I had one of those moments again where my kid asked me for something while my partner was sitting right there, and it made me realize how many of us have quietly become the default parent without ever deciding to. In this episode, I’m breaking down why that happens, not from a place of blame, but from understanding. Because when you see how this dynamic forms over time, it becomes so much easier to change it. If you’ve been carrying the mental load and wondering how it all ended up on your plate, this is going to give you a completely different perspective.
In this episode, we unpack:
What it really means to be the default parent (hint: it’s not about doing more tasks)
How childhood conditioning and early motherhood wire this pattern in
Why practice—not ability—keeps you stuck holding the mental load
The hidden role of perfectionism and standards in keeping control
How small daily patterns quietly turn into a one-person system
Work with me:
Ambitious & Balanced: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced
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Transcript
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms podcast, your go to resource for integrating your career ambitions with life as a mom, I'm distilling down thousands of coaching conversations I've had with working moms just like you, along with my own personal experience as a mom of two and sharing the most effective tools and strategies to help you quickly feel calm, confident, and in control of your ambitious working mom life. You ready? Let's get to it.
The Invisible Shift Into Being the Default Parent
Have you ever had one of those moments where your child asks you for something and your spouse or partner is literally, like, sitting right there? You're literally in the same room, and your child looks at you and says,
Mom, do you know where my cleats are?
Mom, can you get me a snack?
Mom, can you sign this form? Mom, what's for dinner?
And your partner's right there, right? They are fully capable of answering all of those questions or helping out, but somehow the request is still going to you.
Now, if you're a working mom listening to this, chances are that you've experienced this moment many times, just like I have. And what that moment usually reveals is something much deeper.
You've become what many people would call the default parent. The one who remembers the schedules and notices what's missing and tracks the emails from the school and signs the forms and registers the kids for activities and anticipates what's coming next.
A couple of episodes ago on this podcast, we talked a lot about the mental load, like the invisible running list that is in your brain that never really shuts off, right?
And for so many moms, being the default parent is actually where that mental load begins.
So today, I want to talk about why this happens. Not from a place of blame, but from a place of understanding. Because most women don't wake up one day and decide, “I'm the one that's going to manage my entire family system today.” Right?
It usually happens over time, and once you understand how that dynamic forms, it becomes so much easier to change it.
Why Moms Become the Default Parent Without Realizing It
So this week, it's all about why this happens. Next week on the podcast, we're going to talk about how you actually make that change without guilt, without resentment.
So the way I define default parent, if you will, in quotes there, it's the one that most of the time, or on default, tracks and notices and remembers and decides for the family system, for the household. Right?
Notice that it's not necessarily about doing tasks. You could have an amazing partner that, you know, does their part, meaning that they do their fair share of the tasks around the household, but they don't experience the weight of being the default parent because they still have to be told or delegated to in order to do those tasks. Right?
That's why the topic of being the default parent is so interrelated with the mental load that we often carry as working moms.
Because it's not really about the number of things that we have to do that exhausts us at the end of the day. It's about remembering and tracking and the decision making that goes into those tasks.
And so when we are the default of the household and we don't operate in a system where our partner shares in the remembering of the tracking and the deciding, and it sort of all falls on us, that is a very exhausting, mentally draining position to be in.
Why This Isn’t About Blaming Your Partner
But here's the thing. This episode is not going to be about harping on our partners. I know it's really easy to blame them for not being the default parent, for sort of not pulling their weight and putting it all on us, but it's really not that black and white.
There's some really, really clear reasons for why we as women tend to be the default parent. And once you truly understand those reasons, it's going to get so much easier to figure out a solution to it.
So I've broken this up into six clear reasons that I'm going to cover here briefly, each one, and we're going to start with conditioning.
How Childhood Conditioning Shapes the Default Parent Role
And I mean, we really sort of have to start here because most of us saw our mothers as the default parent, right? Most of us. Not all of us. And again, that doesn't mean we didn't have very active fathers or great relationships with our dads.
But we likely saw our mom as being the household manager, right? The one that kept the house clean, that made sure that we were at events on time, that made sure we had cupcakes at our birthday, signed our permission slips, right?
And I know many listeners here likely even had a stay-at-home mom. That happens all of the time. When I'm on breakthrough calls with women that are interested in working with me and coaching, they tell me that the only example they ever had was their mom who was a stay-at-home mom, right?
Who obviously was the default parent because they spent most of the time with the kids.
And when that is our example, when it's our moms that demonstrated to us how to run a household, then it makes sense that we assume those roles ourselves. It's not like a cognitive or really conscious decision.
