The good news: New research indicates that working dads now think about family concerns just as much as working moms do. The catch: Moms get a lot more stressed out about them. 

When thinking about family matters, working moms tend to feel stress and negative emotions, while working dads felt neither positive nor negative feelings, according to a recent study based on data from the 500 Family Study, specifically data from mostly highly educated U.S. parents in dual-income families working in professional occupations. This occurred although both mothers and fathers spent about 30 percent of their mental labor—time spent planning, organizing or managing activities—on family concerns.

“I assume that because mothers bear the major responsibility for child care and family life, when they think about family matters, they tend to think about the less pleasant aspects of it—such as needing to pick up a child from daycare or having to schedule a doctor’s appointment for a sick kid—and are more likely to be worried,” said Shira Offer, author of the study and an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. While we know dads are more and more hands-on with child and home care, on average, working moms of two parent families still carry more of this responsibility.

Other findings from the study, which will be presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association:

• Working moms and working dads spent about 29 and 24 hours per week engaged in mental labor, respectively. 
• Although working dads spent more time than working moms thinking about work-related matters, they were less likely than moms to have their work thoughts spill over into nonwork areas. 

Maybe moms will always be the bigger worriers in two-parent households; maybe not. But once again, we see that working mothers need to pay attention to their own stress and find healthy ways to cope—to take time for mental and physical self-care. Check out some simple stress busters here.