Discussion keeps the world turning.
You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Steve Hatherly today with Yishan and Feifei.
Coming up, ever ask your kid to help clean up a mess and they genuinely look confused like they don't even see the mess at all?
Well, turns out there's a name for that.
Cognitive labor.
And it doesn't stop with kids coming up.
We'll get into it.
And by the end of our chat, you might start seeing your own house and the people who live in it completely differently.
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You've done this, I'm sure, if you're a parent, because every parent has done this at some point.
You look at your kid standing in a room that is a total mess, clothes on the floor, dishes on the tables, backpacks exploded, seemingly, in the hallway, and you say, hey, can you help me clean this up?
They genuinely look around the room and they say, bleh.
Help with what?
Well, your first instinct as a parent perhaps is to think that they're lying, or at least stalling, or maybe even being sarcastic on purpose.
But there's real research out there suggesting that they're not lying at all.
And once you understand why, it stops being a story about messy kids' rooms entirely.
It starts being a story about how invisible work gets divided in every household at every age, including the one that you might be standing in the middle of right now with all of your family members.
So today we're going to pull apart and dig into something researchers call cognitive labor.
We're going to learn what it is, what it's all about, and why it's so important.
Important, especially, well, I don't know, I was gonna say especially for kids and parents.
Not so, not so.
But it might, it's not just for the kids to learn.
But since I mentioned kids, let's start there.
I said it in the opening, didn't I?
That kids, when you say, hey, help me clean up the mess, and they say, what mess?
Why is it that they genuinely, really cannot see what you can see?
Does that sound familiar, Feifei?
Well, it sounds familiar.
I'm not talking referring to my kids, but my husband for these kids.
Yes.
So, but I find it very interesting is because in 2020, actually, this is where this theory basically comes from or part of it.
An American mom called Kate, she went home and she told her two kids, one aged nine, one six at the time,
To look around the house and clean up what needs cleaning.
And they, the kids, they froze and stood there, not really fighting her, not really ignoring her, just stuck, saying, help with what?
For me, you know, I'll be getting really frustrated and then clean it myself.
Yeah, because you assume the children can see what you can see, and they are choosing to ignore you completely.
Yeah, or they just don't care.
But what the moms did is something very different.
So instead of giving up on the ask,
She got curious about that freeze that her children gave her herself and she tried something else.
She set a timer about 15 minutes for the younger kid
And 20 to 30 minutes for the older one and had her kid walk around the house with one job, notice what needs attention and then take care of it.
She didn't really have a list for them.
That's what also some of the moms would try or no instructions on what counts.
So the first few rounds,
The kid noticed basically almost nothing.
So nothing actually got cleaned.
She didn't push it.
But instead, she walked around with them.
And instead of pointing things out herself, she asked questions like, what do you see on this floor that could be picked up?
And then they work out together where things actually belonged.
For example, the pajamas go to the laundry basket upstairs, for example.
Every time the timer went off, she thanked them no matter how little got done.
Oh, because she set the timer for what was it?
15 for the six year old, 20 for the nine year old.
So every time the timer went.
So this was the experiment.
She set the timer, walk around the house and she doesn't say, hey, pick that up, do this, clean that.
She just asked the kids to walk around.
Walk around and what do you see that needs to be cleaned?
And then when you said when the timer went off, mom said, thank you very much for doing that.
Even though they just, for example, pick up a cup or pajamas.
Okay.
As little as that.
And then slowly it starts to change.
So it went further than she expected.
It went further beyond picking up pajamas and putting it in the laundry basket.
Six years later, she says, her kids don't just notice physical mess around.
They notice emotional things, too.
Their mom's having a really rough day and she could use a hug and they went and hug her.
That's very warming and touching.
So apparently this way of setting the timer, not pushing the kid, not giving them a list, just...
Sort of working together with them to figure out what is wrong with this place, what you can do on your own has really worked.
What that mom did in 2020 was completely by accident.
But what she stumbled upon
Was cognitive labor.
So let's talk about what that is and how it applies.
There are actually similar expressions in Chinese, right?
They're just less academic in Chinese.
We actually say 有眼力见, or 眼里有火.
Basically, just being observant and knowing what needs to be done without having to be told.
So that's kind of a compliment of somebody who knows what to do mostly in the workplace.
But this cognitive labor is about knowing what that means is the key to unlocking this kind of whole puzzle.
