Follow the show:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Everywhere else
If you’ve ever asked for help but still felt like everything lives in your brain…this episode is for you. I walk through why delegating tasks isn’t actually solving your mental load and what it really takes to step out of being the family “project manager.” We’re talking about ownership, control, and the subtle ways you’re unintentionally staying at the center of everything—and how to shift it for good.
In this episode, we unpack:
Why asking for help doesn’t eliminate the mental load
The difference between delegating tasks vs. delegating ownership
How control (and perfectionism) keeps you stuck as the default parent
Why letting your partner fail is necessary for real change
A simple shift that gets everything out of your head and into shared responsibility
Work with me:
Ambitious & Balanced: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/ambitiousandbalanced
Book your Break Free From Stress Strategy Call (with free Quiz!): www.ambitiousandbalanced.com/break-free-from-stress
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.
“I’m the Default Parent” — Why Asking for Help Isn’t Solving the Problem
Okay, so let's say that you listened to the last episode and you thought, yep, hey, that's me. I'm the default parent. I'm the one remembering the school emails and signing the forms and scheduling the appointments and registering for activities and packing the bags, noticing when something is missing.
And maybe you've already tried the very obvious solution, which is just asking for help. hey, hon, can you take him to practice tonight? Hey, would you mind grabbing the groceries on your way home? Can you handle bedtime?
And maybe your partner even does those things, but somehow you are still the one thinking about them all of the time. You're the one that still has to remember what happens next.
And that's because the problem usually isn't your partner isn't helping. The problem is that you're still the manager of the entire ecosystem.
So today, in this episode, I want to talk about what it actually takes to shift that dynamic. How to move from being sort of the family project manager to having a household where responsibility truly is shared. Because the goal isn't more help. The goal is getting your brain out of the role of running the entire household.
Okay, so let's talk about what that really takes.
So last week in the podcast, I gave you five common reasons for why women become the default parent. And let me just say, it goes far beyond just, you know, women are better at men than it, because I don't really subscribe to that at all.
I like to talk about it as if women are simply more practiced than men at managing the household. Like, literally, we practice it because we've been doing these tasks oftentimes from the beginning of parenthood. Like, we literally trained our minds to see things that our partners just simply don't see.
Not because they can't, not because they're not capable, but because we haven't given them the opportunity to see it.
Now, obviously, that's a very simplified version of the challenge, and everyone has their own relationships and their own circumstances. And that's why in last week's episode, I really tried to break down several other reasons why.
Delegating Tasks vs. Delegating Ownership: The Shift That Changes Everything
So in today's episode, we're going to talk about not just about delegation of tasks, because my assumption is most of you have already tried that, right? You ask for help, you ask your husband to handle dinner tonight, or to handle bedtime, or to give the kid a bath, or to change the diaper or whatever it is.
And that is a delegation of task. And while that might alleviate the length of your to do list and the things that you have to do, when it comes to permanently shifting the mental load and getting out of default parenthood, what is required is not just delegating tasks, it's delegation of ownership.
The Person Who Owns the Task Carries the Mental Load
Okay, let me say that again. In order to permanently shift the mental load and get out of being the default parent, what's required is not just delegating tasks, but delegating ownership.
The person that owns the task is the one that carries the mental load for it. They are the ones that are keeping tracks of the details and managing the deadlines and thinking through the impact.
Right? It's the difference between saying, hey, can you be the one that gets our kid to swim lessons this kind of go round, to complete ownership, saying, hey, would you be the one that would take full ownership of everything related to swim lessons, from signing them up to getting there, to making sure they have a towel and sunscreen and shampoo if they plan to take a shower and finding out if they move up to the level so that we could sign them up for the next round of the correct swim level.
Right? That person that owns the task is the one thinking through every bit of details from the pre planning to the visioning to the execution to the evaluation of it.
Right? It's only through delegating and letting go of ownership of task that you will truly be able to get out of being the default parent and alleviate permanently your mental load.
Three Strategies to Stop Being the Default Parent (That Are Fully Within Your Control)
So today I'm going to cover three strategies that are all within your control. Meaning we're not asking your partner to do anything, because ultimately we never have control of whether your partner does anything or not.
So these are three strategies that are completely within your control that's going to make an immense amount of impact on you being the default parent.
Strategy #1: Let Go of Control Over How (and When) Things Get Done
Okay, Strategy number one, you have to let go of control of how a task gets done and even on what timeline.
