When marketing executive Neha Ruch had her first child nine years ago — after earning an MBA from Stanford — she decided to downshift her work to part-time, then eventually left her paid job to focus on motherhood.
“I wanted more time with him and more room to discover this next version of myself,” she recently told Know Your Value. What she didn’t expect at the time were all the questions that came with it.
“I was immediately hit with, ‘What are you going to do all day?’ and ‘Do you feel like you’re giving up?” she recalled. “When I fully paused my paid work … people asked, ‘Why did you even go to business school?’. Meanwhile, I felt more confident than ever that I was growing in a new way, and it felt so at odds with how other people were perceiving my choice.”
That motivated Ruch to cultivate a community dedicated to eschewing the outdated stereotypes associated with stay-at-home motherhood. She eventually started Mother Untitled, an online platform that helps ambitious mothers take career breaks with confidence and without shame.
Today, her mission to rebrand stay-at-home motherhood has sparked a movement. According to the organization, one in three working moms are likely to leave their jobs for stay-at-home parenthood in the next two years, while more than 50 percent of working moms are likely to downshift their work.
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Ruch has taken that research, as well as numerous interviews with ambitious parents in the Mother Untitled community, and has released her new book, “THE POWER PAUSE: How to Plan a Career Pause After Kids — and Come Back Stronger than Ever.”
The book is filled with diverse stories of stay-at-home mothers who buck every stereotype, as well as practical strategies for taking a career pause while expanding your network, unlocking personal growth, and charting a course for the long-term.
Ruch recently shared what she’s learned from her motherhood journey, writing her first book and the advice she would give all working mothers who are thinking about taking a career pause. Below is the conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity:
Know Your Value: What are the common misconceptions around stay-at-home motherhood? How can we lift the stigma associated with this loaded phrase?
Ruch: By sheer linguistics, stay-at-home motherhood (SAHM) implies a sense of being shut-in or stuck in one place. Mother Untitled surveyed the general population about their perception of the SAHM, and the image that still comes to mind for many is June Cleaver, an apron-clad archetype left over from the 1950s.
The modern mother taking a career pause or shift to make room for family is having kids older, at the average age of 30, meaning she’s accrued education and professional experience. She has a more equitable relationship with her partner — fathers in this generation spend three times as much time with their children than any previous generation.
She has access to digital tools and technologies to stay connected to personal and professional opportunities, networks, and possibilities. Her career pause is just one part of a very long game.
Know Your Value: What did you learn about yourself — and your professional ambitions — after taking a career pause in early motherhood?
Ruch: Like many women, I had always gleaned a lot of self-worth and identity from my career and my salary. Letting go of everyone else’s perception of me took getting clear on an identity that was bigger than a title. It meant focusing on those skills and accomplishments but could consist of much more about who I was.
Parting with society’s outward measures of ambition and success let me be bold enough to allow myself to learn and grow in new areas, like writing, community-building and research. For years, this was documenting big ideas on a little blog that eventually became Mother Untitled, and that was humbling because not everyone perceived it as “big” or “impressive”.
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Know Your Value: What skills do parents glean as caregivers that translates to better professional success?
Ruch: Parenting demands hard skills and soft skills, which is the ultimate leadership training ground. Looking at the books I’ve read over the last nine years, they span psychology, sociology, and economics, and 50 percent of them have to do with parenting.
$231.1 million dollars a year is spent on parenting books, and I say that to underscore the intellectual labor of parenting. Understanding the complexities of your unique child and family rhythms takes care, as well as straight-up thinking and study.
The day-to-day demands of time management, organization, and prioritization rivals any workforce, and figuring out how to translate big ideas to a toddler or a teenager made me more succinct and precise than any job prior!
But above all things, that time at home helped shape what I cared about and also the perspective of how I can hold my work alongside family life. I stepped back into the workforce doing work I care deeply about with a new clarity of what’s most important, and that’s a superpower in navigating the day-to-day.
Know Your Value: Tell us about Mother Untitled and the intention behind this platform. How did it start, and what lessons have other community members shared about caregiving and career mobility?
Ruch: When I had my first child, it was the height of the “Girl Boss” and “Lean-In” era that was tremendous for supporting women. However, as I made my choice to shift my career for family life, I felt it was casting undue shame on anyone choosing to pause — and that the stay-at-home mom had been left out of the conversation. I started Mother Untitled as a community to show a new collective of women who were modern, feminist, and ambitious, pausing and shifting to lean into the family for a chapter.
I’ve had the privilege of interviewing many women about the underrepresented reality of this stage of life. While getting their bearings in a culture that undervalues care can feel challenging, they all find ways to stay connected and creative.
