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This article will explore the ways mothers and carers use the term ‘emotional labor’ to describe the exhaustion and burnout associated with socially reproductive tasks, rather than the performance of affective labor in the workplace. Scholars of social reproduction theory claim that emotion is key to understanding the specificities of gendered alienation, yet it remains under‐theorised. This article seeks to understand how the emotional lives of carers have been transformed by neoliberal processes that have intensified labor both within and beyond the home. Drawing on interviews with participants from the 2019 ‘My Mum is on Strike’ stay and play event, alongside ethnographic insights from online mothering blogs, sometimes referred to as the ‘mamasphere’ (Wilson et al., 2017), this article seeks to contextualize the experiences of carers who narrate their reproductive labor as emotional ‘work’. Given the conditions of …