A friend asked if i wanted children. This prompted a long conversation about what i call psychological overhead and i’m curious to know if there’s a proper psychology term for it.
Psychological overhead is the amount of cognitive work that must be done to make certain that a responsibility is taken care of. In other words, if two members of a household split all chores but one is in charge of making sure that they’re split and completed, there is no equality because the psychological overhead is at play. It takes a rare housing situation for everyone to equally maintain the psychological overhead.
This connects to children because in most families that i know, one person maintains psychological overhead even when the responsibilities are purportedly shared. This is almost always the mother in a het parenting structure. This is the person who will by default take care of things or ask the partner to take care of things. In older children, this inevitably is the parent who is by-default called when something happens.
This conversation turned to queer culture and how psychological overhead plays out in marginalized populations. It is usually the queer person’s responsibility to translate society’s het structures into a model that makes sense. Queers also typically verbalize their experiences in a het structure in order to be accepted (fuck you HRC). There’s a psychological overhead of responsibility here, whereby the queer gets to do all the translation for the normative community.
Anyhow, i have to imagine that psychologists have a term for this and something that can be read. Anyone?