I spoke to a mother in Brooklyn, New York, whose children had special needs, and it challenged her sense of what’s essential, but in connecting with a community for parents with special needs, she found her way to an auctioneer role that let her tap into her sense of play, where she worked in the evenings after bedtime.
I spoke with a former lawyer in Philadelphia who was using the time with her toddler to rediscover her love of reading and started interning at a bookstore to nurture a new dream. I spoke with a marketer in Arizona who got laid off but reclaimed her agency by choosing to use the time to pursue fractional work. That balance let her have more time with her three and five-year-olds.
Know Your Value: How did your research evolve into a book?
Ruch: The most outstanding fact from the research we commissioned is that one in three American working mothers in the U.S. plan to take a career break in the next two years. One in two mothers plan on a career downshift. Ninety percent of mothers on career pauses aim to return to the workforce.
Reexamining the possibility during career pauses impacts all women trying to figure out how to enjoy and manage family life while staying connected to their ambitions. It became clear to me that women needed more options for work and family, including validating and respecting the choice to pause their career for a chapter and know that they are still growing in a way that is meaningful to them and their future careers.
Know Your Value: We have endured an ongoing caregiving crisis in this country, with the motherhood penalty contributing to the pay equity gap. What do you wish leaders and lawmakers knew about helping women thrive as mothers and professionals?
Ruch: The pay equity gap is made a little worse when there’s a perception of a resume gap. If women are paid $.80 cents to the dollar, women with a career break are paid $.78 cents to the dollar.
There is a fundamental flaw with the perception of caregiving in this culture as tedious, mind-numbing work that dulls and dumbs us down. We need to assign value to this work so our government can understand that caregivers need support to keep our economy growing, and we also need to dignify caregiving as perspective-expanding, skill-developing, and hard emotional labor that can make employees exponentially stronger.
A goal of “The Power Pause” is to signal that it’s time to reexamine outdated tropes about motherhood and that it’s time to consider chapters of family life as a realistic and robust part of professional life.
Know Your Value: KYV founder Mika Brzezinski often talks about the long career runway for women — the idea that we need to let go of the pressure to achieve every milestone early in life — as well as the myth that our best, most productive years are behind us by age 50. What has your experience taking a career pause revealed?
Ruch: I thought I was at the height of my career at 30 years old — I’d just graduated from Stanford Business School — and landed what was my dream job on paper. But I never felt more ambitious or productive than the day I decided to take a break to be with my child.
I knew I trusted myself to keep growing and that I was going to live this stage of life with determination and care. I remember several years later looking on LinkedIn; an assistant I’d hired in my 20s was now in the C-suite and I realized how long I’d been out of the traditional workforce. But I also realized that I only saw a tiny sliver of her story and I knew mine entirely. I knew what I was choosing was the right thing for me and my family for right now, and I was trusting the long game.
Now, as I turn 40, my kids are older and I get to bring this movement to life with the launch of “The Power Pause.” But it wouldn’t have been what it is today if I hadn’t fully lived that career pause. I got to have a decade of traditional professional experience combined with a collection of non-traditional experiences gained in the real life of motherhood and community. The dots often only make sense when you look backward — all the experience counts.
Know Your Value: For women who want to take a career pause but are hesitant, what are your top tips for planning a break after having kids.
Ruch: Have the money conversations. Even if they feel tricky, going into a financial shift with a course allows you to plan for how both partners will value your time spent focused on caring for the household.
I recommend that partners adopt the mindset that you are a joint household organization and that the partner working outside the home equally depends on the partner focused on caregiving. This mutual understanding will allow you to walk through this stage of life with more financial dignity and make decisions like investing in care solutions, like meal deliveries or a babysitter, to set the whole household up to thrive. While one partner staying at home certainly alleviates the cost of childcare, no one person should work 24/7 without breaks.
For anyone stepping into or navigating through a career pause, know that it is just that: a career pause, not a life pause. You are still growing and ambitious, even if your priorities are shifting. Stepping into this chapter with that understanding lets you get intentional about your day-to-day. It allows you to set goals for yourself and then set up your day-to-day, or week-to-week. It allows you room to grow and thrive alongside your children.
When you feel stuck or listless, envision your ideal day in three years — who you want to spend time with, how you want to feel, what you want to be doing. It will reveal your most authentic goals about personal growth, creative or professional exploration and family life. From there, you can start to set measurable, smaller goals so you always feel like you’re moving forward — and in the right direction.
If there’s one thing to know about your power pause, remember that this is one chapter of a long journey, and you are certainly expanding your network, creativity, and sense of self.
Bianca Brosh