It's just something that we take on. It's something we assume or sort of conditioned on some level to accept because we grew up with it.
Why New Moms Naturally Become the Default Parent
But there's a second reason that sort of falls under this category of conditioning, and that is that most women want to be the default parent immediately after their babies are born, right?
During the newborn phase. And beyond want, it's actually a necessity on some level, right? If you breastfed your child and had the option of doing that, your child was literally dependent on you for food. You were the only one, right?
When they wanted nourishment, they came to you.
And when our babies are really little like that, this is such an important bonding time for us as moms. We want to hold them all of the time. We want the skin-to-skin contact with them. We want to be there when they cry and attend to their cries, right?
Men can listen so much longer to a baby crying than a woman can. It's sort of part of our mommy bear instinct. Like our hormones literally flood through our body as a protective measure to keep our babies safe.
So right from the moment our babies are born, we sort of assume the role of default parent in that newborn stage.
How Early Patterns Turn Moms Into the Default Parent
Which really then leads to the third reason that women become the default parent. We condition ourselves, and we condition then our partners to think that because we're the default parent in the newborn stage, then we're the ones that are going to take care of our kids' needs as they get older, right?
Again, none of this is very conscious. It just sort of is what happened. It's because that's what we have been doing. We sort of assume that those caretaking responsibilities of our children are going to continue.
Meaning it literally becomes a pattern. We get in a habit of hearing their cry and anticipating their need.
And our partners don't develop that same instinct or habit because they're not given the opportunity.
The Pattern That Keeps Moms as the Default Parent
How many of you, when your baby was born and heard them cry, wanted to be the one to get up and go attend to their need? I certainly was.
And how many of you had that dynamic where, if you were too tired or too exhausted to go attend to them, would say, “Honey, would you please go take care of her?” Right?
You literally, you started that pattern really early on of saying, I'm going to be the one that's going to go attend to them because I want to. And if I don't want to in some moment, I'm going to delegate that responsibility to my partner.
The pattern started really, really early, right? And continues as our kids get older, right?
How Moms Become the Go-To for Everyday Parenting Tasks
So let me give you some of those examples. If you're a parent that is consistently the one that gives your toddler a snack when they're hungry, right? Because your kid comes to you and is like, “Mom, can I have a snack?” then you get really familiar with what snacks they like, how much snacks they might be hungry for, like how much is appropriate for them.
And you might even be thinking about all of the different food they had that day, and so what kind of snack is appropriate. Should it be an apple or an orange? Or is it okay if they have the chips right now or the cookies right now, right?
You know all of these things because you've literally been practicing attending to your child and their snack needs.
Why Dads Don’t Build the Same Parenting Habits
Your partner, on the other hand, because you've been the one that's been doing that, does not have a whole lot of practice at doing that, is not very attentive, doesn't even have the knowledge of what snacks your child might want.
And then of course, this becomes this sort of cyclical cycle because it just gets easier for you to be the one that gives the snack.
And so your child learns ultimately to come to you for the snack because that's the pattern that the household is in.
And it's easier for you to just do it than to download all of that information to your partner.
Now, that doesn't mean that your partner isn't willing. It certainly doesn't mean that they're not capable. You're simply more practiced at it, right? You're in a pattern of it.
Why Moms Carry the Mental Load for Kids’ Activities
My kids are at an age when they're playing a lot of sports right now. And with sports, of course, comes a whole checklist of things that come along with it, right?
You've got to have the proper equipment, you've got to pack a water bottle, you might need sunscreen, a hat. There is, when are the practice times happening? Those have to be tracked. What location, potentially pickup times, snack schedules.
And if you've traditionally been the one that tracks and organizes and keeps your kids' sports schedules and tasks sort of organized, right, it makes sense that your partner doesn't step in to do that.
Or if they do, they need a whole lot of coaching in order to do it well, because they've never really done it before. They've never had the practice of thinking about those things and going through the mental checklist of what's needed before the kid goes to practice or to a game, right?
It's not that they can't do it or that they're not capable of doing it or even that you're better at it than them. I think a lot of the time the most helpful way for us to think about it is that we simply are more practiced at it.
I've said it I don't know how many times now.
The Lie That Moms Are “Better” at Parenting and Household Management
And then, of course, that leads to the fourth reason why women are more likely to be the default parent. If we're more practiced at it, we also start to believe the lie that we're better at it.
Come on, really?
Before you and your partner were even together, somehow they functioned without you, right? Somehow they got themselves through school, got dressed every day, turned their schoolwork in most of the time, figured out how to get a job, figured out how to eat every day, maybe even cook a couple of meals, right?
