The six-week challenge: surviving the school summer holidays!

Schools in England break up for the summer over the next few days, and for many working parents that six-week stretch is one of the most stressful periods of the year. It is also, according to a growing body of research, one of the most cognitively demanding.

The concept of "mental load", also called cognitive household labour, refers to the invisible planning, scheduling, anticipating and remembering that keeps family life running. A landmark study in the Journal of Marriage and Family surveyed 3,000 US parents across 21 different domestic cognitive tasks. Mothers took on a significantly larger share of the daily cognitive tasks that keep the household ticking over, while fathers held more of the episodic tasks such as maintenance and finances (Weeks & Ruppanner, 2025).

Follow-up work by the same team, published in Socius in October 2025, sharpened the picture further. Analysing survey data from 2,133 partnered heterosexual US parents, the researchers found that mothers who worked full-time or earned high incomes did significantly less physical housework than lower-earning mothers, but carried just as heavy a mental load. Higher-earning fathers took on more of the daily mental tasks around children's education and activities, but not the everyday scheduling and household coordination that fell disproportionately to mothers regardless of income (Weeks et al., 2025). Income buys childcare. It does not, on this evidence, buy cognitive relief.

School holidays magnify this. The scaffolding that normally shares the load (schools, wraparound care, established routines) disappears at once. Every day needs designing. Every meal needs planning. Every activity, snack, screen limit and sibling squabble needs a decision.

This is the terrain where parental burnout develops.Parental burnout is a distinct syndrome, first properly characterised by Roskam and colleagues in Belgium, and defined by three features: overwhelming exhaustion in the parental role, emotional distancing from one's children, and a sense of parental ineffectiveness (Roskam et al., 2017). It is not the same as work burnout, and it is not simply "being tired". It has been linked to sleep disturbance, depression, and in more severe cases to escape ideation and parental neglect. Chronic stress with insufficient recovery is the underlying mechanism.

Why it matters

The summer holidays land on top of an already loaded system. Add heat, disrupted sleep, financial pressure around holiday activities and the emotional labour of managing bored, tired children, and the ingredients for burnout are all present. Mothers, on the current evidence, carry a disproportionate share of that risk.

This is not a problem to be solved by "self-care" alone. The primary driver is structural: too many decisions, too little shared responsibility, and no natural pause point in a six-week block.

Practical takeaways

1. Externalise the load. Get the mental to-do list out of your head and onto a shared family document, calendar or app that both partners (and older children) can see and update. Research on cognitive labour suggests the invisibility itself is part of the burden.
2. Redistribute at the category level, not the task level. Handing over a single task ("can you pick up the shopping?") keeps the planning with you. Handing over a category ("you own weekday breakfasts and packed activities for the next fortnight") transfers the cognitive work as well.
3. Build in genuine recovery windows. A protected two-hour block twice a week, with the other parent, a grandparent, a friend or paid childcare covering, is more protective than sporadic snatches of time.
4. Lower the bar deliberately. The evidence on parental burnout consistently identifies perfectionism and unrealistic expectations as risk factors. A "good enough" holiday, with a mix of ordinary days and a few highlights, is protective.
5. Notice the early signs. Persistent exhaustion, a growing sense of dread about parenting, and emotional flatness towards your children are all warning signals. They are not moral failings. They are the point at which the load has exceeded the resources.

The summer holidays are meant to be a break. For a lot of parents, they are anything but. Naming that honestly is the first step to changing it.

References:

1. Weeks, A. C., & Ruppanner, L. (2025). A typology of US parents' mental loads: Core and episodic cognitive labor. Journal of Marriage and Family, 87(3), 966-989. 
2. Weeks, A. C., Kowalewska, H., & Ruppanner, L. (2025). Take a load off? Not for mothers: Gender, cognitive labor, and the limits of time and money. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 11, 1-17. 
3. Roskam, I., Raes, M. E., & Mikolajczak, M. (2017). Exhausted parents: Development and preliminary validation of the Parental Burnout Inventory. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 163.