In the videos she posts on her TikTok account, Victoria Morse’s life looks ethereal.
Here she is leaning into her stay-at-home mom, or #SAHM, era in a long dress and straw hat, feeding her 17-month-old daughter outside in the grass surrounded by flowers. They are riding bikes, blowing bubbles outside, and as she puts it, putting the stress of chores aside in pursuit of making memories. She’s cooking with her baby on her hip, bathed in the glow of a soft light.
“Sure, I got the job,” Morse, 33, wrote on one video. “I climbed the ladder. I made the money. I bought the things, I impressed the people, I became the breadwinner. But this is still the greatest achievement. Everything else is just stuff.”
This is Morse’s new life after leaving her corporate job. It’s a huge shift, one she tells me she’s thrilled to be finally embracing.
“My hope is to build something that’s both creatively fulfilling and flexible, one that supports my family and allows me to be fully present as a mom, because that’s the best job of all,” she tells me.
Prior to becoming a mother, Morse’s life followed a clear path, one that many millennial women tread beside her. She pursued a career, in her case in design, with passion and hard work. She was, as the TikTokers say, a full-on corporate girlie, following the example of the girlboss era and charging ahead, assuming she would one day “have it all” as a wife, mother, and career woman. At just 10 weeks pregnant, she signed her unborn child up for daycare waiting lists, assuming she’d pick up where she left off after her parental leave.
She had her daughter in spring 2024 and five months later, she was laid off. To Morse, it was a radical shift in perspective. She realized that her priorities had changed.
“I realized how little I wanted to be a part of a place that prioritized the bottom line over people’s well-being,” she says. “Becoming a mother highlighted how misaligned it all felt. I didn’t want to spend my best energy behind a screen in meetings that didn’t fulfill me, then come home with nothing left to give my daughter and my passion was lost.”
If you’re a young mother, Morse’s story may feel familiar. To many millennial and Gen Z women, one thing is becoming clear—we were sold a lie. In a country where we have no paid leave, receive no support for exorbitantly high childcare costs, and are increasingly being forced back into rigid and strict corporate office environments, many mothers of young kids are reaching their breaking point.
Amid the reality of our situation, many women are espousing a new dogma. It’s time, they say, to reclaim #SAHM life as one that is modern, powerful, and intentional, rejecting the antiquated stigmas associated with the choice. The question they are asking is: Are you mom enough to stay home? Or in other words, are you ready to reject the system we have been forced into, to create the life you want for yourself and your kids?
“If you ask the American public who they think of [when they hear] ‘stay-at-home mom,’ they’ll still tell you June Cleaver—a fictional character from the 1950s,” says Neha Ruch, who turned her own choice to stay home into an ethos she details in her book, The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids—and Come Back Stronger Than Ever. “When you ask about a working parent, they’ll say Michelle Obama and Sheryl Sandberg. But I very quickly realized that power chasm was flawed.…I had to rewrite the definition of ambition for myself.”
American parents are in crisis. It’s a reality that has been discussed ad nauseam, but bears repeating. Our current system just isn’t sustainable.
Last year the US Surgeon General released a report declaring parental burnout a public health crisis, citing such strains as high costs of childcare, societal pressures to give their children a certain lifestyle, and lack of social support as driving parents to a breaking point. According to the report, 33% of parents said they had “high levels of stress” in the month prior to the study, compared with 20% of other adults, while 48% said that “most days their stress is completely overwhelming,” compared with 26% among other adults.
“The stresses parents and caregivers have today are being passed to children in direct and indirect ways, impacting families and communities across America,” the report reads. “Yet in modern society, parenting is often portrayed as a less important, less valued pursuit. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Though American dads are more involved in their children’s daily upbringing than ever before, cultural norms and expectations dictate that moms still shoulder a large part of the burden. And as companies increasingly demand employees return to full-time in-office work following the remote-work boom seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, statistics are showing moms are being disproportionately affected.
