The tasks necessary to keep a household running smoothly often go unnoticed and are referred to as invisible labor. One underlying cognitive construct that may help to quantify the mental component of invisible labor is prospective memory (PM), or memory for future actions. In the current study, parents completed self-report measures of their own PM demands, perceptions of their partners’ PM demands, and frequency of their own and their partners’ prospective and retrospective memory failures. Mothers reported maintaining greater PM demands than did fathers, particularly for their children’s PM intentions. Fathers’ and mothers’ PM demands did not differ for tasks that benefitted their partners; yet, mothers perceived themselves to provide more mnemonic support to their partners than their partners do for them. Mothers and fathers also differed in the extent to which they perceived their partners to carry the cognitive load related to their children. Finally, parents who perceived their partners to have potentially poor PM appear to take on more PM demands and doing so comes at a cost for fathers. The current work unifies themes within the mental labor and PM literatures and provides a framework through which researchers and clinicians can better understand parental cognitive demands.

保持家庭顺利运转所必需的任务往往被忽视，被称为无形劳动。一种可能有助于量化无形劳动的心理成分的潜在认知结构是前瞻性记忆 (PM)，或对未来行动的记忆。在目前的研究中，父母完成了对他们自己的 PM 需求、对他们伴侣的 PM 需求的看法以及他们自己和他们的伴侣的前瞻性和回顾性记忆失败的频率的自我报告测量。与父亲相比，母亲们报告说他们对 PM 的要求更高，尤其是对于他们孩子的 PM 意图。对于有利于伴侣的任务，父亲和母亲的 PM 要求没有区别；然而，母亲认为自己为伴侣提供的记忆支持比伴侣为她们提供的更多。母亲和父亲在他们认为伴侣承担与孩子相关的认知负荷的程度方面也存在差异。最后，那些认为他们的伴侣可能有较差的 PM 的父母似乎会接受更多的 PM 要求，而这样做会为父亲付出代价。目前的工作统一了脑力劳动和 PM 文献中的主题，并提供了一个框架，研究人员和临床医生可以通过该框架更好地理解父母的认知需求。