Breaking Up with Mom Guilt: Real Solutions for Working Moms

You’re Already Enough - So Rewrite your Mom Guilt Narrative

It’s morning. You drive towards dropping off your youngest child at school. Suddenly, your phone vibrates with an urgent work email. You hug your child goodbye with one arm, type a reply with the other, and fly to your first meeting. By midmorning, guilt engulfs you: the guilt of leaving your child behind so abruptly, the guilt of not giving 100% to your work, and the guilt of somehow failing on both fronts.

This emotional to-and-fro between your career goals and motherly duties is called working mother guilt. We all know that working mother guilt is the heavy feeling of not doing enough, either at work or at home. It usually arises from the desire to be both a great employee and a devoted parent and worrying that you fall short in one or both roles. You feel it when you miss a school event, have to depend on childcare, or just take time out to care for yourself.

Ultimately, this guilt gnaws at our confidence and results in major heartaches, stress, and poor mental health. Many women aim for success and want to be “perfect” moms. I was one of those moms after the birth of my first child. All the while, I was working full-time - over fifty hours per week! My babysitter had to tell me, “he needs you more than this.” Ouch.

But working mother guilt is NOT a life sentence. Please recognize that we all have it, but it is possible to understand where it comes from and learn to follow a few effective strategies to reduce it.

mom looking at toddler while working on computer and her phone

Working Mother Guilt Dissected

We can deal with working mother guilt by understanding three key factors: where it comes from, how it shows up in our mind and body, and our most triggering moments.

Where the Mom Guilt Comes From

● Cultural Conditioning: Society views motherhood as a self-sacrificing role. Our culture has told us for centuries that a good mother cares for her children. “Good moms” should always be present for every minor injury and every milestone. Good moms should bake cookies in the afternoon, and good moms should attend every school event. This is cultural conditioning, pure and simple. Notice all the shoulds in that previous sentence? Those shoulds live in our heads from cultural conditioning and from our image of motherhood – from your own mother or a mother-figure.

My own mother worked full-time as an elementary school librarian. She never attended any of my school events, but I wanted to be there for my kids!

● Workplace Bias: There is a real “Motherhood Penalty” for working mothers. After having children, women face slower career growth, fewer promotions, and lower salary hikes. This bias sends a message: if you want to succeed professionally, you’ll have to work harder to prove yourself, which can intensify the guilt of being away from your children. Alternatively, you buy into the notion that having children slows you down (because it really does).

It took me nine years to get promoted to associate professor with tenure when I was working for a medical school. The expected time period for promotion is seven years, except that I had given birth to three babies during that time!

● Personal Expectations: Your ideals can feel heavy. Was your stay-at-home mother the perfect mom? Cooking every meal perfectly, picking up and dropping off kids at school, attending each sporting event, and performing many other maternal tasks are more demanding than our ideas of cultural standards lead us to believe. Plus, any degree of innate perfectionism makes any maternal mistake or missed event feel huge. For perfectionists like me, that was a hard pill to swallow.

One of my patients took a turn for the worse on the same morning that I was to attend a Mother’s Day tea with my son at his preschool. I stayed to help stabilize that baby and frantically paged my husband to ask him to attend the tea. Our three-year-old son didn’t know the difference, but I felt awful!

How Mom Guilt Manifests in us

Working mother guilt can ruin your mental, emotional, and, ultimately, your physical health:

● Mental Overload: You might scold yourself for missing the morning breakfast routine and watching them climb onto the bus. This drains our energy and affects work tasks and home life alike. We carry our unmet expectations along with us as we make our way to work. And when we are at home with our children, we continue to think about that unfinished work project.

About six months into my new practice, I pleaded with my partners to start morning rounds at 0800 am instead of their prior routine - 0700 am - so that I could see my children off to school each day. They begrudgingly agreed and later several of them confessed to enjoying seeing their own kids at breakfast!

● Emotional Turmoil: You constantly juggle your emotions between pride over a work achievement and guilt for not celebrating your child’s milestones and school events. This leads to mood swings and can put a strain on your personal and professional life.

When I was physically tired after a difficult 24-hour-call stint in the hospital, I wanted to see my kids when I got home, but I wanted to go to sleep more! Even when exhausted, I felt guilty for feeling this way.

● Physical Stress: Yes, your body feels it. Chronic guilt raises cortisol levels and causes headaches, trouble sleeping, digestive issues, muscle tension, teeth grinding, and many more symptoms. This chronic stress can lead to working mom burnout and/or depression.

I’ve been there before!

Common Mom Guilt Triggers: Why it Hurts so Much

Missing a school or sporting event: You’re choosing to work over your children.

Relying on daycare or babysitters while at work: You’re “abandoning” your child, and they are not you and don’t do things your way.

Checking work emails during family time: Your work is still in charge of your mind.

Comparing yourself to others who seem to make it all work so easily: You only see highlight reels, curated to look great, and it makes you feel less than.