Holiday mental load and parenting stress reinforce each other, study finds

The Christmas season places extraordinary demands on parents, from organising gifts and meals to managing children’s expectations, yet much of this work remains invisible. A new experience sampling study published in Communications Psychology tracked 293 parents in the United Kingdom over 35 days spanning the holiday period to examine how cognitive labour, emotion suppression and subjective stress influence one another in daily life.

The researchers used Dynamic Structural Equation Modelling, a statistical approach suited to intensive repeated-measures data, to separate moment-to-moment dynamics from stable differences between individuals. The analysis revealed strong autoregressive stability for all three constructs, meaning that a parent’s level of cognitive labour, suppression or stress at one point in time strongly predicted their level at the next. More strikingly, cognitive labour and stress showed reciprocal moment-to-moment links: higher mental load forecast greater stress, and greater stress forecast a heavier mental load, indicating a self-reinforcing cycle.

The study also found that cognitive labour and stress predicted subsequent emotion suppression, the deliberate holding back of emotional expression. According to the authors, this pattern suggests that suppression operates as a situational coping response to mental and stress overload rather than as a stable trait that drives the other processes.

At the between-person level, the picture was more limited. Parents who reported more social support tended to suppress their emotions less often, but social support did not buffer levels of stress or cognitive labour over the holiday period. In other words, support appeared to ease the emotional containment parents felt they needed, without lightening the underlying mental workload or the stress it generated.

Gender differences emerged only for cognitive labour, with mothers reporting higher levels than fathers. No gender differences were reported for stress or emotion suppression in the between-person comparisons described in the study.

The findings highlight the dynamic interplay between invisible labour and stress during a period when parental demands intensify, and they underscore the psychological strains that parents, and mothers in particular, may face over the Christmas holidays. Because the data capture day-to-day fluctuations within the same parents, the study offers a fine-grained view of how mental load and stress feed each other in real time, while the between-person results suggest that social support alone may not be enough to break the cycle.

Subject of Research: Daily-life dynamics of cognitive labour, emotion suppression and parenting stress during the Christmas holidays

Article Title: Parenting stress spirals and a gendered labour division over the Christmas holidays

Article References: Botes, E., Reiter, J., Greiff, S., & Teuber, Z. (2026). Parenting stress spirals and a gendered labour division over the Christmas holidays. Communications Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00535-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44271-026-00535-3

Keywords: parenting stress, cognitive labour, Christmas holidays, emotion suppression, experience sampling, dynamic structural equation modelling, social support, gender differences, mental load, UK parents, Parenting, stress