If Mom Wants Her Christmas Stocking Filled, Should She Have to Ask?

Too many moms will wake up Christmas morning to empty Christmas stockings. Although they’ve filled stockings for the rest of the family, no one will have filled theirs. Saturday Night Live lampooned this all-too-predictable phenomenon. And recently, CNN raised the issue after a young wife’s Instagram video about it went viral.

But if Mom’s empty stocking is a problem that should be fixed, who’s responsible for fixing it? That question has caused some debate across social media in recent days. One wife and mother interviewed by CNN made a point of telling her husband to put some items in her stocking. She urged other moms to do the same. “Dads can’t help us if they don’t know. You just need to be bold and speak up for yourself and what you want,” she said.

For many readers, that solution misses the point. Buying a few stocking stuffers is neither difficult nor expensive. It’s a small effort of caring that mothers make for their partners and children year after year. Those mothers should not have to explain that they’d like the same caring in return. As one Reddit member put it: “Women somehow know they need to take care of these things but men need to be told? Another thing on Mom’s to-do list.”

It’s about emotional labor.

Even if you’re unmarried or, like me, never had a Christmas stocking tradition, you should care about this question. It goes straight to the issue of how women’s roles are perceived, both at home and at work. It’s part of the debate over emotional labor, defined as the work we do to take care of other people’s feelings. Arranging get-togethers, putting up holiday decorations, remembering to celebrate birthdays and retirements–these are all examples of emotional labor. And they are all tasks that women more commonly perform than men.

HR professionals, business leaders, and advocates for gender equality have woken up to this fact in the past few years. Because if the women in the office always organize going away parties, find just the right gift for that key team member, and lend an ear when someone needs to vent, that’s bound to affect their productivity. No one will ever get a bonus for remembering other employees’ birthdays. Yet those kinds of tasks add value, because they keep your team feeling like a team, rather than a random group of people who all happen to work in the same place.

In an ideal world, business leaders who brag about their company culture would reward the emotional labor that helps create that culture. Everyone of every gender would share in that effort. No one would ever fall behind because they put in too much time making sure other team members felt valued. And no Mom would ever have to explain that, just like everyone else, she would like her stocking filled.

Go inside one interesting founder-led company each day to find out how its strategy works, and what risk factors it faces. Sign up for 1 Smart Business Story from Inc. on Beehiiv.