When Stephanie Fornaro was 5 and her younger brother was 6 months old, her mother left and did not come back. When Fornaro had her own children, she vowed she would do better. She left her sales job in preparation for the birth of her second child in 2017.
But after the birth, Fornaro struggled. Her husband, an entrepreneur, was on the road half the time. And she was lost in a fog of postpartum depression. Fornaro didn’t want to hire help. “It felt like I was failing as a mother because I was allowing someone else to raise my son,” she says. “I spent my entire life wondering how does a mother leave her children? It wasn’t until I went through a bout of postpartum depression myself that I understood. It wasn’t a lack of love. It was a lack of resources and support.”
America tells women they can have it all: children, a career—and their sanity. But the numbers don’t bear this out.
Mothers in the United States are not okay. The percentage of mothers with excellent mental health dropped from nearly 40% in 2016 to 26% in 2023. During the same period, mothers who rated their mental health as fair or poor jumped by more than 60%, according to a 2025 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Some mothers are voting with their feet. An analysis by KPMG found over the past three years the number of college-educated women with children under 5 in the workforce has declined, while employment rates for women without children and most groups of men have increased.
Many are opting out of motherhood altogether. Over the course of this century, the U.S. birth rate has steadily declined. In 2025, the rate hit an all-time low of 53 births per 1,000 women, a 23% drop since 2007.
Fornaro took a different approach. She’s dedicated herself to improving the system. Employing a nanny had made motherhood doable for her, so in 2022, Fornaro started Hello Nanny!, a platform that simplifies hiring childcare, from recruiting and vetting candidates to making sure nannies are paid legally as opposed to under the table.
As she built Hello Nanny!, Fornaro realized that even the tax code around childcare is broken, making it even more difficult for families to get help. While employers can deduct payroll from taxes, families must pay nannies with posttax dollars. In 2026, Fornaro started Workforce Infrastructure Institute, a nonpartisan research foundation that advocates for tax code reform for childcare.
Fast Company put out a call asking mothers who’ve started businesses aimed at addressing these problems what they were building and why. More than 130 responded, including a few from countries like Canada, the U.K., and Germany, which offer more extensive government support for working parents.
Their companies range from one selling nontoxic formula for treating lice, to numerous AI apps for reducing the mental load, to lovingly crafted coaching and support group programs covering everything from sick children to the sandwich generation. (We’ve listed them at the end of the article. While a number were designed to employ working parents, we omitted companies that did not specifically have a product or service that helps parents.)
Individually, each business tells the story of a talented mother who grew so frustrated with the system she decided to build her own solution. “If you look at other cultures, nobody raises a child alone,” Fornaro says. “Only in America do you have this cultural expectation that if we’re self-sufficient then we’re successful. If we need help, then we’re seen as weak and failing.”
Taken together, the companies create a detailed map of the fault lines in American motherhood from workplace penalties to childcare gaps. They also offer a glimpse of what a better system could look like.
Two hinge points in American history that created today’s problem for working mothers
American society has always put enormous social pressure for married women to abstain from working. In 1930, a series of laws made it illegal for the government to employ more than one person in a married couple. Frances Perkins, who became the first female secretary of labor in 1933, called it “selfish” for married women to work when their husbands could support them. Before World War II, only 15% of married women had a job compared with about 50% of unmarried women.
This paradigm shifted when the U.S. entered the war and men went abroad to fight and women were called into workforce to replace them. As the war dragged on, the government asked mothers with young children to join as well.
To make this possible, the government funded day care centers. By the end of the war, almost 25% of married women worked outside the house. But in 1946, with the war over, the government shut down these daycare facilities despite parents’ lobbying for more childcare.
