Introduction
Most conversations about the mental load of working mothers are written from a context where the central problem is whether childcare is affordable and who handles household planning between two partners. These are real concerns. But for most working mothers in Indonesia, the problem looks fundamentally different.
The Indonesian working mother does not simply choose between a good nanny and a good daycare. She calculates whether the caregiver she found is trustworthy enough, whether the arrangement will hold tomorrow, and what she will do if it does not. She navigates a household where the expectation to manage domestic life does not diminish, even though she also holds a job. Depending on where she lives and what she does, she may spend hours commuting through congested city traffic, or she may spend that same energy managing a household in a context where paid childcare barely exists. The specific shape of her burden shifts with her circumstances. What does not shift is who carries it.
I am a working mother and a legal professional in Jakarta. The particular weight I carry is shaped by this city: the commute, the cost of living, the fragility of childcare arrangements in an urban environment where extended family is often far away. But the underlying structure of that weight, the assumption that domestic and caregiving responsibility belongs to me regardless of what my professional life demands, is not specific to Jakarta. It is documented across Indonesian working contexts, from factory floors in East Java to public offices in West Lampung to small enterprises in Bogor. This article is my attempt to name that structure clearly and to place it where it belongs: not as a personal failing, but as a shared condition.
The research tells a consistent story. Across different regions, sectors, and income levels, Indonesian working mothers carry a disproportionate share of domestic and caregiving responsibilities alongside their paid work. What varies is the specific shape of that burden. What remains constant is that it falls to them and that it is largely invisible. This article examines three dimensions of that burden: the cultural and economic conditions that create it, the fragility of childcare as a structural problem, and the emotional cost of a load that does not end when the workday does.
The Three Layers of Burden That Never Operate Separately
In Indonesia, the working mother does not face one problem. She faces three simultaneously, and research conducted specifically in Indonesian industrial contexts has confirmed this structure. A study by Martiana et al. (2017) involving 350 female workers with children under five across three factories in Sidoarjo found that the health and wellbeing problems of working mothers arose from three intersecting sources: the burden of cultural expectations, economic pressure, and the high demands of workplace productivity. None of these operates in isolation. They compound each other daily, and the cognitive labor of managing all three falls almost entirely on the mother.
The cultural dimension in Indonesia is shaped by what is commonly referred to as kodrat, a concept rooted in religious and traditional values that positions women as naturally suited to caregiving and domestic management. Under this framework, a woman’s primary role is understood to be that of mother and homemaker, regardless of her professional responsibilities. This does not simply mean that domestic tasks are assigned to women. It means that the cognitive ownership of the household, the anticipation of needs, the management of relationships, and the tracking of every child-related detail is understood as an expression of who a woman is rather than the work she performs. When exhaustion is framed as the natural cost of being a devoted mother, there is no cultural language for naming it as a burden and no legitimate claim to relief from it.
The economic dimension is equally important to understand correctly. Many Indonesian working mothers do not work by preference in the sense that Western discussions of women’s careers assume. Rohman (2022) documented that female workers in the batik industry in Jombang entered paid employment primarily to stabilize family finances, yet their entry into the workforce did not reduce their domestic responsibilities by any meaningful degree. They remained fully responsible for household management. Work was added on top of, not traded against, their domestic role.
This dual burden is not an individual failure of time management. It is a structural condition that has been documented across Indonesian working contexts, from industrial workers to public sector employees. Yulyanti et al. (2024), reviewing seven studies on the subjective wellbeing of Indonesian working mothers, found consistent evidence that work-family conflict is one of the most significant predictors of reduced wellbeing in this population. The higher the conflict, the lower the wellbeing. And in Indonesia, the conditions that produce that conflict are structural, not personal.
Childcare Is Not a Solved Problem: It Is an Ongoing Negotiation
One of the most important distinctions between the Indonesian experience of maternal mental load and the version described in most international literature is the nature of childcare itself. In much of the writing on this topic, childcare is discussed as a cost and quality problem: can mothers find it, and can they afford it? The assumption is that something called a childcare system exists and that the question is one of access.
