Keeping the Calm: Anticipatory Emotional Management and the Reproduction of Gendered Cognitive Labor in Families

• In Event: Family Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Household labor remains a durable site of gender inequality even as men’s participation in domestic tasks has increased. Research on cognitive labor documents persistent gender disparities in anticipation and monitoring, while largely treating these processes as organizational rather than evaluative. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 52 U.S. mothers conducted in 2025, I identify anticipatory emotional management as a future-oriented mechanism through which emotional forecasting becomes embedded in household cognitive labor. Mothers described planning as a continual projection of how upcoming situations would feel for children and family members. These forecasts shaped how tasks were defined, prioritized, timed, and evaluated, as mothers organized decisions to prevent distress, minimize harm, and sustain emotional security before problems emerged. Emotional foresight thus functioned as a decision rule, structuring what counted as a “good” plan and when preparation was sufficient.

I further show that anticipatory emotional management is stabilized by gendered accountability structures that anchor responsibility for emotional and organizational consequences to mothers across household and institutional contexts. Under these conditions, delegation often redistributes execution without transferring anticipatory authority, and mothers remain mentally tethered through oversight, monitoring, and readiness to manage potential emotional fallout.

By specifying emotional forecasting as an organizing logic of anticipation, this analysis clarifies why cognitive labor is experienced as relentless, morally weighted, and resistant to redistribution. When responsibility is oriented toward uncertain emotional futures, cognitive labor extends beyond task completion and cannot be easily partitioned into discrete, transferable units. The findings extend scholarship on cognitive labor and emotion work by demonstrating that emotional management is not only reactive but prospective, and by identifying a mechanism through which cognitive and emotional processes become mutually constitutive in the reproduction of gender inequality.

Author

• Claire Thomas, Louisiana State University