#37 AI-Empowered Mom | What's On Her Mind: Understanding the Mental Load with Allison Daminger

In this episode of the AI-Empowered Mom podcast, host Sarah Dooley is joined by sociologist and author Allison Daminger to unpack the invisible mental work that keeps families running and why it still falls so heavily on women.

Drawing from her book What’s on Her Mind? The Mental Workload of Family Life, Allison explains how traditional measures of household labor miss the constant anticipating, researching, organizing, and monitoring that happens inside parents’ heads. She shares insights from interviewing nearly 200 parents, including why time is the wrong metric for mental load, how the “superhuman and bumbler” dynamic shows up in many homes, and what her research revealed about different gender couples compared to queer couples.

The conversation also explores divorce and mental load, calendar partners, weaponized incompetence, and how AI could either reduce or unintentionally increase cognitive labor if it is not designed thoughtfully. Allison offers a grounded, compassionate reminder that if the mental load feels heavy, it is not a personal failure. It is a structural one.

A must listen for parents, caregivers, and anyone trying to understand why family life feels so mentally exhausting and what might actually help.