In Indonesia, no such assumption holds. Working mothers navigate a spectrum of arrangements, each carrying its own specific cognitive burden. A live-in nanny solves the problem of daily availability but introduces the ongoing cognitive and relational labor of managing another person within the most intimate space of the household. A daily caregiver who arrives each morning introduces the constant background risk of non-arrival and the absence of any institutional backup when that risk materializes. Relying on family, whether a mother, a mother-in-law, or a sister, is often described as the most natural solution, but it is far from cost-free. It demands the management of relationships, the navigation of different child-rearing philosophies, and, in households where the mother lives with extended family, the continued expectation that she will participate fully in domestic life regardless of what her workday has required of her.
Even the choice of a licensed daycare center frequently reflects not an abundance of resources but a calculation about which form of stress is more manageable. The labor of finding, vetting, and continuously managing an individual caregiver can be more psychologically taxing than the financial strain of paying for institutional care.
Dwinanda et al. (2021), using data from 8,907 respondents in the Indonesia Family Life Survey, found that a mother’s working status had a statistically significant and negative effect on children’s health outcomes. This finding does not mean that working mothers harm their children. It reflects the reality that when childcare responsibility is transferred to caregivers without adequate support or monitoring, the nutritional and developmental needs of children are less likely to be consistently met. The cognitive labor of anticipating and managing this gap falls to the mother. She is the one who worries. She is the one who calls during lunch to check. She is the one who carries, through every meeting and every deadline, the awareness that the arrangement holding her family together is fragile.
This is what the mental load looks like in Indonesia. It is not the invisible management of a smoothly functioning system. It is the invisible management of a system that requires constant improvisation, with no safety net and no acknowledgment that the improvisation itself constitutes labor.
When the Working Day Ends, the Load Does Not
A complete account of the mental load of Indonesian working mothers must include what happens after the workday ends because, for most women in this context, it does not end in any meaningful cognitive sense.
Wardiyah et al. (2021), in a study of 231 mothers in West Lampung, found that mothers who worked outside the home had a 6.264 times lower probability of achieving quality time with their children compared to mothers who worked within the home. The study found that fatigue upon returning home was a primary mechanism: mothers who had spent the day in demanding professional roles arrived home depleted, not out of indifference but out of an absence of any remaining energy. The time between the end of the workday and the end of the evening was occupied by domestic responsibilities that had accumulated during the hours she was away.
For mothers commuting in urban environments like Jakarta, this depletion begins before the workday even starts. Baek et al. (2023), in a large-scale study of 18,744 workers, found that long commuting time is a significant independent driver of work-family conflict, burnout, and sleep disturbance. The mind does not rest in traffic. It continues processing the logistics of the day, the arrangements for tomorrow, and the tasks left unfinished. By the time a working mother in Jakarta arrives home after two or more hours in transit, she has already been working in this invisible cognitive sense for the entire journey.
The emotional consequences of this sustained load are documented in research with Indonesian working mothers specifically. Alverina et al. (2024), in a qualitative study of full-time working mothers in Indonesia, found that the absence of adequate personal time led directly to emotional dysregulation, heightened reactivity toward children and spouses, and a gradual erosion of individual identity beyond assigned roles. Participants described resentment toward partners who appeared to retain personal freedom, guilt when attempting to take time for themselves, and anxiety when leaving children in the care of others. Significantly, the study found that going to work had become the primary form of personal time for these mothers, not because work is restful, but because it was the only context where they were temporarily released from the simultaneous management of domestic life.
The broader picture, across Indonesian studies, is consistent. Yulyanti et al. (2024) found that work-family conflict was a reliable predictor of lower subjective wellbeing among Indonesian working mothers, while social support, self-management capacity, and resilience functioned as protective factors. But protective factors at the individual level do not resolve structural problems. Resilience is a response to a condition, not a solution to it. The condition that Indonesian working mothers are expected to carry the full cognitive weight of two domains simultaneously, without institutional support, without cultural acknowledgment, and without relief, remains in place regardless of how well any individual mother learns to manage within it.