And it turns out there's real academic research behind exactly what this mom stumbled onto.
A sociologist, Alison Deminger, who conducted her landmark 2019 study as a doctoral candidate at Harvard and is now on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin Medicine.
So this university and the study is something that she calls cognitive labor.
Yeah.
So cognitive labor is the noticing, then it's the paying attention to something that needs to be done before it actually before you are asked to do it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's the mental work behind the task.
I think on some Chinese social media platform is called invisible labor.
It's the attention for, it's separated from the physical act of doing it.
So the sociologist defines it in four distinct parts.
First one is anticipating, is noticing something needs attention before anyone points it out.
And the second part is identifying, is figuring out the options for handling it.
And the third one is deciding, is choosing between them.
And the final one is monitoring, meaning following up to make sure it actually got done and stays done.
Okay, so anticipating, that's when you notice something.
It's just actually noticing something.
That's why you said the mental work.
Yes, it's something like you go to your fridge and you look at the fridge and noticing that the milk is running out.
Mm-hmm.
And then you are thinking, yes, somebody needs to purchase their milk.
And then that is the anticipating and identifying.
And then you got to decide which supermarket, which brand, what size of milk you need to purchase.
That's the deciding part.
And then you make sure somebody definitely went to the market and pick up that milk.
I was thinking, do you think that's something about one person's personality?
Because we know that MBTI has the J person and P person.
J means they're more organized.
P is more like they're following the flow and everything.
So in this case...
Somebody who knows when to buy new milk, what brand, is somebody who is more organized.
Or another way, they know they are responsible to do that.
So according to the research, noticing, the ability to notice is not a personality trait.
I know what you mean.
People will sometimes say like, oh, I'm not a details person.
And by the way, this is not restricted to the home.
You can apply this cognitive labor theory to the office too.
But we'll just, since we're talking about kids and apparently husbands today, we'll stick in the house for now.
Yeah, people say, oh, I'm not a details person, right?
But the data from that study suggests that it is learned.
Cognitive labor is something that is learned.
It's not innate.
It's not something that you are born with.
It is shaped within a person by practice and environment.
The research says it's like riding a bike or driving a car or something like that.
You don't innately know how to ride a bike.
You have to learn how to do it.
It's a skill.
So therefore-
According to this research, you don't innately see that the milk carton is almost empty and needs to be replaced and start the wheels turning in your brain.
Okay, I need to make a note of that.
I'll go to the shop and make sure I get the right kind of milk.
According to this research, that is not a natural thing for everyone.
It needs to be taught.
And that's why that mom walked around the house with her kids saying, pay attention first.
Notice first, act later.
So she's basically had developed her own course to teach and train her kids about this cognitive labor, about anticipating, identifying problems and then make decisions and then also monitor, make sure the tasks actually get done.
Yeah.
So let's talk about your house, Fei-Fei.
You said more than your kids.
Yeah, because that was what I was thinking, because I'm the one who's doing a lot of this cognitive labor around the house.
And apparently, it is, according to statistics and numbers, it is mom's.
Around the world who are doing the majority of the heavy lifting for cognitive labor in the household.
Apparently, men are only good at the decision-making part.
Only decision making?
Yeah, the women in the house, the moms in the house do the other, the deciding factor.
They think they're doing the decision making, but actually it's just us telling them.
You're tricking them.
So do you, all of this theory, do you see it applied in your house, I wonder?
On some level, yes.
I think, for example, the American mom's way of training her kids to teaching the details about the cognitive labor.
She never really, you know, she's sort of teaching them how to make decisions and get things done independently.
She didn't give them annual orders.
Any instructions.
And I think, yes, being independent is something you need to taught to your kid.
And if you didn't really teach that kid about being independent, about anticipating and noticing some of the problems,
Maybe they won't have that ability as an adult later in their life.
And that is, I think, why Steve mentioned a lot of the women in households are doing the heavy lifting when it comes to cognitive labor is because
Most of the time, boys were not taught with this kind of skill.
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that because the University of Michigan did a study and what they found was that a long time ago.
Uh
Young girls aged 5 to 14 spent about 40 more time on household chores of boys their age now if you fast forward to later uh on in life for those kids the same data from 2015 they found that the kids gap uh
Had specifically narrowed to near parity.
Sorry, it was 2014.
Boys were doing about 27 minutes of housework a day compared to girls 30 minutes.
So there used to be a gap in the amount of work they were doing, right?
