DEVELOPmental load: why splitting the tasks fairly as parents still doesn't feel equal

We have three sons under seven. When our third was born, my parental leave ended after sixteen weeks, the standard in the Netherlands, and my partner took prolonged parental leave. My career shifted from secondary to primary. He became the primary caregiver.

He had always been an involved father. With two children under four and a third arriving, there was no version of our life where he wasn't. He did the pickups, the cooking, the doctor's appointments. Within a few months of being the primary caregiver, he also picked up more of the mental load: anticipating, planning, organising the things that don't have a physical shape.

On paper, the division was right. And still, I felt the pressure sitting on my shoulders.

Then something else happened, and I could only name it after the fact.

Because he spent so much more one-on-one time with our kids, he got to know them differently. He started to see their development, not just their days. He became interested in shaping that, on purpose, for the long term. He wanted to know whether what we were doing day to day actually matched how we wanted to raise them.

He started noticing when something was a bit off. He initiated conversations about their development without me flagging it first. He changed things during the day because he'd noticed, on his own, that they worked better that way.

That is when I felt my shoulders drop.

What had weighed on me most was never the logistics. It was the feeling that I alone carried the responsibility for who our children were becoming. I hadn't even had words for how heavy that was, until it was shared.

This is the DEVELOPmental load.

What the DEVELOPmental load actually is

The DEVELOPmental load is the long-term, future-oriented responsibility for a child's development: the ongoing work of noticing who a child is becoming, deciding what they need next, and adjusting course accordingly. It is distinct from the day-to-day mental load of logistics, and distinct from the broader Accountability Gap that governs who owns outcomes across a household.

Mental load is the dishwasher, the shoe size, the dentist appointment. It is real, it is heavy, and it has been documented extensively (Daminger, 2019). But it is bounded. It has a start and a finish. You book the appointment. It's done.

The DEVELOPmental load has no finish line, because a child is never finished developing. It is the question that runs underneath everything else: is what we are doing, today, actually serving who this child is becoming? Nobody assigns that question to you. It simply becomes yours, usually the moment the baby arrives, and it stays yours unless someone else genuinely steps into carrying it too.

What changed in our family was not the task list. What changed was that a second person began to hold that question as his own, rather than waiting for me to raise it.

Responsible, accountable, developmental: three different things

I spent a decade doing leadership interventions in corporate teams, at McKinsey, at TheoryY, with leadership groups on several continents. The pattern I saw most often was not a skills problem or a communication problem. It was an accountability problem: one person owned the outcome, others executed tasks when asked.

The RACI framework, used in professional settings every day, makes a precise distinction. Responsible means you do the task. Accountable means you own the domain: you notice when something is off, you hold the full context, you carry it even when you're not actively working on it. I call the gap between those two the Accountability Gap.

The DEVELOPmental load is a third, more specific layer on top of both. It is not about who does the school run (responsible), and it is not only about who notices the school run needs doing (accountable). It is about who is holding the long view: who this child is becoming, whether our current approach is actually working for them, what they'll need next year that they don't need now.

A father who is responsible executes the task. A father who is accountable also notices when it needs doing, without being asked. A father who carries the DEVELOPmental load goes further still: he initiates the conversation about whether the approach itself is right, brings a question about a child's development that nobody handed him, and adjusts his own behaviour, unprompted, because of what he's noticed.

That third thing is what actually produces the exhale for a mother.

Why this stays invisible, and why it sticks

The reason the DEVELOPmental load is so hard to see is the same reason mental load stayed invisible for decades: it lives in anticipation, not in tasks, so there is nothing to point to.

Allison Daminger's 2019 research identified four phases of cognitive labour: anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding how to handle them, and monitoring the outcome. Weeks, Kowalewska and Ruppanner (2025, Socius, Vol. 11) extended this and found that cognitive labour sticks to mothers regardless of how much she earns, how many hours she works, or how egalitarian the couple believes themselves to be. They call this gendered cognitive stickiness. In a 2025 study of 3,000 US parents, mothers carried 79% of daily cognitive labour: the constant, routine work of scheduling, childcare, food, and relationships. Fathers carried more of the episodic tasks: finances, maintenance, the less frequent decisions with a clear start and end point.

The daily cognitive labour has no off switch. It runs in the background at the school gates, in the shower, at two in the morning. The DEVELOPmental load runs even deeper than that background hum, because it isn't asking "did I remember the appointment." It's asking "is this actually working for who they are."

The cost of carrying that question alone is not abstract. Research reported this year found that mothers living with a partner are 2.3 times more likely to be long-term work-disabled than fathers. A CNV survey of 1,000 working Dutch mothers found that half are chronically tired in the first year after birth, 10% develop a burnout, and 12% a depression. These are not mothers without an involved partner. These are mothers with one. Involvement, on its own, does not close this gap.

Why this matters for him too, not only for her

Sharing the DEVELOPmental load is not a favour a father does for a mother. It changes what kind of father he gets to be, and the research on this is now direct.

Evolutionary anthropologist Anna Machin's research (The Life of Dad, 2018) established that fathers are not biologically designed to be bystanders: testosterone drops, oxytocin rises, and the brain reorganises around care when men step into hands-on caregiving. A 2026 neuroimaging study by Daneshnia and colleagues followed twenty-five new fathers with brain scans from the first week postpartum through 24 weeks, and found the most intensive reorganisation happens in the first six to nine weeks: the parental caregiving network, the regions governing empathy, perspective-taking, and emotion regulation, comes online fast, and its development is directly proportional to time spent in hands-on care.