Now, I know a lot of my type A perfectionist listeners, which I know is a lot of you out there, this is really, really hard. And my hunch is, is that you don't just struggle with delegation at home, right? This is probably a challenge at work too, where you don't delegate work to your team because they're just simply not as good as doing it as you are, or they're not going to do it in the way you're going to do it.
And then your fear that you're going to create more work that you're going to have to review and edit and redo anyway, so might as well not even do that. You'll just do it yourself, right?
No, you do not get to transfer ownership of a task and control the outcome. Right? That's not true ownership.
Look, I'm going to assume that you have married or are with a very capable partner, okay? Of course they do things differently than you. They have different standards, they have different timelines, but they are capable.
At some point you're going to have to trust their capability. You're going to have to trust their opinion about how something should get done.
At the end of the day, the real question is, do you want to keep your hand in every little task, controlling every little outcome? From what your kids are going to get packed for lunch today, to when swimming practices are, or if they're involved in certain activities, or what time they go to bed, or even what bedtime looks like.
At the end of the day, you're going to have to choose which one of those tasks and outcomes are really important to you and feel like non negotiables, and which ones you can let go of so that you free up some of that mental space and energy.
Now, I can tell you that when my kiddos were babies, I was diligent about their sleep routine, about what they ate. Like those two areas of parenting I needed to have like complete control over.
I wanted to control the outcome, which meant that I was the one often putting them to sleep. I was making their food, I was introducing new foods, I was thinking through what kinds of foods I wanted them to eat.
I didn't have any resentment towards my husband for that. I was choosing to be the default parent and control the outcomes of those particular tasks because they were very important to me.
But not everything gets to be your top priority.
This isn't about lowering expectations too. I just want to be clear on that. It's about choosing what really matters most to you.
Cleanliness of house, the food your family eats, bedtime routines or sleeping regimens, promptness of communication, vacation planning, child care options, and cost.
Not everything deserves your best energy and attention. So which things do you want to hold on to? And which outcomes do you want to let go of.
Why Letting Them Fail Is Required to Shift Out of Default Parenting
Now, this leads directly into strategy two, because I can hear a lot of it now, right? This sort of lack of belief that if you transfer ownership of something to your partner, they're even going to do it, right? It's going to take constant reminding and nagging.
Which, by the way, if you are reminding or nagging, that is a clear sign that you have not, in fact, transferred ownership.
Just to be clear, if you transfer ownership of something to your partner, something in the household, something that they've never done before or really had to think about before or planned before, likely they're going to fail the first time around, right?
They're going to miss a deadline, they're going to miss something in the schedule. They're going to forget to pack something that the kid needs, right? It might be a total and absolute disaster. Your kid might be a mess because of the impact it will have on them.
But them getting it wrong and failing and missing the mark, it's not because they're not capable of doing it again. They're just out of practice. They literally have never practiced having to think through all of those details before.
And some amount of failure is required in order to take on ownership.
Okay? So strategy number two is to let them fail. Let them learn all the things they need to learn in order to fully own whatever the task is that you're transferring ownership of.
A Real-Life Example of Delegating Ownership (From “Drop the Ball” by Tiffany Dufu)
Now, I think one of the greatest examples of this that I could ever give you comes from a book that I read called Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less by Tiffany Dufu. If you have not read this book, I highly recommend it. It was really, really good.
But there's this really great story that Tiffany walks us through about transferring ownership of tasks with her husband. Now, after this period of time that her husband and she went kind of through all of the household managing tasks and divvied them up and all the things, it wasn't too long after that that her husband took a job in Africa.
So they, I believe, lived in New York City. He moved to Africa, like permanently moved, and he only came back every, I'm going to say, six to eight weeks, but I really don't remember how often it was. So he would come back for a very short, like long weekend or something like that, then go back to this job that he had in Africa.
So that was their dynamic. Very interesting dynamic, right?
What Happens When You Truly Let Go of Ownership (Even When It’s Uncomfortable)
But just before he moved, they had done this delegation of tasks between the two of them. And one of the tasks that her husband took on was the mail.
He took full ownership of everything related to the mail—that was picking up the mail, opening all of the mail, handling any pieces of the mail that needed handling, from paying bills to answering invitations, things like that.
And then he moved. And they never really had a conversation around what to do with the mail. And so in Tiffany's mind, though, it was still her husband's job because he was still a part of this household, that he was going to take care of the mail. But it didn't appear that he had any plan on how he was going to do it.
But it wasn't her job. She had transferred ownership.
