Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen article after article in the New York Times, BBC, PBS, and a few others about a recent change in labor statistics: more mothers of young children are leaving the workforce. Jessica Grose opined in the NYT that what we are facing is an “erasure” of working women and a neglect of their contributions to society. The drama!
The Zero-Sum Rhetoric Around Working Moms
The media fundamentally misrepresents the value of maternal presence and attachment during early child development. Women have indeed made significant strides in the workforce, resulting in unparalleled gains for our modern world. However, when we prioritize women’s economic participation over caregiving and frame maternal presence as an act of erasure, we create a false dichotomy that ignores all available science around attachment security.
We twist motherhood and caregiving into a zero-sum game.
The common lens for looking at women, work, and childcare often focuses on economic impacts and gender equality, frequently implying that a mother’s choice to be present for her children is detrimental to society. The coverage treats downturns in women working like a critical shortage of some kind. The stories are always about the workplace, never the home. The office gets centered in the narrative as a barometer for the health of the nation.
This limited viewpoint overlooks a core truth: secure attachment, built on a mother’s presence and emotional availability, is essential for a child’s lifelong mental health, emotional stability, and ability to contribute positively to society.
Put more simply: Why aren’t we valuing in our news coverage the positive impact of emotionally secure and stable children? The people who will be your future neighbors, classmates, and colleagues…
Invisible, Vital Benefits
Extensive research in developmental psychology and neuroscience has demonstrated that secure attachment, nurtured by consistent, caring, and responsive engagement from a primary caregiver, lays the biological foundation for resilience, emotional regulation, and healthy relationships. This attachment security provides the emotional framework children need to explore, learn, and develop confidence. It’s not just about physical care or feeding but about establishing a secure base from which children can flourish. Supporting maternal presence is not a societal luxury, but a strategic investment in the health and resilience of future generations.
Stronger marriages. More orderly classrooms. Lower crime. Less addiction.
Currently, societal and economic systems impose an unrealistic expectation on women to “do it all“ simultaneously: excel professionally while providing constant emotional nurturing or comfortably outsource childcare before their children are developmentally ready. This creates a no-win situation, pressuring women to feel guilty or inadequate if they prioritize caregiving, or guilty if they return to work. When mothers choose to temporarily or permanently leave the workforce to focus on caregiving, society often views this as a loss.
Governments express frustration over reduced tax contributions and economic participation, while feminist commentators argue they are letting their side down.
Ok… but well-adjusted, emotionally secure children nurtured by their attentive presence are a public good. Taking this pause does not mean abandoning women’s rights or giving up on a career forever.
The people who usually talk about common goods tend to say nothing about this fact.
Criticism shouldn’t be directed at women’s freely made choices, but at the societal and economic structures that stigmatize caregiving as some kind of failure.
When nearly half of children have insecure attachment, we must shift our cultural narrative to acknowledge that women can and should be able to prioritize their children’s emotional security without shame.
What Needs To Be Done?
Supporting flexible work arrangements
Better parental leave systems
Formal recognition of caregiving as a vital societal contribution.
We need a cultural transformation that affirms maternal presence as beneficial and foundational, rather than viewing it as a failure or a setback.
Let’s shift the conversation away from demonizing women who may choose to “lean out” and instead promote partnership and emotional security as the foundations for society’s success.
 | A guest post by
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While I agree with you main thesis that young children need their mothers, I disagree with the first two of your three prescriptions.
Supporting flexible work arrangements
Better parental leave systems
Formal recognition of caregiving as a vital societal contribution.
I think we need to return to recognizing a husband and wife as a unit that together earns a living and raises a family. And a society that values both of those goals together. Older children need hands-on parenting differently than babies and toddlers do, but they still need attention. We are reaping the outsourcing of education to schools and universities that are producing anxious, often illiterate students with poor logic and thinking skills. Raising the next generation is an important and worthwhile goal.
A lot of truth to this, but several things to consider...When women are well employed they can continue to support the family if they need to leave an abusive relationship, husband dies, etc.
My mother was, for her day, well educated. She had an expression "Just a dumb housewife."
Today, I see the very important role those housewives played in supporting the well being of their families. There was less mental illness and developmental problems. Obesity was rare and shocking. Culture is/was generally passed down through women or mothers, but quickly lost. Today we buy cookbooks to try to regain some of that important knowledge. Traditional, cultural knowledge is very valuable but largely erased by school education. Adding to the loss of nutritious meals is the increase in processed foods, and foods exposed to chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Around 1930 Weston A. Price, D.D.S. noticed deteriorating health in his patients, and asked the question "What makes people healthy?" He went to work to find out....see more at price-pottenger.org, 800-366-3748, 619-462-7600. Price saw value in traditional, indigenous people.