The next major moment came 25 years later, in 1971. Decades of lobbying led to the passage by Congress of the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have established a national day care system. However, President Nixon vetoed it because it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”
Public policy has never again come close to catching up to the culture as the number of women in the workforce steadily rose, crossing 50% in the late 1970s. In 1988, Jennifer A. Kingston, a journalist with The New York Times, described a new phenomenon: the mommy track. As prestigious law firms started offering maternity leave and flexible hours to working mothers, they also took them less seriously and put them on the “mommy track” where there was no hope of promotion.
In the absence of any larger policy solution, the best we have is the corporate benefit of flexible spending accounts (FSA), which started in the 1980s and allow parents to pay for childcare with pretax dollars. At the time, childcare was roughly $2,000 a year and the FSA cap $5,000. But childcare for two children is now almost $30,000 annually on average, while the average income is about $66,000. In early 2026, the FSA cap was raised—to $7,500.
“The cavalry’s not coming,” says Suzanne Slaughter, CEO of Groundwork, a company that helps mothers find fractional work. “In the decades I have left to work, I don’t think we’re going to have meaningful policy change. So then, what can we do to evoke change?”
This is why Slaughter, Hello Nanny!’s Fornaro, and so many other women are inventing a brand new “mommy track”: promoting themselves to CEO of a new business designed to address some element of the problem that bedeviled them as working mothers.
Happy and healthy pregnancy and postpartum with dignity
Thirty-six hours after Anu Sharma was discharged from the hospital following the delivery of her child, she walked back into the ER on the verge of a stroke. Sharma considers herself lucky; she comes from a family of doctors and recognized the symptoms—but she was acutely aware another woman might have died.
The U.S., has a dismal—and frankly, terrifying—maternal mortality rate compared to other countries. In 2022, 22.3 women out of 100,000 died giving birth. (The comparable figure for Japan, for example, was 3.4 women; France, 7.6; Canada, 8.4.) Almost 80% of these deaths were preventable, and two-thirds occur within six weeks. Yet, once a woman is discharged from the hospital after giving birth, her first gynecological visit is six weeks later.
In 2021, Sharma started Millie, which brings midwives to a modern clinic; midwives provide postpartum care, including a home visit before the six-week mark. Sharma points out that ob-gyns are specialists who are trained to handle high-risk pregnancies. By 2035, one study estimates only six states will have enough ob-gyns to meet demand. Bringing midwives into the equation can make care more accessible.
Physical health is only half of the equation. About 10% of mothers have postpartum depression, but only about half of them are diagnosed. Another 20% have postpartum anxiety. Louise Song created Momma Chill after paying $800 out of pocket for psychiatric care, and ultimately left her job at Amazon. While still nascent, Momma Chill provides group support and coaching for mothers dealing with postpartum anxiety or depression to help them navigate caregiving and their career.
On a larger scale, Christy Davis and Cait Probst built VillageFor, an app including AI voice analysis that can provide a snapshot of a mother’s mood and stress levels, allowing mothers to track their well-being over time. The app can connect mothers to a maternal mental health hotline or text their care providers if there’s a crisis.
Even if a mother is healthy, the physical reality of postpartum is messy and inconvenient, especially if you’re breast feeding. In 2016, Patrice Hayden Meagher, a mother of four, forgot to pack a pump part. At the time she was an executive in commercial real estate and had a meeting with a major client. Because she’d forgotten a part, she could not pump, and she began to leak, staining her blouse. Meagher was humiliated. In 2020, she started MilkMate, which builds lactation rooms for offices and provides disposable pump kits, so mothers don’t have to worry about bringing a pump to work. In addition to being convenient, MilkMate’s spaces are welcoming—a change from most lactation rooms, which can be barren.
MilkMate’s chief marketing officer, Brie Tascione, remembers working in an office that was very supportive and designed a maternity leave policy around her. Even then, she was pumping on a toilet seat. (This was prior to 2022, when federal law mandated that offices create a space other than a bathroom for women to pump.)
“I didn’t tell anyone I needed something more,” she says, noting it’s difficult for mothers to speak up, particularly when their larger needs are already being met or the system is making an exception for them. “We’re giving women permission to do something basic and necessary in a way that feels dignified.”
