In certain corners of corporate America, a generous parental leave policy has become a crucial tool for recruiting and retention. Many of the biggest tech employers have been leaders on this front, offering 16 to 20 weeks of leave, or even close to six months at companies like Google.
But even as companies have expanded their parental leave benefits, few of them have sought to address the unique challenges many parents—and especially mothers—face when they actually return to work. A handful of companies, among them Apple and Amazon, offer a grace period that enables employees to ease back into work part-time or work flexible hours for a few weeks.
Despite all these advances, clinical psychologist and author Angele Close argues that many leaders still don’t fully comprehend how pregnancy and motherhood fundamentally changes people—a phenomenon that is now better understood. Over the last decade, researchers have studied how going through pregnancy and motherhood alters cognition and changes the brain in a manner that lasts at least two years.
There’s a term for this experience: matrescence, which Close defines as a “profound identity transformation that women go through becoming mothers, [which] affects all areas of their life—physiologically, neurologically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually.” In her book Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, journalist and science writer Lucy Jones describes it as a transition akin to adolescence, with comparable changes to the brain.
The modern workplace, however, is not really designed to accommodate matrescence. It’s not just that women are uniquely impacted by pregnancy and childbirth; in many cases, they also disproportionately shoulder the burden of caregiving responsibilities.
Even now, with so many companies offering more generous leave policies, men still take less leave. Most workplaces are simply not equipped to adequately support working mothers when they return—and concerns over showing bias or making shaky assumptions about their ambitions can put employers in a tricky position.
Setting up support
Close believes the first step is just increasing awareness of how working mothers are changed by the experience of matrescence.
“People don’t understand matrescence yet, so we have to get that language in our culture to really appreciate it,” she says. “There is this idea [that] you get your leave, and then you’re going to just bounce right back . . . Of course, it’s unique and individual to everybody. But even just having that language and the lens of it—she’s not coming back the same woman she was when she left. And can we give space for that? Can we be curious about that?”
For some employees, matrescence might precipitate a more radical shift.
“Many women do start wanting different things,” Close says. “What lights you up before might light you up differently. Sometimes that might mean they are going to just leave the company and go and try something new.”
Of course, despite common assumptions that a woman’s ambitions recede after having a baby, everyone responds to motherhood differently. But Close says companies should be more open to the idea that something may have shifted. Or at least give employees an opening to have a conversation about their priorities upon their return: both what they might need as they reacclimate, and how they hope to balance their ambitions alongside their caregiving responsibilities. That might also include having a follow-up conversation a few months down the road, to check in and reevaluate.
“Most women that I talk to want that,” says Close, who works with clients both as a therapist and motherhood coach. “They are fulfilled in work. They don’t want to stay at home. They want to find a way to integrate this and make it work. But because it’s not understood in the workforce and in their organizations, they aren’t fully supported.”
Navigating a transformation
While parental leave policies and other caregiver benefits can amount to lip service at certain companies, it remains a crucial offering for many employees, as well as an opportunity for companies to talk about issues that might impact working parents. A company that wants to highlight the challenges faced by mothers returning to the workplace could, for example, bring in people to speak on the subject for a “lunch and learn” event.
When employers don’t leave room for much dialogue about their career ambitions, it also makes it that much more difficult for working mothers to raise concerns. “If I’m not feeling supported, now I have to vocalize it,” Close says. “So the more that people understand, the safer it’s going to be for a mom to have the confidence to say: ‘I know it’s not me and I’m not failing. This is what I need.’”
In fact, companies should see this as an opportunity to cultivate loyalty and strong leadership skills. The experience of matrescence can be a “real positive transformation for women,” Close says, one that gives them greater clarity on their values and priorities. The juggling act of early motherhood enhances their ability to manage competing priorities in a way that can prove exceptionally useful in the workplace.
“She’s now juggling many, many things, and her whole body—her physiology—is managing that, and developing it, and getting good at it,” she says. “We’re missing out on potential great leaders if they just feel unsupported and end up leaning out.”
The costs of failing to support
There are long-term consequences when companies fail to develop those employees, well beyond the acute transformation of early motherhood.
In their initial years of child-rearing, working mothers may need more flexibility in their schedules and seek out greater work-life balance. But the motherhood penalty can affect how companies perceive those women further along in their careers, as their children grow older and they want to pour themselves into their work.
“There are a lot of women who are kind of at the later stages of motherhood, where they have a lot to offer,” Close says. “They have more energy, they have more space, and they have gained those skills.”
After all, there’s a real cost when companies are unable to retain these workers. In the years since the pandemic—which drove many working mothers out of their jobs—the number of women in the workforce had surpassed pre-pandemic levels. But last year, that trend started to reverse: In the first half of 2025, about 212,000 women exited the workforce, and a Washington Post analysis found that the share of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 had dipped by nearly three percentage points. The December jobs report cemented this shift as 81,000 workers left the labor force—all of whom were women, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
“When moms come to see me, they’re cracking, or they’re burnt out,” Close says. “A big part of what I do is to just say: What you’re going through is normal, and it’s expected, and it’s not a personal, individual failure. What a world it would be if we all understood that, and companies and bosses and CEOs could make space for that and be supportive. We’d have a lot more moms [who] are thriving.”
