Motherhood- The Difficulty of Returning to the Workplace

Returning to the workforce after motherhood is often framed as a logistical challenge: childcare, schedules, flexibility. But for many women, the difficulty runs far deeper and we are seeing the impact. The number of working moms with young kids just hit a 3-year low (Motherly, 2025).

On the MissPoppins: The Art of Parenting podcast, Dr. Anna Kallschmidt emphasizes this tension with precision. Dr. Kallschmidt holds a PhD in organizational behavior and is the author of The Unwritten Rules of Work, a widely discussed examination of how power, class, and invisible norms determine who succeeds professionally. Her work focuses on the cultural rules people are expected to know but are rarely taught.

Across her research, writing, and public commentary (including her TikTok channel). Dr. Calschmidt returns the central idea that work is not a neutral system. And motherhood exposes that fact.

“There’s always going to be a pressure that you never did enough,” she explains. “And especially if you’re a mother, you have to prove that maternity leave didn’t ‘quote unquote’ ruin you.”

What makes returning to work after motherhood so destabilizing is not the gap in employment, but the expectation that nothing fundamental should have changed.This is not a formal requirement. No manager writes it down. But it quietly governs how returning mothers are perceived and whether they are seen as ambitious, dependable, or still worth investing in.

Dr. Kallschmidt points out that this pressure is paired with a persistent sense of insufficiency:

“There’s always going to be a pressure that you never did enough.”

Not enough at work. Not enough at home. Not enough proof that you can still operate at the same speed, with the same availability, as someone whose life has not been fundamentally restructured by caregiving.

Part of the problem, she argues, is that work refuses to acknowledge parenting as work at all.

“Parents are working all the time, even if it’s not for pay.”

The labor of caregiving does not disappear when a mother returns to her job. It simply becomes invisible.

“You know the value of your time because that’s time that you can spend with your family and that’s time that your kids get from you.”

The Health Coverage Gap for Mothers

Yet professional culture continues to treat time as though it is infinitely elastic, detached from real human cost. For many mothers, this collision between ideology and reality becomes financial as well as emotional. Dr. Calschmidt notes that healthcare costs alone can push women out of the workforce entirely. Cases continue to emerge of parents leaving the workforce due to unsubstantiated health coverage for their delivery date.

Health insurance often becomes more expensive for mothers due to the significant costs of pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum care, which add thousands to annual healthcare expenses. When childcare, healthcare, and unpaid labor are factored in, returning to work can feel less like empowerment and more like an economic trap.

Compounding this is a cultural myth about effort and reward. Mothers are encouraged to push harder, prove commitment, and “make it work,” while others in organizations operate by very different rules.

Instead:

Mothers, meanwhile, are often praised for endurance rather than supported through structural workplace change.So is returning to the workforce hard after motherhood? Mothers clearly don’t lack ambition, intelligence, or resilience. It is harder because modern work was not designed with caregiving in mind.

The Service/Care Economy Shows Promise

Dr. Kallschmidt acknowledged what looks like a cultural “shift toward solopreneurship” is actually a reaction to declining institutional reliability.

“When systems won’t flex for your life, you build something that will.”

Traditional employment used to offer predictability: healthcare, upward mobility, protection during life events. When those things disappear, the logic of staying disappears too.

Notably, even in the midst of AI ruckus, the service industry continues to outperform.There is an explicit link of solopreneurship to caregiving realities of everyday life. This shows promise for the likes of lactation consulting, parent coaching, doula care, mental health support, and all other service based workers, 

In 2025, the U.S. job market added only 584,000 jobs, the weakest annual gain since the pandemic, but healthcare and social-assistance sectors stood out as the strongest sources of growth, contributing over 700,000 jobs in areas such as ambulatory services, hospitals, and nursing care,and other service/care economy sectors; even as other sectors slowed (Business Insider, 2026)

As a society, we are being pushed to place more respect for once overlooked industries that are the foundation of our society.

Planning to Leave Your Job to Pursue Motherhood Instead?

There are different types of life transitions, while some mothers struggle to return to the workforce, others plan their existence. However, the world of paid maternity/parental leave and employer benefits varies by state.

For parents navigating these transitions, connecting with coaches specialized in family systems transitions . These coaches help parents think strategically about timing, identity shifts, and long-term sustainability.

A notable expert Arianna Hillis, offers dedicated coaching for career transitions and family planning.