When women do invisible family labor well, it can look like they aren’t doing anything at all. The appointment gets made. Someone notices the child needs new shoes. The birthday card arrives. Grandma gets called. The family shows up for Thanksgiving. Someone remembers the medication, senses the tension, checks on the struggling sibling, and knows which relationship needs tending.
Life just appears to happen. Until the woman making it happen stops. Then everyone notices.
The Work We Don’t See
One of the first pieces that made this visible to me wasn’t a psychology study. It was an essay by anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo, “The Female World of Cards and Holidays,” about the unpaid kinship work women do to keep families connected—cards, calls, gifts, the maintenance of family as a social fact rather than just a biological one.
I remember reading it and thinking about my own photo shoots. Not just one, but many. My little family. My in-laws on both sides. My kids’ school pictures. Milestones that felt too important to skip. Each one meant scheduling, showing up, paying for it, choosing the images, ordering prints, framing some, and mailing others out as cards. Add it up over a year, and it’s not an afternoon’s worth of work. It’s days.
Nobody in my family could have told you that. I couldn’t have told you that before I started counting. It’s one of the things that makes a family feel like a family. And it’s also just work, the kind that doesn’t show up on anyone’s list of things I did that week, and rarely gets recognized as commensurate with what it actually costs.
A 2026 study by Michelle Grocke-Dewey and Nicole Wanago asked mothers to identify the invisible work involved in raising children. Collectively, they identified 124 different tasks—not just doing things, but remembering, anticipating, monitoring, planning, and worrying. Other recent research has linked mothers’ emotional and cognitive labor with greater perceived stress and poorer occupational balance.
Successful invisible labor tends to erase its own evidence. We notice the appointment that wasn’t made more readily than the dozens that were. Competence disappears into everyday life. Failure becomes visible.
And Sometimes We Watch the Fall
The current Lindsay Clancy trial is an extreme and horrific example, and the deaths of her three children should never be reduced to a story about ordinary maternal overload. Her criminal responsibility is a specific legal question involving competing claims about her mental state (as I’m writing this post, the verdict has not yet come out). But the public conversation surrounding the case is revealing. Women are talking about maternal mental health, exhaustion, responsibility, and what happens when someone who is expected to care for everyone else is profoundly unwell herself. And what about the other people in the household who should help care for the woman who is caring for everybody else?
Maybe that conversation feels familiar because women already understand the underlying rule: You can carry an enormous amount without anyone noticing, but everyone notices when you drop it. And this pattern doesn’t begin or end with motherhood.
Invisible Labor Begins Earlier, in Adult Daughterhood
We talk frequently about the invisible labor of mothers. We talk much less about the invisible labor of daughters. I study a form of family labor I call daughtering: the work women do to maintain relationships and contribute to their families from the role of daughter. My research has found daughtering to be active, effortful, and largely hidden from societal notice. In more recent research, my colleagues and I analyzed responses from 1,444 women describing what they do well as daughters. They described showing up, listening, remembering, connecting, supporting, enduring. Generally, daughters are making other people feel that they matter. Or, in another way of putting it: work. But we don’t usually call it that. They’re just good daughters.
Until a Daughter Stops
This makes the current conversation about adult-child estrangement particularly interesting. Online, some parents describe their estranged adult children as selfish, ungrateful, entitled, or too sensitive. Sometimes parents take the grievance public, telling an online audience about the child who stopped calling, stopped visiting, withheld access to grandchildren, or walked away.
And certainly, parents can be deeply hurt by estrangement. Adult children can behave badly. The existence of estrangement alone tells us very little about who was “right.” But notice what becomes visible: She left. What remains invisible is everything before that.
One woman I interviewed described years of her mother bringing up the daughter’s old boyfriend. She always spoke fondly, always “just reminiscing,” always landing, to the daughter, as a quiet commentary on the family she’d since built with someone else. She’d asked her mom to stop. Her mom laughed it off.
Then one afternoon, browsing a TJ Maxx together, her mother tried to slide in yet another update about the old boyfriend, something she’d seen on Facebook. The daughter, now married with a baby in the stroller beside her, said: I’m taking a time-out from you. The baby and I are going next door, and we won’t be ready to get back together until you’re ready to move forward in a new way.
It worked. Her mother was stunned…and then she recalibrated. They finished the afternoon together. It worked because the daughter was actually willing to walk out of the store, or go home for the day, if that’s what it took. And it worked because her mother, once she understood her daughter was serious, was able to absorb the point and change course instead of digging in.
Most mothers and daughters, in my research, want exactly this: to love each other well, even when it takes a bold or uncomfortable act to get the relationship back on track. Only a minority of mothers can’t make that shift, and it’s in those relationships that the deeper, longer-lasting disconnection tends to take root.
A woman cannot single-handedly create a healthy relationship. Yet women are routinely expected to maintain them, including, it turns out, the moment when maintaining them means briefly, deliberately walking away.
Make the Invisible Visible
Before asking, Why isn’t she doing more? of a woman, try asking, What has she been doing that I haven’t noticed?
- Name the work. Notice who remembers, anticipates, checks in, worries, organizes, smooths conflict, and maintains relationships (not just who completes visible tasks).
- Appreciate it before it disappears. Don’t wait until she stops calling, organizing, remembering, or accommodating to realize how much her effort contributed.
- Make the relationship reciprocal. Instead of asking women to get better at carrying invisible labor, ask what other people can carry (and what burdens can simply be put down).
Sometimes putting something down will be uncomfortable. It might look like leaving TJ Maxx with the baby. It might mean saying no to a Thanksgiving get-together across the country. It might mean refusing to laugh off the comment one more time. From the outside, that moment can look like the disruption; but the disruption may be the first visible evidence of years of invisible work.
If we only recognize women’s labor once they stop performing it, we haven’t really learned to see it at all.