An August 2025 study conducted by The Care Board’s Labor Force Participation Tracker for the University of Kansas has made headlines recently for its shocking conclusion: Moms of young children are leaving the workforce in record numbers, dropping by 2.8 percentage points from January to June 2025. This is the largest midyear drop in more than 40 years.
The study’s authors had some ideas as to why this decline occurred, noting that “with return-to-office mandates on the rise, these policies may disproportionately affect mothers of young children.” The other issue, perhaps unsurprisingly, is childcare.
“Moms with children under 5 are most likely to report childcare problems as the main reason for being out of the labor force, working part-time rather than full-time, or missing work the previous week compared to fathers of children under 5, fathers of children under 18, and mothers of children under 18,” the study notes.
If you’re a mother of a young child and your reaction to these statements is “well, duh,” you aren’t alone, says Misty L. Heggeness, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Kansas and an economist who leads The Care Board. Anyone who has been in this system can clearly see that it isn’t built for women to feel fulfilled both at home and at work.
“From my perspective, I live in a world that was built by men, and it was built for the ease of male lives,” she says. “It wasn’t built for the ease of my life. That’s a fact. And because of that fact, if I choose to have a career and to go out and work, and if I also choose to have children and to raise my children to be healthy, well-rounded adults with my spouse and other family members around me, it means that I’m going to be continually exhausted. Why? Because I have two jobs, not one.”
It’s not a surprise, then, that many modern mothers are spending their days at their desks daydreaming of quitting one of their two jobs. And like Morse, they are coming to the conclusion that the job they can’t quit, motherhood, is actually the one they find the most fulfilling. Faced with a corporate culture where workers increasingly feel expendable and layoffs are a seasonal occurrence in many industries, many women are realizing, as Heggeness puts it, that we are trying to survive in a world not built for us, and that the idea of leaving it all behind to focus on our kids seems increasingly enticing.
If you’ve had this thought (and let’s be honest, who hasn’t), there’s plenty of content on social media to further convince you. Under hashtags like #SAHM and #RomanticizingMotherhood, women who have made the choice are posting videos of the ways in which they have found true fulfillment through exiting the rat race. These videos often share DNA with the “soft-girl” movement, which similarly advocates for women to focus on self-care and personal fulfillment instead of climbing the corporate ladder.
“Before, my job felt like my identity,” Ashley Niemuth, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mom of two in Kansas City, Missouri, tells me. “It was a huge part of who I was. But after becoming a mom, that shifted and I realized how small work is compared with raising a little human. For me, it’s about time.… Being a mom is the one role in life where you’re truly irreplaceable. Many people can fill your job, but no one else can be their mom.”
When she’s not parenting her children, Niemuth posts videos on TikTok and Instagram about the everyday joys she finds in motherhood—from the cuteness of a baby sock to her daughter’s Ariel-themed first-birthday party. In her content, it seems that Niemuth has adapted beautifully, but she says she was terrified to make the leap from her job in government lease acquisition to SAHM life.
But then her second child was born in the middle of the unpredictable and unwieldy government cuts in winter 2025, and her contract wasn’t renewed.
“That pushed me to stop sitting on the fence and really face the choice,” she says. “Instead of scrambling into something else right away, I decided to see it as an opportunity to be where my heart was pulling me all along—at home, fully present with my little ones.”
Now, when she goes back to work eventually, she says she will think of it differently.
“Motherhood has made me realize just how valuable time really is,” she says. “It’s given me space to slow down and think about how I really want to use my time. When I step back in, I want it to be with a fresh perspective and in work that I feel genuinely passionate about.”
One way of looking at the SAHM revolution is as an unconventional yet valid new wave of feminism, of women taking their power back from a system not built for them. But of course, there’s another way of looking at it—as a huge, patriarchal regression.