And so weeks and weeks and weeks went by of the mail piling up. And I believe the nanny went to pick up the mail at that point and would bring it into the house and would leave it on the counter.
And this mail pile got so and so high, so much so after weeks and weeks, the nanny was like, do you want me to take care of that? And Tiffany was like, nope, my husband, he said he was going to do it, and I trust that he will do it. He has full ownership over it.
And I believe it was a couple of months before her husband came home. And you can imagine how high this pile of mail went, the bills that were in it. She knew there were a couple traffic tickets that needed to get taken care of. She learned that she had missed some birthday party invitations that came in the mail because she never opened a single one.
Let Them Learn: Why You Can’t Take Back Ownership (Even When It’s Hard)
Now, it was one of the most difficult things, and this is such a great chapter to read. She talks about the internal turmoil that she went through as she saw this pile of mail every single day.
And so he came home for the first time for a visit, and he was like, hey, babe, what's up with the mail? And she was like, oh, that was what we delegated to you. You're taking full ownership of the mail, so I assumed that you were going to take care of it when you got home.
And you could just see this little light bulb moment for him. He was like, oh, yeah, okay.
So he spent, apparently, days opening the mail and dealing with all of the mail while he was home from living in Africa. And sure enough, he always figured out how to take care of the mail from then on out.
He made a plan. I don't remember what that plan was, but he took ownership and decided what that plan was going to be for how he would deal with the mail, even though at months at a time, he didn't actually live in the house, right?
Tiffany had to let her husband fail in order for him to have the learning and to strategically think out what he needed to do to be successful at owning that task for the family.
So strategy number two, you gotta let them fail. You can't take back ownership. You have to trust that they will figure it out. Maybe it will take 5, 10 times of failing and tweaking and realizing the impact it's having on everyone else around them, but they will learn.
Strategy number three, stop presenting yourself as the default parent. Meaning when the teachers are connecting to the parents at the beginning of the school year, make sure your partner is included in all of the communications. When a form asks for your email address, put yours and your partner's. When you're coordinating childcare, add your partner to the text thread. Right?
Stop Being the Communication Hub: How to Break the Default Parent Pattern
Over the last few years, I have started doing this on a number of different fronts with my husband. And it gets so much easier to inform him of things and to remember to tell him things when he's just simply in the initial communication to begin with.
Right? Communication with your teachers, coordination of birthday party details with a parent, or after school pickups or gift giving threads that are going around with your family at the holiday times, or social invitations that you're accepting.
Right? One of the greatest things you could do is stop being the center of all of the communication in your family by decentralizing yourself and adding in your partner.
When you do that, you're actually giving them an opportunity to, one, see all of the things that you are holding and communicating and organizing. Two, you're giving them an opportunity to potentially step in and say, oh, I'll take care of that. And three, you're kind of letting them in on all of the various activities that are going on so you don't have to remember to update them.
I can't tell you how often I have conversations, particularly like with my mom, about something that we're doing with them or some sort of small detail that feels inconsequential to me, but I don't tell my husband. So then he gets surprised.
Surprised when, hey, my brother shows up when we're going over for dinner. He's like, I didn't know they were coming. It was like, oh, yeah, I never told you that.
If I had just added him to the text thread, so I wasn't the central hub of that communication, he would have known and I wouldn't have had to communicate it.
Stop Being the Default Parent: The Shift That Finally Relieves the Mental Load
So here you go. Three strategies to help you no longer be the default parent in your household and to permanently alleviate you as the centralized household manager.
So if you take anything from this episode, let it be this. The goal is not to get them to help. The goal is to stop being the one that is holding everything in your head.
And that shift doesn't happen because you explain things perfectly or because you remind more, or because you try harder to delegate. It happens when you change the internal structure in the family system, when you move from delegating tasks to delegating ownership, when you allow things to be done differently, when you stop stepping in to fix or finish things, and when you stop being the person that everything has to run through.
That's how the default parent dynamic starts to change permanently.
Now, it's not overnight, but in real small, intentional shifts that will add up over time.
And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, but how do I actually do this in my life with my partner, in my specific situation? That's exactly what we will figure out together inside my Break Free from Stress strategy call.
In this 30 minute conversation, we will look at exactly what is keeping you stuck in that default parent role and map out one clear shift that will start to relieve some of that mental load right away.
You can find the link to book that in the show notes, the Break Free from Stress Strategy call, and I will see you here next week. Until then, 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.
