How to Teach Your Teen to Share the Mental Load | Dr. Sheryl and Sam Kelly
Sam Kelly spent a full year teaching her husband to see what needs doing at home without her pointing it out. Then one Friday night, she was making a Saturday chore chart for her kids and stopped mid-list: why was she teaching them to rely on her the same way? Out of that moment came Notice and Do, a framework for raising kids who see what needs doing and do it without being told, and now the name of her new book.
Dr. Sheryl pushes Sam past the toddler examples and into the teen years. They get specific: what a ten or fifteen minute walkthrough of a shared bathroom actually sounds like with a teenager, why screens and phone access work better as a built-in expectation than a bribe, and when it’s fair to pay a kid for a task (and when it undermines the whole point). Sam, whose three kids and husband all have ADHD, also shares what the “Big Three” looks like in her house with kids aged fourteen, twelve, and almost nine, how the bar moves as a kid gets older, and why she teaches her kids the actual vocabulary of the mental load, by name.
Chapters
0:00 – Intro: Notice and Do
1:10 – A year of teaching her husband the mental load
3:20 – The Friday night chore chart moment
4:21 – “I can do it faster”: the control we have to unlearn
7:21 – Is it too late to start with teens?
8:10 – The 15-minute walkthrough of shared spaces
9:50 – Preexisting motivators: work before screens
10:31 – When the reminders still don’t stick
13:19 – Does this turn you into a micromanager?
16:12 – Should you pay kids for chores?
18:52 – Teaching kids the mental load by name
20:52 – The Big Three
25:23 – How noticing builds empathy
26:45 – Whole family problems need whole family solutions
27:55 – Today’s one thing
Looking for more support in the in-between years of parenting? Good Inside Teen gives you practical tools, scripts, and expert guidance for the moments that can feel most overwhelming with tweens and teens: https://www.goodinside.com/lp/teen-parenting/
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