Why U.S. Working Moms Are So Stressed – And What To Do About It
Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis, conducted interviews with mothers in four countries — the United States, Italy, Germany, and Sweden — who have jobs outside the home to better understand the pressures they felt. She found that American moms were by far the most stressed, primarily because of the lack of parental benefits offered by their employers and the government. In Europe, women told Collins they had more help, but at times cultural norms around their personal and professional roles had yet to catch up. Collins thinks companies can work to improve the situation but argues that the real solution is carefully designed government interventions that will help families at all income levels. She’s the author of the book Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving.
TRANSCRIPT
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
Stressed, exhausted, overwhelmed, guilty. These are some of the words that working moms in four countries use to describe themselves when talking to our guest today, Caitlyn Collins. She’s a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of Making Motherhood Work.
For that book she interviewed 135 women who have children and jobs outside the home and asked them about their lives. Samantha, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. expressed a common sentiment among American mothers: “Before I had children the message was, you can do everything. I can’t do everything. If I keep all the balls in the air I’m broken.”
In Europe where parental benefits are much better, we think employed mothers are happier and Collins research supports that. But she also found that some were still frustrated by expectations that they be both ideal workers and perfect moms.
She wants to find solutions for these women, but not the self-help kind. As a sociologist, she’s more interested in how policy and cultural change can help. Caitlyn, thanks so much for coming on the show.
CAITLYN COLLINS: Thanks for having me.
ALISON BEARD: So, it seems like working motherhood is a balancing act, sometimes a very stressful one, everywhere. But in looking at the four countries that you did – Germany, Italy, Sweden and the U.S. – what are some of the biggest differences that you saw?
CAITLYN COLLINS: Well, part of what struck me in doing these interviews with moms across these countries is that American moms stood apart for not only their stress and their worry, but they were the only women that I interviewed who didn’t expect to have external supports from their employers, from their partners or from the federal government.
The women that I interviewed in Sweden and Germany and Italy, all expected to be supported from these other sources. I knew that these European countries had work family policy supports that were much more robust than we have here in the U.S., but the fact that it was American moms uniquely who blamed themselves for their own stress and thought it was their own job to resolve it, that struck me as really surprising, but also to be honest with you, really heartbreaking.
And women often in the U.S. would start crying during the interviews and I didn’t expect this ahead of time. And the question that moms here tended to tear up unexpectedly over was when I asked them part way through our interviews, help me understand what it means to you, to be a good mother to your children.
And this often elicited eyes welling up with tears and women breaking down with us needing to stop and pause because these American moms so often felt like they were failing their children. That there was a really wide gap between their hopes for what it meant for them to be a good mom and what they were actually able to enact on a day to day basis.
What women want and expect for themselves depends a lot on their cultural context. And American moms heartbreakingly to me, they expect nothing in the way of support from their partners, from their employers, and certainly from the federal government. And even when I asked women, “do you think that the government could do anything to help support your work and family life better to make things less stressful?”
And women would look at me really blankly like this had never occurred to them before. And one mom stopped and paused for a while, looked up at the ceiling and said, “well, it would be really great if I could be home when my kids get home at the end of their school day, but that would be like turning around the Titanic.”
ALISON BEARD: You make the point that societal and cultural values play such a big role in how we feel about how we’re supposed to perform in the office and at home. How much of that emotion was driven by the mothers’ own expectations for themselves versus society’s expectations for them?
CAITLYN COLLINS: Well, as a sociologist I would argue you can’t separate the two. The expectations that we hold for ourselves about anything in life – what it means to be a good partner, a good worker, a good parent, a good friend, a good daughter – all of these are really intimately linked to cultural ideals about what it means to be good at those roles.
So, in the U.S. we have this idea that what it means to be a good worker is to devote all of your time and all of your energy to the workplace with the hopes of demonstrating to your employers that you are fully committed and in allegiance with the goals of the workplace. And this tends to benefit men and disadvantage women in the workplace.
And again, without policy supports that help ameliorate the conflict that people who have non-work responsibilities such as family – without those policy supports what we find is an acute amount of work/family conflict and I think that that does breed the guilt and exhaustion and stress I was mentioning when American moms would break down during our conversations.
ALISON BEARD: So, many European countries are held up as sort of better places to be a working mom and Sweden is one in particular. And since you went there and interviewed women there, does it feel that way on the ground that it’s just the best place you could possibly have children and have a job at the same time?
CAITLYN COLLINS: Yes, Alison. To be honest with you, yes. And everyone I know who has visited Sweden from an American perspective has said, “when can I move?” The issue at hand of course is that things look really ideal there, but it’s not like we can just import the policies they have to the U.S. and expect things to kind of be this nirvana for working moms here.
