Multitasking for moms

Parenting superpower or rookie mistake in today’s digital world?

- Saakshi Kapoor Kumar

“Ma, do you think multitasking is harmful to moms in the long run?” I asked my mother as part of my research for this article.

It made sense for me to involve my mother since she is a veteran in both fields, motherhood and multitasking. When my sister and I were growing up, my father was away a lot, sailing in the merchant navy as a captain. This meant that my mother also had to sail through her own storms, navigating motherhood and, without much of a choice, being the captain of the ship called home. For most of her life, she has been a serial multitasker. “What rubbish!” she snapped before continuing matter-of-factly, “I have done it for years, your grandmother did it too. Do you see anything wrong with us?”

Impact of multitasking

Mothers have been multitasking for years. Then why are we debating the impact of multitasking on mothers today? In fact, multitasking, which means doing more than one thing at a time, seems to be a hot topic of discussion among researchers over the past few years. A landmark study conducted in 2001 by Meyer, Evans and Rubinstein, titled ‘Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching,’ found that multitasking can be counterproductive, even though it may seem like an efficient way of getting things done. Our brain has cognitive limits, and multitasking challenges these limits, eventually reducing our productivity and increasing psychological stress. The consensus is that multitasking is not healthy for us.

Multitasking & human brain