71%
of the mental load lands on mom
In a University of Bath study of 3,000 US parents, mothers managed 71% of household mental-load tasks — and 79% of the daily ones, like tracking feeds and the family calendar.
The mental load · for first-time parents
You can’t share a mental load you can’t see.
Researchers can now put numbers on what new parents feel: mothers end up managing about 71% of the household’s mental load — while most fathers honestly describe the split as even. Nobody is lying. Feeds, wake-ups and the running when-is-the-next-one tally just don’t leave a trace for the other person to see. mybabynotes puts the whole day on both phones, with a name on every entry — the work becomes visible without anyone having to announce it.
No per-person scoreboards, ever · Four-tap logging · Works offline at 3am · Open source (AGPL)
What the research actually shows
It’s not an effort gap. It’s a visibility gap.
Study after study finds the same pattern in new parents: the work skews hard toward one partner, both partners overestimate their own share, and the disagreement is mostly about the labor neither of them can see.
“Equal”
is how most dads see the same week
Pew finds 63% of working moms say they do more of the day-to-day parenting; dads are far more likely to call it evenly split. Both answers are sincere — they’re looking at different halves of the day.
−5 hrs
the slide starts with baby #1
Ohio State followed dual-earner couples who split work evenly — until the first baby. Afterward, men’s housework fell by about five hours a week while women’s total load grew. Nobody decided this; it drifted.
67%
of new moms feel the relationship dip
In the Gottman Institute’s longitudinal research, 67% of mothers reported declining relationship satisfaction in the first years after a baby. Unseen labor — and the resentment it breeds — is a big part of why.
Sources: University of Bath / Journal of Marriage & Family (2024) · Pew Research Center · Ohio State New Parents Project · The Gottman Institute
How a shared log changes it
Close the visibility gap and the fairness fight loses its fuel.
mybabynotes wasn’t built as relationship software — it’s a baby log. But one log shared by the whole household, live on every phone, works directly on the mechanism those studies describe: labor that only one of you can see.
Every entry says who
Each feed, diaper and wake-up lands in the shared timeline with the time and the person who did it. The 4am bottle you gave is just there when your partner wakes up — no recap, no “by the way, I was up twice.” Credit without a speech; visibility without surveillance.
On duty is a button, not a vibe
“I thought you had him” is the classic new-parent fight, and it’s really an ownership bug. Covers make who-has-the-baby explicit, and taking over a deliberate act — started outright or asked for and accepted, with an “until” time you both agreed to. When nobody’s covering, that’s said out loud too: you’re both on.
The rhythm leaves one head
The Bath study’s worst number — 79% of daily tracking on one parent — is exactly the part an app can carry. When you accept a handoff, the plan is drafted from the baby’s actual rhythm: next feeds, meds, amounts. A full night solo, no twenty-question briefing first.
History settles it gently
Remember the Pew gap — she says she does more, he says it’s even? Seven days of feeds, diapers and sleep, exactly as they happened, means that conversation starts from one shared week instead of two exhausted memories. The end-of-cover summary replaces the “so when did you…” interrogation entirely.
One thing it deliberately doesn’t do: per-person totals. There’s no leaderboard, no “you: 12, them: 31.” The log exists so you both can see the baby’s day — the fairness conversation is still yours to have, just with the facts already on the table.
If you’re the dad reading this
Three moves that shift the load this week.
-
1
Log everything you already do
Four taps per entry. Not for credit — so the next person never starts blind, and so the work you do at 2am exists somewhere other than your own memory.
-
2
Take a real shift, on the record
Not “I’ll watch him while you nap” — a handoff. Tap accept, follow the drafted plan, own the night until the “until” time. Your partner sleeps because it’s explicit, not because she’s listening through the door. (Here’s the night-shift schedule that works.)
-
3
Look at History together on Sundays
Five minutes, same screen. Not to score last week — to plan the next one: who’s carrying the nights, what trade would actually help, what to hand to a grandparent.
Fair questions
Doesn’t tracking turn parenting into scorekeeping?
It’s the opposite, in practice. Scorekeeping is what happens without a record — someone has to recite their effort out loud to be seen. With a shared log the facts are just there, attached to the baby’s day, and there are deliberately no per-person totals or rankings anywhere in the app.
Can an app really lighten the mental load?
It can carry one specific piece: the remembering. When the last feed, the next med and the day’s rhythm live in a shared log instead of one parent’s head, either of you can take over without a briefing. The rest — actually trading shifts, actually talking — is still on you two, and no app should promise otherwise. (Sleep helps more than any software.)
What if my partner won’t use another app?
Start alone. Even one person logging makes handoffs work — whoever takes over sees the last feed and the drafted plan without asking. Most partners join once they’ve been on the receiving end of a handoff that didn’t need a briefing. It installs from the browser (no app store), and each log is four taps.
Make the load visible. Split it on purpose.
One shared log for the whole household — on our server or yours.