How much maternity leave is too much? or too little?

I've seen several news stories lately about different female leaders and their maternity leaves which has made me question how much time do moms really need away from the work grind? And can moms be pressured into taking too little time off for the sake of the job? Let's examine three different scenarios and see what we think. Starting with my own!

My first child was my daughter and she came to us at 18 months via Foster Care. Admittedly, this was a unique situation in that she was sleeping through the night, I had physically not gone through birthing another human, and she was used to a daycare situation and thrived in that environment. Also, we were both healthy. I took a week off work to get her settled in with us and with her new school, and then we hit the ground running into parenthood.

My second child was a little boy straight from the hospital at two days old. He was also our foster child and a drug baby so it was a very different experience than with our daughter. I called my boss on a Sunday afternoon to say that we were on our way to the hospital to get a baby and that I would be taking the next 12 weeks off (paid thanks to Bear Stearns). I elected to come in every Wednesday to keep things humming and to work through any issues that my team leaders were facing, sometimes I would bring the baby and sometimes my parents stayed with him. On my performance review that year, my boss said my greatest accomplishment was that my division didn't fall apart while I was out --- see how building infrastructure works????? Goodness knows I needed that 12 weeks to bond with a baby who was struggling and rarely slept plus all his doctor's appointments and meetings with his support team and birth parents. Twelve weeks did not seem long enough, but I was thankful for it all the same.

Example #2: Kim Caldwell - Head Coach of the Women's Basketball Team at The University of Tennessee. Kim accepted the head coach job in April 2024, announced she was pregnant in September 2024, and had her baby in January 2025 right in the middle of basketball season. She took four days before she returned to practice and only missed one game before returning to the sidelines full-time. Admittedly this timing is terrible: it's her first year in the role and she has a team that is a contender so letting go during the middle of the season would have been hard for anyone.....but four days!!!!!! I was still figuring out how to give my kid a bath within the first four days! I'm sure she didn't want to miss the meat of her basketball season, but to me, that's a big ask of a first-time mom. She has shared that her mother and her sister are helping her until after the season, but it still seems so quick for everyone involved!

Example #3: Meteorologist Erin Moran - Erin is a meteorologist in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and has had two kids in the past four years or so. She had her baby boy in September 2024 and took 150 days off to be with him before her husband took paternity leave to extend the baby's time at home by another eight weeks. So Erin was back doing the weather for eight weeks before she announced that she was resigning to spend more time with her family. Goodness knows this is more time off than most moms get, but do you think her employer was pleased that she took all that time and then resigned? or is it just a reality that faces every employer of parents? As she departed, she expressed her thanks for the generous benefit of her leave - do you think they gave her a hard time about stay home for good?

So what's the solution? Most working moms have to depend on the government-mandated 12 weeks off WITHOUT PAY to spend time with their baby and they are required to use all their sick days and vacation days to cobble together some income during the 12-week period. I read that 73% of new moms think about quitting post-birth and 36% actually do quit within 18 months of becoming a mom.

Any family who has been through this knows that these are the most difficult days of your career. Even if everything goes well and people are healthy and sleeping, it is still challenging to juggle it all and to feel good about yourself as a person.

So what's the answer to the original question: How much maternity leave is too much or too little????? I think the answer is: every mom has to figure out what works for them. Most likely it is a combination of considerations on how much support a person has, how much money the person has, how healthy the baby is, and how supportive a company is to the newest parents on their teams. You would think we would have this figured out by now as a country, but most companies do not have a great strategy and only do what is required of them. My guess is most moms have regrets.

For me, I wish that I had taken more time with my daughter to bond, have fun, and get to know each other better before we got into our work and daycare routines. Looking back you can see it is time you will never be able to recoup.