The same book found something that rarely makes it into the conversation about involved fathers: the quality of the co-parenting relationship predicts the strength of the father-child bond far more than it predicts the mother-child bond. A mother's bond with her child tends to hold steady even under real relationship strain. A father's does not. It is more sensitive to how the partnership itself is doing.

Which means the cycle runs in both directions. When one parent carries the DEVELOPmental load alone, she becomes exhausted, the exhaustion becomes resentment, the resentment strains the partnership, and the partnership strain makes it harder for him to be the attuned, present father he wants to be. Nobody chose this. It closes on its own unless someone names it.

It also means that stepping into the DEVELOPmental load is not extra work bolted onto a father's day. Gartzia et al. (2024, Journal of Organizational Behavior) found that parents who were genuinely engaged, hands-on caregivers developed measurably better leadership behaviours at work, because the capacities built through caregiving (empathy, noticing what a person needs before they say it, holding complexity) transfer directly. Motherhood is not the only side of this equation that builds leadership. Fatherhood, done with real ownership, builds the same brain.

Where the DEVELOPmental load sits in the bigger picture

The DEVELOPmental load lives in the relationships quadrant of the Map of Matrescence, alongside the Accountability Gap, and only in the partnership context: it is not a general term for parental worry, it names a specific, shareable layer of responsibility between two co-parents.

It is distinct from the Accountability Gap, though the two often travel together. The Accountability Gap is about the running of the household: who notices the fridge is empty, who remembers the dentist. The DEVELOPmental load is about the child specifically: who holds the long-term picture of who this child is becoming and what they need next. You can close the Accountability Gap, split every visible task fairly, and still be the only one carrying the DEVELOPmental load. Many of the mothers I work with describe exactly that: the logistics finally work, and the exhaustion doesn't lift, because the deeper question, "is this actually right for our children," is still hers alone.

It tends to surface most acutely in the Long Middle, the second phase of the Matrescence Arc, when the old self has been dismantled and the new one hasn't yet solidified. That is precisely when the question of who your children are becoming starts to matter most, and precisely when carrying it alone is heaviest.

What closing it actually looks like

Closing the DEVELOPmental load is not a conversation you have once. It is a structural shift: from one parent holding the developmental vision and the other executing what they're told, to both parents genuinely co-authoring it.

That is exactly what the Family Model Canvas© is built for. It takes the accountability structures I used for a decade in organisational leadership work and applies them to the domain that matters most: not just who does what at home, but who is actually accountable for your children's development, named explicitly, instead of assumed by default.

Explore the Family Model Canvas

About Babette Lockefeer

Babette Lockefeer is the founder of Matermorphosis and an expert at the intersection of leadership and matrescence. She previously worked as a leadership consultant at McKinsey. She coined the term DEVELOPmental load after noticing the pattern in her own family of three sons, and has written about it for de Volkskrant (Dutch newspaper) as well as for Matermorphosis.

Frequently asked questions about the DEVELOPmental load

What is DEVELOPmental load? DEVELOPmental load is the long-term, future-oriented responsibility for a child's development: noticing who they are becoming, deciding what they need next, and adjusting course accordingly. It is a concept developed by Babette Lockefeer, founder of Matermorphosis, distinct from the day-to-day mental load of logistics and from the broader Accountability Gap that governs household ownership more generally.

Is DEVELOPmental load the same as mental load? No. Mental load refers to the invisible cognitive work of running a household: scheduling, remembering, planning logistics (Daminger, 2019). It is real and heavy, but it is bounded: each task has a start and a finish. DEVELOPmental load has no finish line, because it is the ongoing question of whether your current approach is actually serving who your child is becoming, not a task that can be completed and closed.

Is DEVELOPmental load the same as the Accountability Gap? They are related but distinct. The Accountability Gap describes who owns outcomes across the household generally: who notices the fridge is empty, who remembers the appointment. DEVELOPmental load is specific to the child: who holds the long-term developmental vision. A couple can close the Accountability Gap entirely, splitting every household task and its ownership fairly, and one parent can still carry the DEVELOPmental load alone.

How do you actually share the DEVELOPmental load with a partner? Not by assigning more tasks. The shift happens when a partner starts initiating: noticing something in a child unprompted, asking whether your shared approach is actually working, raising a developmental question before it's flagged for him. That requires giving up control of the "right way" as much as it requires him stepping in, and it is the kind of explicit redesign the Family Model Canvas© is built to guide, rather than something couples tend to arrive at by accident.

Does sharing the DEVELOPmental load actually change a father's relationship with his kids? Yes, and the research points to a specific mechanism. A 2026 neuroimaging study (Daneshnia et al.) found that the strength of a father's bond with his child is more sensitive to the quality of the co-parenting relationship than a mother's bond is. When one parent carries the DEVELOPmental load alone, the resulting exhaustion and resentment strain the partnership, which in turn can limit exactly the kind of present, attuned fathering most fathers say they want. Sharing it is not a concession from him. It is a condition for the father-child bond he is trying to build.