The standards might not be the same, but you're not better at it than they are. Again, you're likely more practiced, but it doesn't make you better. Your brain has had more opportunity to organize, remember, create systems, track likes and dislikes and needs. You're not better at doing any of that.
And I ultimately just don't think that's a helpful belief for us to have, to believe that women are better than men at the household organization or the default parenting. Because when we believe that our partners don't do it as well as we do it or can't do it as well as we can, we sort of put them at a disadvantage, right? We sort of think down upon them in some way.
And I can't imagine they appreciate that. And I certainly don't want to be married to a partner where I'm thinking like they're not capable.
But that does lead to 0.5 here, right? Which I'm already sort of hinting at. It's not that you're better at it than them. It could be that your standards are different.
This is where perfectionism comes in, right? And where certain type A personalities have a really hard time letting go. And likely that doesn't just happen at home, it happens at work too, right?
Why Letting Go (and Letting Them Fail) Changes Everything
Let's go back to the sports example, right? If you relinquish everything around your kids' sports to your partner, meaning they're fully in charge of getting the kids packed for sports, their bag packed, remembering to take the bag, making sure their clothes get washed, making sure they sign up for the snack schedule, right, all the things related to that, they're likely not going to do it the same way you do it.
They might be behind. They might forget to wash the kid's jersey, right? They might even accidentally miss a kid's practice from time to time. But let me tell you, the first time that happens and they have to face it, when their kid is super upset at them because they're wearing a stinky, gross shirt or because they made it to the game late because their dad didn't pick them up on time, they're going to learn from that.
Our partners are going to get better at caring and organizing themselves and their tasks when we give them the opportunity to do it and fail at it. That's how all of us learned, right?
Somewhere along the way, we learned that our kids don't like wearing smelly shirts, and so we have to remember to wash them after every game or every practice, right? Somewhere along the way we learn that our kid prefers the blue cup instead of the red cup, and so we give them the blue one all of the time, right?
We've learned through failure too. And now it's time for our partners to have some of that opportunity as well.
How Women Become the Default Parent Without Realizing It
Of course, we're going to get more into that next week as we talk about some of the solutions to all of these things. You are not better than your partner at managing the household. You're more practiced at it and you've had a lot of opportunity through trial and error to figure out how to do it.
So let's step back for a moment and look at this, right? Becoming the default parent, assuming you are that one, hasn't happened through one big conscious decision, right? It has formed slowly.
It has come from what you saw when you were growing up, literally your household and how your mom functioned. It started early in those newborn years when our babies naturally rely on their mothers more. It has grown as we have learned to step in quickly and unintentionally teach our partners that we've got it all handled.
And then over time, we start to believe that we're simply better at managing all of those details. And the more we do it, the more practiced we become in noticing everything that needs attention and the less opportunity we've given our partners to do the same.
And then for many high-achieving women, of course, there's another layer. We often have strong preferences about how things should be done, which makes it, of course, harder to fully let go of certain responsibilities.
So what starts as a series of small moments eventually turns into a system where one person is holding most of the mental load for the entire family.
How to Shift Out of the Default Parent Role Without Guilt
Now, the good news is that once we see how that system is formed, we stop judging the system, we stop judging our partners, and we can start to change it.
So in the next episode, we're going to talk about what it actually looks like to shift out of the default parent role and how to redistribute responsibility in a way that doesn't create resentment or constant reminders.
And if you're listening to this and realizing that your brain feels like it's constantly running the entire household, tracking schedules, anticipating needs, remembering everything, right? That's exactly the kind of thing that I help working moms unpack in my Break Free From Stress strategy call.
It's a 30-minute private conversation with me where we will really look at what's driving your mental load in your life right now. And you're going to walk away with one specific shift where you can start relieving some of that pressure right away.
So you can find a link to book a time in the show notes, and until next week, in the next episode where we're talking all about the solution to this, let's get to it.
Ending Every Day Feeling Behind?
Hey, before you go, quick question. Are you ending most days feeling behind? No matter how much you get done?
If this is happening right now, it's not a time management problem. It's a pattern. And stress patterns don't fix themselves. They compound.
Most working moms don't actually need more time. They need to feel back in control.
Inside my Break Free from Stress Strategy Call, we spend 30 focused minutes identifying exactly what is driving your overwhelm and mapping out a clear shift, so you stop reacting and start leading your life again.
If you're tired of white-knuckling your weeks, don't put this off. Go to the show notes and click on the Break Free from Stress Strategy Call link to schedule your call right now.
All right, working moms, till next week, let's get to it.