Not everyone needs to pump in an office, but Tascione’s larger point stands. Pregnancy and postpartum are akin to having your mind and body leveled and then reshaped. In a society that likes to pretend we don’t have bodies that can get messy, how do we create space for mothers to feel safe and dignified?
Childcare and house help on tap
The crux of the problem working parents face is: Who takes care of the children and manages the household when the parents work?
Last year, Mitra Raman and Karthika Shankar, childhood best friends, started Rosie, a subscription service that lets parents sign up for a certain number of hours of house help a month. Raman got the idea after watching her nanny play with the kids while Raman cooked dinner. “I realized I wanted to switch places,” she says. Workers hired through Rosie can provide flexible childcare or house help. As an added bonus, Rosie offers mothers who need flexible hours and find that caregiving is a good fit an opportunity to earn some money.
In order to build name recognition, Rosie has been partnering with local events and providing childcare for free. That offering has been so popular, Raman and Shankar are considering developing it into a different offering.
In another novel marketplace seeking to create a win-win for both sides, Alison Donnally is building JoeyCo, a platform that matches college students looking for housing to families that need an extra pair of hands. While JoeyCo was originally built for older people who needed help with chores, Donnally has used it herself to find childcare.
Recess, started by Amy Kiska and Molly Morse, attacks the problem from a different angle. They’re building a platform that helps parents find classes and camps for kids. Recess cuts out the process of wading through dozens of websites and activity provider pages and also allows parents to coordinate with their children’s friends.
An unexpected added benefit: Kiska and Morse have found they’re able to talk with camp and activity providers to let them know what parents really need. Kiska gives an example: “We’re able to say, ‘Hey, your camp ends at 4 [p.m.], and the vast majority of consumers needs 5. Can we stretch it an hour?’”
Working while parenting
Having a child is probably the riskiest career move a woman can make. In 2023, researchers at Columbia University found that women’s salaries in the U.S. drop by 50% and remain that way for up to six years. A number of the founders I heard from built companies to protect women’s careers during this time, whether it was finding interim talent to cover parental leave or coaching businesses.
Suzanne Slaughter’s Groundwork is a job placement platform for mothers who want to go fractional. She points out that most startups don’t need full-time talent for every position, so they look for part-time talent through their networks. Most of those jobs never make it to the public.
When Slaughter was able to show founders the caliber of the talent on her platform, they were hooked. “I was obsessed with making this period of peak child-rearing more joyful,” Slaughter says. “I observed so many friends grind through it, treating it as a period to get through to what’s next, and that made me so sad. We have to give this population better resources to continue working, on slightly adjusted terms, so you can show up for your family in a way you’re proud of.”
Even if one is able to get and keep a job that works with parenting, there’s still the matter of keeping up with colleagues who don’t have children. When artificial intelligence started rearing its head in the workplace, Raquel Cadourcy worried about mothers. While her childless colleagues were able to learn AI after work, parents who had to take care of kids were being left behind.
In 2025, Cadourcy started ai.moms, a virtual boot camp that teaches mothers how to use AI. It enables moms to build an AI assistant that can help them with everything from meal planning to creating standard operating procedures for delegated chores. Demand has been so high, Cadourcy says, that she’s expanded ai.moms to in-person workshops and events.
Much of surviving working while parenting comes from having the support of people who are facing the same issues. In 2017, Darci Groves cofounded the online community Moms in Tech while working at Facebook. “Back then, being a mom in tech meant you had to pretend you weren’t,” says Groves, who is also Moms in Tech’s CEO. “It was pretty widely understood that tech was a man’s space, but being a parent was also alienating and being both was a double whammy of marginalization that was super lonely.”