And that distinction has never felt as fraught as it does under the Trump administration, which is actively endorsing pronatalist policies that seem to be aimed at stripping women of their agency. This all, of course, is happening as women today have lost their reproductive rights and are facing heightened levels of sexism, and gender dynamics have never felt more fraught.
It would be easy to assume that the videos and videos of happy, shiny SAHMs on social media are just another iteration of “trad wives,” the buzzy social media trend of women who build influencer platforms based on embracing the patriarchy and traditional gender roles. And to be sure, some of the women posting videos thanking their husbands for “allowing” them to stay home and smugly declaring that no career could compare to “raising littles” skew into the far-right outlook.
But the experts I spoke to say that hand-waving away this trend as trad-wife-coded is a disservice. For one, the most famous so-called trad wives have careers, and thriving ones, as influencers. They are making a killing off their content, even if it’s sometimes rage bait.
“These women are actually really smart entrepreneurs,” Heggeness says. “They have figured out a way to make better balance in their own lives by generating income from touching on a topic that is really going to piss a bunch of people off.”
She believes that the liberal panic around trad-wifehood has been overblown, and lumping women into categories this way serves to further divide moms at a time when we need to be banding together.
“We live in a society that was built by men,” she says. “As women, this is what we’re faced with. For me, the fight isn’t ‘Let’s convince women who stay at home that it’s better if they’re working.’ We need to get more focused on talking about how we are humans and families first, and workers in employment or workers with careers second.”
The other point, though, is more salient. By giving up full-time work entirely, women do take a hit in their overall lifetime earning potential, in what’s known as a wage penalty. Then there’s the loss of agency, and the pitfalls of being completely financially dependent on your partner, to consider. After all, there’s a reason women fought so hard to get out of the home in the first place—because it didn’t work for so many. And the fact is that many families nowadays cannot survive without a two-income household, even when you factor in exorbitant childcare costs.
Heggeness thinks we should advocate for a more holistic approach that relies on everyone in society figuring out “how to be good stewards as caregivers of our own families, and our generation into the next.”
“The whole idea of one person staying at home taking care of the family, and one person going out to work—that’s not fair for either of those people,” she says. “The traditional concept that we have in our head that is driven by gender and expectations isn’t fair for anybody. It’s not fair for the women. It’s not fair for the men.”
Ruch’s philosophy is a more nuanced approach to traditional gender roles. Her biggest mantra is that a pause is just that—a pause. It’s not giving up your career forever; it could look like working part-time or pivoting into more of a passion project.
“We are really about embracing a fluid narrative so that women have more options available to them that they can walk through with support, with confidence, and then be able to have more opportunities on the other side with less shame and penalty,” says Ruch.
As I perused #SAHM videos on TikTok, I was surprised to learn that many of the women’s content contained more nuances than the stereotype would suggest. Morse, for one, sees her new life as a career pivot, not a hard stop. She started posting motherhood content after losing her job and soon found it much more fulfilling than her traditional career. She doesn’t see her change as becoming a true stay-at-home mom, but “leaving corporate America, which allows me to be both creative and spend more time with my daughter.”
“I’m so grateful to live in an era when women working can look 100 different ways than it did even 20 years ago,” she says.
Niemuth also is planning more of a career “pause” than an ending.
“I see this season as a chance to reflect,” she says. “Motherhood has made me realize just how valuable time really is. It’s given me space to slow down and think about how I really want to use my time. When I step back in, I want it to be with a fresh perspective and in work that I feel genuinely passionate about.”
And despite all the bad headlines and the general state of the world, Heggeness says she’s feeling hopeful. She thinks that the general state of unhappiness among women is powerful and will only grow more so.
“My belief is what is happening now is we’ve read the room,” she says. “So we are doing now what we historically have always done as women. It looks as though we are reverting back into our corners. But what’s actually happening is women are going into the pantries, they’re going into their little screened porches in their homes, and strategizing and planning with other women on how they’re going to get beyond what’s currently happening.”