{"id":65674,"date":"2022-04-18T15:29:13","date_gmt":"2022-04-18T15:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/?p=65674"},"modified":"2026-02-09T15:29:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T15:29:22","slug":"what-it-means-to-be-a-working-mom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/what-it-means-to-be-a-working-mom\/","title":{"rendered":"All moms are working moms: Why it&#8217;s time to embrace this once and for all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&rsquo;s about damn time we cleared this up: <em>All<\/em> mothers are working moms. Whether you have a career and work outside your home, hold a remote position and work remotely, and yes, even if you are the primary caregiver for your family and work inside your home, you are a &ldquo;working mom.&rdquo;<\/p><p>It&rsquo;s time we collectively say &ldquo;no&rdquo; to harmful narratives that divide us and have empathy for all of the nuances that exist within our individual experiences of motherhood.<\/p><div class=\"wp-block-custom-dynamic-list key-takeaways-block\"><h3>Key takeaways<\/h3><div class=\"key-takeaways-container\"><ul><li>All mothers are working moms, whether that work happens in an office, at home or entirely within caregiving. Dividing moms by where or how they work only fuels shame and misses the reality that the pressure and labor are universal.<\/li><li>Motherhood often comes with identity loss, judgment, and an endless comparison game that no one can win. Society continues to undervalue mothers&rsquo; labor &mdash; especially unpaid work &mdash; despite the immense time, skill and mental load it requires.<\/li><li>Progress starts with empathy, honesty and inclusive conversations about the many valid paths through motherhood. When moms share their real experiences instead of competing, we create a more humane and realistic standard for what &ldquo;working&rdquo; truly means.<\/li><\/ul><\/div><\/div><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-no-matter-what-work-looks-like-for-you-the-pressure-is-on\">No matter what work looks like for you, the pressure is on<\/h2><p>I may currently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/working-from-home-is-harder-on-moms-study\/\">work from home<\/a>, but previously, I was a stay-at-home mom. Both roles are incredibly hard. So is working outside the home.<\/p><p>Shortly after having my first child, I became his primary caregiver. New <a href=\"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/how-to-balance-career-as-working-mom-of-a-toddler\/\">motherhood<\/a> is hard enough, but I didn&rsquo;t anticipate &mdash; and was not prepared for &mdash; the identity struggles I would experience in this transition. I didn&rsquo;t anticipate the shame I would feel seeing the glazed over look in someone&rsquo;s eyes whenever they asked, &ldquo;So what do you do?&rdquo; and I replied, &ldquo;I stay home and take care of my son.&rdquo;&nbsp;<\/p><p>But I quickly realized becoming a mom that everyone &mdash; from a stranger in the grocery store to your own family members &mdash; has an opinion on how you should be mothering.&nbsp;<\/p><p>Worst of all is the contention that is constantly drummed up around the level of &ldquo;work&rdquo; moms are doing. It feels in a way that, after becoming a mom, society pushes us on to this hamster wheel of comparison. There&rsquo;s an endless influx of messages, coming at us from all angles, which aim to convince us that we&rsquo;re not measuring up &mdash;&nbsp;to one another or an unrealistic ideal dictated by society. It&rsquo;s a race that no one can ever win, because it reduces us to a shell of our experiences.<\/p><figure class=\"wp-block-pullquote\"><blockquote><p>While the struggles differ for mothers who work in an office, remotely or in the home, the overall labor that they&rsquo;re putting in continues to be undervalued.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-how-mothers-labor-has-always-been-undervalued\">How mothers&rsquo; labor has always been undervalued<\/h2><p>While the struggles differ for mothers who work in an office, remotely or in the home, the overall labor that they put in continues to be undervalued.<\/p><p>Despite it being 2026, moms continue to be expected to shoulder the lion&rsquo;s share of child-rearing, household management and the mental load of both. Yet, because this work is technically unpaid, so society doesn&rsquo;t deem it materially valuable. The truth: Salary.com estimates that in 2020-2021 (during the pandemic), stay-at-home mothers worked an average of 106 hours per week, which would add up to a fair-market annual salary <a href=\"https:\/\/www.salary.com\/articles\/how-much-is-a-mom-really-worth-the-amount-may-surprise-you\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">equivalent of nearly $185K<\/a>.<\/p><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-what-it-will-take-to-move-forward\">What it will take to move forward<\/h2><p>We all grapple with the identity shifts, the loss of our sense of self, the burnout, the mental and physical struggles. Seven years ago, when I first became a mother, we weren&rsquo;t openly talking about this reality. I&rsquo;m glad that there has since been a shift. <\/p><p>Consider the fact that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/BRThGeqjVEJ\/?hl=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Chrissy Teigen<\/a> spoke candidly about her experience with perinatal depression. <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/6096588\/gabrielle-union-surrogacy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gabrielle Union<\/a> has spoken openly about the grief she faced with infertility and surrogacy.&nbsp;Conversations like these are crucial and remind us that there&rsquo;s not only one acceptable path or gold standard when it comes to mothering.<\/p><p>Motherhood is transformative, but it&rsquo;s also isolating. It&rsquo;s easy to feel siloed in our experiences. However, when we talk about what we&rsquo;re going through, when we share what &ldquo;working&rdquo; looks like for each of us, when we invite other moms to the conversation, rather than dividing and shutting each other out, we have the opportunity to set a whole new standard &mdash; one that&rsquo;s equally nuanced and real.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p><p><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whether you have a career and work outside your home, hold a remote position and work from your home, and yes, even if you are the primary caregiver for your family and work inside your home, you are a \u201cworking mom.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":975,"featured_media":65689,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"enable_toc":false,"care_reviewed_by":0,"care_post_updated_flag":false,"care_updated_date":"2026-02-09T15:29:13.462Z","last_update":"2022-04-18","view_count":713,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1157,1127],"member-type":[3],"vertical":[6,11],"platform":[2],"class_list":["post-65674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-parent-mental-health","tag-work-life-balance","member-type-seeker","vertical-children","vertical-news-trends","platform-resources"],"acf":[],"created":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/975"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65674"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":225874,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65674\/revisions\/225874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65674"},{"taxonomy":"member-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/member-type?post=65674"},{"taxonomy":"vertical","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vertical?post=65674"},{"taxonomy":"platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.care.com\/c\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/platform?post=65674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}