ask felt enormous. And it's the shape of what we're trying to build with parte. — a family calendar that takes dads seriously as people who want to carry their half, and gives them somewhere to actually put it down.