But what hadn't changed according to that study from Michigan is the adult gap.
The children's gap was diminishing.
The adult gap wasn't.
So married women in that same study were still doing roughly twice as much housework as married men compared to the same time period from before.
That's a really interesting result from that.
And what I take from that is that
So newer parents are teaching their kids, young boys and young girls, hey, you're both responsible, okay?
Cognitive labor, notice it, act on it, clean it up, whatever.
But we haven't gotten to the generation where those kids have grown up.
Yet and we're still seeing in america according to that data that there's a division here and and according to the research part of the blame is cognitive labor
Men just don't pay attention to that stuff
Do you think that's a fair criticism
I feel that, as I mentioned before, it's kind of a sense of responsibility thing to every individual.
One thing is that even for the girls and for the women in the family, they were not...
Taught about these kind of cognitive labor for a lot of time and for my own experience and more like if I'm living alone, I kind of self-taught.
That kind of cognitive labor because I need to make my room clean.
I need to buy my own milk.
That is the thing that I discovered, okay, I need to be responsible for all of these things.
But you were forced to learn.
And I don't want you know, there are other studies, too, by the way, in case you thinking that I'm sitting here man bashing.
I'm not.
There was a 2023 University of Bath study.
That's Bath, England, found that in dual earner earner couples, women carry roughly 71 percent of the household's cognitive labor.
So it can be anybody, by the way, anyone who wasn't taught how to do this.
But if you were a kid and let's say you grew up, maybe you had a nanny.
Or you had a mom or a dad who did everything for you.
They cleaned your room.
They helped you with your homework.
They made all your meals for you.
They took out the trash for you.
You didn't have any household chores.
Well, you might think, especially if you're a kid, wow, that sounds amazing.
But what isn't learned there is cognitive labor.
So that young kid who didn't learn how to recognize things early in life will eventually grow up into an adult male or female.
So can we blame them if they've never actually been taught?
What I'm saying is, if you get mad at your partner or your co-worker because you feel like, how can they not...
How can you not see this?
It's just they've never been taught.
They don't even see it in the first place.
Can we teach them the way that American mom trained her kids?
Yes.
And you can teach this to adults, too.
So maybe on some level, we sort of give them, I'm not sure if it's the right word, quote unquote, permission to make mistakes.
Let the house be messy once in a while.
Let them noticing the problem themselves and then fixing that problem themselves.
And slowly they were able to develop this cognitive labor ability to noticing, anticipating and identifying and deciding and monitoring problems.
And I think, yeah, that can be helpful.
I'll try that at my household.
This is tested.
There's an author.
Her name is Eve Rodsky, and she developed a system called the fair play method specifically to address this issue.
So it uses a set of 100 cards, each representing a specific household or family responsibility.
And the rule is.
Whoever owns a card owns the entire task from start to finish.
The anticipating, the deciding, and the monitoring, not just the physical execution.
So that, to use the milk example, if you get the milk card in the house, right, it means you're responsible for the milk.
You are the person who pays attention.
When it starts to run low, you alert the person who needs to buy it and they go and do it.
And the idea of that card game is it divides up responsibilities around the house.
My question is, is if you say to your partner who's a 45-year-old adult, okay,
Some card game.
Here's what we're going to do because you don't have the ability to put the toothpaste cap back on the toothpaste.
We're going to play a card game.
Guess what?
You're responsible for the toothpaste from start to finish in cognitive labor.
I can't see this going very well in the relationship.
It's quite condescending, I feel.
And on the other side of the coin is that I don't want that partner to be able to have this cognitive labor, to have that decision-making ability in the first place.
What do you mean?
I don't want us debating or discussing about which brand of milk should we purchase.
I just want to be a simple execution.
I told you to buy this brand of milk, you get it done, and that's easy.
So that is why I think on some level maybe they're not able to have this cognitive labor abilities it's making things easier because
See, that's another gray area.
You need to develop that skill but not too high so that you can have a space for discussion and then also decide who can decide.
The deciding power.
Just very quickly, Yuxin, do you feel like your cognitive labor ability has strengthened since you've started living alone?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, it gets easier, right?
Yeah, and I started to notice what needed to be done.
Yeah, I don't know.
Don't play that card game with your adults in the house.
You might go wrong.
That's it for today's roundtable for Yushan and Feifei.
I'm Steve Hatherly.
Thanks for being with us, and we'll see you next time.