Conclusion
The mental load of working mothers in Indonesia is not a quieter version of a problem described elsewhere. It is a distinct problem, shaped by conditions that most of the available literature on this subject was not written to address. Whether a mother is commuting through Jakarta traffic or managing a household in a smaller city where formal childcare barely exists, the underlying structure is the same: domestic and caregiving responsibility is hers by default, the cognitive work of holding it together is invisible, and the exhaustion it produces is culturally interpreted as devotion rather than labor.
Research conducted across Indonesian contexts, from industrial workers in East Java to formal sector employees in West Lampung to working mothers in urban Bandung, documents this burden with increasing specificity. The three-source model identified by Martiana et al. (2017) captures the compounding nature of cultural expectation, economic pressure, and workplace demand. The findings of Dwinanda et al. (2021), Wardiyah et al. (2021), Alverina et al. (2024), Yulyanti et al. (2024), and Baek et al. (2023) collectively describe a population that is cognitively and emotionally overextended, operating within systems that place the full burden of adaptation on individual mothers while leaving the structural conditions that create that burden largely unexamined.
Naming this a structural condition is not a complaint. It is the prerequisite for changing it. Indonesian working mothers, across regions, sectors, and income levels, deserve policies, workplaces, and cultural conversations that take the full weight of what they carry seriously, not as an inevitable feature of motherhood, but as a condition that can and should be better supported.
I chose to write about this topic because I have lived it, and because the available writing about it does not describe the life I know. I am a working mother and a legal professional in Jakarta. I manage a demanding professional role and a household in a city where the logistics of daily life require constant negotiation. For years, the fatigue I felt was something I absorbed privately, interpreting it as a sign that I needed to be more organized, more patient, more efficient. It did not occur to me to ask whether the conditions I was managing were themselves the problem. It was only when I began to engage with research on work-family conflict and cognitive labor in the Indonesian context that I found language for what I had been carrying. That language changed something. Not the conditions, but my relationship to them. I stopped measuring myself against the impossible standard of managing without difficulty and began to see the difficulty as the expected outcome of structurally inadequate support. I write about this because Indonesian working mothers are largely absent from the international conversation about maternal mental health, and because the conversation that does exist tends to frame their experience in terms borrowed from contexts with very different material conditions. The mother who leaves home before dawn, manages a full professional day, commutes back through hours of traffic, and arrives at a household that still expects her full domestic presence deserves to be seen in that specific reality. So does the mother in a smaller city who has no commute but also no childcare, whose extended family helps but whose domestic role never diminishes, and whose exhaustion is just as real and just as unnamed. This article is a small contribution toward making both visible.
References
Alverina, Y., Hanami, Y., & Abidin, F. A. (2024). Working is my me time: Exploring the perception of me time among working mothers. Jurnal Psikologi Ulayat, 11(2), 264–283. https://doi.org/10.24854/jpu910
Baek, S.-U., Yoon, J.-H., & Won, J.-U. (2023). Association between high emotional demand at work, burnout symptoms, and sleep disturbance among Korean workers: A cross-sectional mediation analysis. Scientific Reports, 13, 16688. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-43451-w
Dwinanda, N. C., Wiksadana, W., Sihaloho, E. D., & Purbatambak, H. S. (2021). Impact of working mother to children’s health in Indonesia. EcceS: Economics Social and Development Studies, 8(1), 44–64. https://doi.org/10.24252/ecc.v8i1.21023
Martiana, T., Wardani, A. K., Alayanmur, P. A., & Rahman, F. S. (2018). Dual roles of mothers working in the Indonesian industry: Its effects on maternal and child health in Sidoarjo. Airlangga University Repository. https://repository.unair.ac.id/81422/
Rohman, K. (2022). Peran ganda ibu rumah tangga yang bekerja: Studi pada perempuan pekerja harian di batik tulis Jatipelem. Indonesian Journal of Gender Studies, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.21154/ijougs.v3i2.4836
Author Bio
Rima Rahayu is a working mother and a professional based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Her writing explores the quieter dimensions of work and life, reflecting on the pressures that are rarely named, the experiences that often go unspoken, and the conversations that quietly matter.
Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license for mental health awareness with editorial review.