So, part of what really struck me when I landed in Stockholm, just in general day to day life when you’re riding the Metro, buying groceries, there are men everywhere with babies alone. No women in sight. And there’s a joke amongst Swedes that Americans tend to get off the airplane, look around them in shock at all of the men pushing strollers or feeding babies, and ask, “why is it that so many men work as nannies here?”
And of course they aren’t nannies. They’re fathers. And to me the fact that Americans would assume that these are paid caregivers says everything we need to know about our cultural ideals about who should be taking care of kids. And in a Swedish context, the assumption is that men and women share both in breadwinning and caregiving equally. That is a cultural ideal that’s supported through their federal policies and we lack that sort of cultural consensus here in the U.S.
ALISON BEARD: Has Sweden always been that way or did policies drive that cultural attitude?
CAITLYN COLLINS: So, their sort of feminist movement and awakening as it related to women in the labor force and all of this happened slightly before ours did here in the U.S. And so they’re ahead of us as it relates to thinking through what it means to support families and what it means to try to encourage gender equality.
So for several decades now the country’s labor policy and family policy has been deeply intertwined with gender equality policy. And so, I think what you’re saying is absolutely right that these policies in some ways sort of led the charge toward cultural change that was more egalitarian. So, for example, their paid parental leave – it was the first country in the entire world, 1974 that passed paid parental leave – and the idea being that men and women would split this equally.
And what Sweden ended up doing was incentivizing men to take advantage of this parental leave by offering it at high wage replacement, which research shows is absolutely crucial for take up. So, it’s one thing to have policies on the books and this is the case in many American work places, to offer work family benefits or polices is one thing, but to actually have workers feel comfortable and confident that they can take them without negative repercussions in the workplace is an entirely different matter.
And in the Swedish context by offering these policies and incentivizing men to take them, what we ended up seeing was enormous increases in uptake up parental leave amongst men. And today it has worked its way into cultural attitudes such that men and women would tell me that both parents have a right to spend time with their children.
And this discourse of rights is actually built into Swedish welfare policy. That children have a right to equal access to both of their parents and that both parents have a right to spend time with their children.
ALISON BEARD: And that’s separating it from the idea of benefits too. It’s some extra thing that I get. No, it’s something that I deserve to have.
CAITLYN COLLINS: Exactly. And when there’s a communal sense that the ability to spend time with your children is a right rather than a privilege, it really changes the cultural conversation.
And I think that’s what we’re missing here in the U.S. to be honest with you Alison. The idea that parents don’t think that necessarily they should have the right to spend time with their children after they give birth, but we are seeing some really promising up swells of support for more work family policy support, particularly things like paid parental leave, not just FMLA. And also, universal Pre-K. I think we are developing a cultural consensus that it is in all of our collective best interest to raise children well.
And we know that having parents at home with kids when they’re able, especially for the first six months to a year, is beneficial not only for parents, but for kids. And a wealth of research interestingly also shows that when paid parental leave is offered at moderate length, we see either neutral or positive impacts for businesses as it relates to profitability, turnover, worker morale and worker productivity.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. You did make the point though that there’s one hurdle, in that you can change the policies, an organization can offer great benefits, a government can change its laws, but then people need to catch up. And what you saw in Germany between the East and West Germany was a good example of that, right? That the culture hadn’t caught up to the policy.
CAITLYN COLLINS: Yes. So, Germany is a fascinating case and I really wanted to interview moms there in the two regions. So, I conducted interviews in Berlin, in former East Germany and in several cities across western Germany, because the country has this very interesting historical legacy as a result of the split between East Germany and West Germany for 40 years.
And when former East Germany at the time was – or the GDR – was a socialist welfare state, maternal employment was quasi-compulsory and they had universal childcare. So, it was completely expected that women had a child, stayed home for six or eight weeks and then went back to work fulltime, putting their kids in one of the state-run childcare facilities. And so, it was expected that mothers worked outside the home as well as did the vast majority of child rearing and housework at home.
In comparison, in western Germany, it was long in the case that mothers were expected to stay home for the first few years of a child’s life before they entered daycare. And this was backed up again with their public policies. So, they offered up to three years of parental leave which was effectively maternity leave, because only moms took all this time off of work. And then daycare was only available starting at the age of three.
So, when you have a policy that says you’ve got up to three years at home and you can’t put your kid in a childcare facility until age three, this is a pretty clear signal about what women quote unquote should be doing with their time in the first few years of their children’s lives. And after reunification, this very traditional, what we call conservative welfare state model was imposed on former East Germany, where these cultural ideals had been much more gender egalitarian.
And what I found was that women in former East Germany told me that they didn’t feel guilty at all for working outside the house and enrolling their children in daycare. I heard a lot of women in western Germany tell me they felt acute guilt for taking less than three years of leave and returning to work. Three years is a long time to be out of the professional workplace. Especially for white collar workers, highly educated workers.