Today, Moms in Tech has grown into a worldwide organization with more than 19,000 members and in-person workshops and events. “The impact we care about most shows up in the day-to-day interactions where a mom may post that they were just a part of a layoff and within the hour, dozens of other members that person has never met before in person (but have connected through conversations over the years) are sending links for open roles and offers to support them in their job search,” writes Annie Tsai, who serves as the organization’s chief operating officer. “This kind of activation happens every day in our community, and it’s incredibly powerful.”
Patching up the system
While many of these businesses offer good solutions, they are still nascent. Several of them are also expensive, affordable for the kind of family where one member of the family can quit their job to build a company. Few have reached the status of providing an affordable, nationwide on-demand service.
Part of the problem is the nature of the business many of these companies are in. JoeyCo has an extensive process for matching students and families and then training them to communicate and resolve conflicts. The company trains students to run 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins. Donnally is wary of growing too fast. “We’re laying the groundwork for understanding where we can go fast and where we need to maintain the human messy slowness that this business requires,” she says.
Funding is another sticking point, as women founders still receive just about 2% of venture funding. There’s no good data on how much of this goes towards mothers building for mothers. Many founders also told me venture funding wasn’t a good fit. Slaughter of Groundwork has seen 10-fold growth, but she is wary of taking VC money. She wants to be able to log off and take care of her own family instead of having investors set the pace for her.
While I was writing this story, my group chat blew up. A friend of mine who works in tech in Boston has a son who will enter kindergarten in two years. School ends at 2:30 p.m., but the soonest someone could pick him up is 5:00 p.m., and Wednesdays are half-days, not to mention summer vacation. Her son has severe allergies, and there’s no nurse on staff during extended care. A mishap could be fatal. While her husband is an involved parent, she is the primary caregiver.
She pays $450 a week for day care. A part-time nanny during the school year would cost roughly $500 a week, and $1,200-$1,600 a week full-time in the summer, assuming she could find someone willing to work that schedule.
I looked through the 130 odd emails I’d received. Currently, Rosie is available only in Seattle, JoeyCo in California, and Recess in Texas. Camply, a similar platform, is available only in Atlanta. My friend doesn’t want to go fractional, but even if she did, Groundwork isn’t in Boston.
“Maybe I quit my job,” she wrote after hours of fruitless brainstorming.
The businesses spotlighted here are important point solutions. Below, I am sharing the full list people shared with me because I hope they can help anyone with specific challenges they’re facing balancing motherhood and work.
But let’s be blunt: Some of the solutions working mothers need aren’t things companies can provide. “This is not just a VC problem; this is not just a startup problem,” says Leslie Feinzaig, founder of the venture capital firm Graham & Walker and the Female Founders Alliance. “This is an America problem.”
75+ businesses moms are building to help working mothers—and themselves
Jump to Benefits & navigating parental leave / Career / Coaching & Community / Childcare & home help / Health / Media & Research / Pumping and Postpartum / Products / Reducing the mental load
Benefits & navigating parental leave
- The Continuity Co.
- Cover My Leave
- Leavigation
- Lumo
- Hello Bundle
- Mom-Ease
- Mother Cover
- RMH Compass
- Parentaly
- Pinch
Career
- Beyondtheschoolrun
- The Consulting Nest
- Groundwork
- Herona
- Mother of all Jobs
- Rewired Careers
- We Are Rosie
Coaching & Community
- ai.moms
- Amba Consulting NI
- Boss Mom Wellness
- Dr. Anne Welsh
- Empower Work
- Even
- Hi.Ho.Coaching
- In My Honest Mom Opinion
- Josie
- Joy Parenting Club
- Keep Company
- Livlyhood
- Moms In Tech
- Ritualle
- The Third Shift
- Uncommon Cultures
- Veronica Bamford-Deane
- WorkMom
- Workpants
Childcare & home help
- BubbaDesk
- Bubble
- Camply
- Cocorio
- Haven
- Happy Hearts Kids
- Hello Nanny!
- JoeyCo
- Little Break
- Marvelous Minds
- Nannies & More
- Rosie
- Sage Haus
- Upwards
- Worldschooling Hub Goa
