53 min
Ep 25: The unseen mental labour of motherhood: Inviting your partner to share the load with Dr Elyse McNeill, PhD Mama Chatters
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- Parenting
Have you heard of mental labour? It's all of the thinking, organising, planning, management, emotional work that underpins all of the aspects of family life, household life, everything related to our children.
And for women especially - it's a lot.
Dr Elyse McNeil has been a clinical psychologist for nearly a decade and has recently completed a PhD on the topic of mental labour. Through her work at Share to Thrive she is creating education and information for couples to significantly improve the way they manage mental labour and improve their relationship. She lives on the beautiful Gold Coast with her husband and little boy.
Today we chat about:
- What is mental labour and why does it fall moreso on the shoulders of women?
- How can we help our partners to understand the mental load?
- How can we have productive and respectful conversations around mental labour without inviting defensiveness or conflict?
- What are some practical ways that we can better share the mental labour?
- What are some systems we can put in place to make things feel a little more fair?
Note that this research was conducted on heterosexual couples and more research is required to apply to all families.
Dr Elyse's brand new course Share to Thrive is available now and she has kindly gifted our Mama Chatters listeners with a 25% discount using code MMLISTENERS.
https://mentallabour.sharetothrive.com/
TRANSCRIPT
Have you heard of mental labour? It's all of the thinking, organising, planning, management, emotional work that underpins all of the aspects of family life, household life, everything related to our children.
And for women especially - it's a lot.
Dr Elyse McNeil has been a clinical psychologist for nearly a decade and has recently completed a PhD on the topic of mental labour. Through her work at Share to Thrive she is creating education and information for couples to significantly improve the way they manage mental labour and improve their relationship. She lives on the beautiful Gold Coast with her husband and little boy.
Today we chat about:
- What is mental labour and why does it fall moreso on the shoulders of women?
- How can we help our partners to understand the mental load?
- How can we have productive and respectful conversations around mental labour without inviting defensiveness or conflict?
- What are some practical ways that we can better share the mental labour?
- What are some systems we can put in place to make things feel a little more fair?
Note that this research was conducted on heterosexual couples and more research is required to apply to all families.
Dr Elyse's brand new course Share to Thrive is available now and she has kindly gifted our Mama Chatters listeners with a 25% discount using code MMLISTENERS.
https://mentallabour.sharetothrive.com/
TRANSCRIPT
53 min