And in fact, Germany, there’s a word that working mothers in western Germany taught me that I’d never heard before to help explain this cultural stigma. Women would say to me, we have a word here in Germany. I don’t think it exists in English. But when I return to work after a year instead of taking the quote unquote generous three years of leave available to me, I was called a “Rabenmutter.” And a Rabenmutter in English would translate to raven mother. And a raven mother is a mom who selfishly flies away from the nest, abandoning her children to pursue a career.
And women in western Germany would tell me that stay at home moms especially and sometimes folks of older generations would call them Rabenmutter and say, “you’re being selfish by returning to your job. Your job is to stay home in the next with your young ones and take care of them until it’s the ‘right age’ for them to enter childcare.” And so women felt enormous cultural stigma for returning to work and they felt like they were failing not only at home, but also in the workplace.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And if you have more than one child you’re then expected to stay home for another three years?
CAITLYN COLLINS: Yes. Imagine that. So, it was often the case that women had more than one child. And again, the cultural expectation is that you stay home for three years with each of them. Six years out of the professional workplace is eons.
I interviewed moms who would say things to me like, “I stayed home and now that I’m back, I can tell my job success has been a sacrifice for my child. I’ll be lucky if they let me sit in the cellar. I’m an old woman now. I’m more or less obsolete. The fact that they let me keep my job itself is wonderful because it was too long out of the workforce.”
ALISON BEARD: So, how long does it take for culture to catch up to policy?
CAITLYN COLLINS: What a great question. I don’t think there’s an easy answer to this. In the past few years, starting in 2007, Germany looking at their skilled labor shortages and fertility rates that troubled lawmakers, the country as a whole decided to implement a series of policies that align much more closely with a Scandinavian welfare model that supports this dual earner/carer model of family life.
And to boost women’s labor force participation, especially women who had children, and again, to increase fertility rates, Germany has implemented a series of policies that look much more Scandinavian. That three years of paid parental leave I mentioned – they’ve reduced it to one year. And a policy shift like that is really dramatic and it takes a while for culture to catch up.
ALISON BEARD: It’s interesting though because it’s sort of a chicken and egg thing.
CAITLYN COLLINS: Yes, very much so.
ALISON BEARD: You need the culture to change a bit before the policy can be changed.
CAITLYN COLLINS: Absolutely. And I think here in the U.S. we can see examples of this with all sorts – I was talking with my students about this in class yesterday, examples of when policies, social policies lead the way toward positive social change, or sometimes it’s culture that’s really leading the charge and policies take a long time to catch up.
ALISON BEARD: Given how slow it is to change laws, should organizations be taking a bigger stance than they already are in terms of providing parental benefits?
CAITLYN COLLINS: Well, I think that offering organizational level benefits is of course fantastic. It’s better than nothing for workers. Putting the onus on workplaces itself is really problematic because first of all a lot of workplaces can’t afford to offer paid benefits to their workers such as unlimited paid vacation and paid parental leave and things like this.
Usually only employers who are looking not only to recruit, but then also retain highly talented workers, tend to offer these benefits. And what that ends up creating is a workforce that’s very widely stratified between workers who are usually highly educated, higher income, they can use their resources and their capital to leverage better benefits for themselves and these workplaces, compared to folks who are working at the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum who don’t have those resources and capital to leverage.
So, if we saw a place like McDonald’s starting to offer paid parental leave, that would be a sea change and that would offer benefits to employees who need them the most. Folks who are low income. And so, yes, I think it’s great for organizations to be offering these policies. I think again, any support is better than none.
But I think the onus should be on the federal government to fund this through a national tax program rather than relying on individual employers to make the decision that’s in the best interest, not only of their workers, but also for them as the business itself.
ALISON BEARD: I’m glad you made the point about different classes of workers because your interview subjects were mostly middle class, urban, professionals. So, their experiences is obviously very different than people working blue collar, or service industry jobs, yet even they, people with income at their disposal, presumably who work for employers who are more progressive. Even they were, I think your phrase was “drowning in stress,” right?
CAITLYN COLLINS: Absolutely. And so, you’re exactly right. I interviewed middle class working mothers for this study and we can think about these middle class moms as being sort of the proverbial “canaries in a coal mine.”
If even these women who have adequate resources and capital and social networks to leverage in order to try and resolve their work/family conflict, if even they are drowning in stress, imagine what life is like for women at the bottom end of the socioeconomic spectrum who can’t afford the same sorts of benefits as middle and upper class women can.
ALISON BEARD: And I think the idea that the messages that we often receive is that it’s on us to negotiate for better benefits, to look for a better employer, to figure out coping strategies. So, it is hard to get beyond this individualistic notion that it’s on us.
CAITLYN COLLINS: And I want to drive home the point that I don’t at all think that it’s surprising or unusual that women feel this way. I think it’s 100 percent logical that American women would think it’s on them to resolve their own work family conflict. Because it’s the message that we constantly give families. Families in the U.S. are considered a private responsibility.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And as we work toward improving that situation, it opens a big opportunity for organizations to lead the way. So, what are some companies that you think are doing a great job in both supporting their own employees and agitating for broader change?
CAITLYN COLLINS: Well, I think, I can list a lot of companies that I think have policies that look great. I have heard far less about organizations that are agitating for a social change on a national level. So often the push for policy change is at the organizational level as you pointed out Alison.
And I think we can look to companies like for example, Deloitte. Many tech companies as well such as Netflix. The tech industry was one of the first sort of fields in which we started to see what looked sort of like a race to offer the most generous policies for their workers.
And again, I think we can understand this because we’re in an era now where people want to live less harried, frantic, stressed, overwhelmed, work and family lives. People want greater balance between their work and family responsibilities these days and I think tech companies realize that offering things like unlimited vacation or lengthy paid parental leave, are highly desirable and could pull workers from other fields that they might pursue into tech and to keep them there.
So, yes, I think it’s really fantastic that we see companies offering policies like these. What’s really important to highlight is a need for these companies to offer these work family benefits to all their workers and not just their salaried ones.
Several companies in Silicon Valley came under fire through large public outcry when they offered these policies and made the front page of newspapers across the country, as a result of what looked like very generous work family benefits. But again, they offered these to folks who occupy the C-Suite and not to the janitors who are cleaning up the C-Suite after them.
ALISON BEARD: Do you have any advice for managers about how to make things better for the working moms on their teams? Or, the working dads for that matter?
CAITLYN COLLINS: Yes. Role model what it would mean to live a more sane work and family life. When you have policies on the books, managers are in the best position to again, role model taking advantage of and using these policies without remorse and regret. They occupy positions of power and can demonstrate to folks who are their subordinates that it is OK to use these policies. We encourage you to use these policies and there will not be consequences and stigma for you, for using them.
And it’s again, incentivizing in some ways workers to take advantage of the policies that’s going to matter. Because it doesn’t matter how many wonderful policies you have in writing if people feel scared to take advantage of them.
So, a big problem in, for example, tech, the tech industry is an easy example to use since they make news headlines all the time as a result of this, but many of them are now offering quote unquote, unlimited paid vacation days. What we know, the research shows is that when you offer unlimited paid vacation days people actually end up taking less than they do when they’re given a certain number. And so, some of these tech companies are now actually incentivizing workers to actually take advantage and use the days available to them. Which suggests again that this ideal worker model, that you show this 100 percent commitment to your workplace suggests that people will not take advantage of policies that help reconcile their work and family commitments, because they don’t want to be seen as a bad worker.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So, you dedicated this book to your mom who was a corporate executive when you were young and then scaled back to being a consultant. How did her experience inform your work? You know she might have been stressed and very busy, but you turned out really well.
CAITLYN COLLINS: I think she was stressed and busy. My mom – I had a working mom, a single working mom for much of my childhood that did it all, or at least she strived to do it all. She had a very successful career in corporate sales and marketing. And what that often meant was sacrificing time at home.
And so, we had a, an absolute army of caregivers, babysitters, nannies, sports teams, clubs, neighbors, taking care of us until she could get home at the end of the day. She typically worked seven to seven in the office.
And I remember really being in awe of my mom growing up. Seeing her leave in these impeccably tailored suits and high heels, commanding these rooms full of men in suits, but she was stressed and she was frantic. And she tells me today anyway, that she constantly felt guilty and inadequate.
We ate a lot of pizza and McDonalds and she’s told me that she felt acutely guilty for having served us those meals and I laughed when she admitted that to me as an adult because I remember thinking that I had the best mom ever. That I got the McDonalds and pizza all the time. I thought she was just rewarding us and she was like no. It’s because I didn’t have time to get to the grocery store. And I was like, well I just thought that made you an extra cool mom.
But again, growing up with this rally rock star mom who ended up sacrificing her career aspirations to dial back to a part time job, so she was effectively a stay-at-home mom – she did consult, but it had no benefits whatsoever and it paid infinitely less than her corporate sales and marketing job did. And watching my mom struggle through all this, I just grew up thinking to myself, there has got to be a better way.
ALISON BEARD: Well, thank you so much. It’s been really informative. And it’s obviously a subject dear to my own heart.
CAITLYN COLLINS: Well, I’m so glad that we had the conversation and I’m of course always feeling lucky myself that I get to engage with folks like you about it.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Caitlyn Collins. She’s an assistant sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of the book Making Motherhood Work.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager.
Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.