Is motherhood better outside the US?

Whether you get to enjoy motherhood may depend on where you live.

May 06, 2026

Mother’s Day is upon us, and by now I’ve become inured to the many Lists of Things Mom Would Love that crowd my inbox. I’m much more inclined to sign up for Lisa Sibbett’s “Complicated Mother’s Day” get-together (happening today at noon ET!), or give a donation to the organizations helping mothers and children around the globe. (We’re giving here and here this year if you want some ideas).

To be sure, I am also going to get a massage. And it’s nice to have a day — one day! — that celebrates mothers.

But maybe…another world is possible. A world where mothers wake up every day to flexible paid leave, safe and affordable childcare, and a doctor who actually knows your name.

woman holding kid at the street — Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash

Who among us hasn’t fantasized about the free childcare and year(s) long family leave dreamscape of Scandinavia, where you can hygge it up with your newborn eating cardamom buns? Is it as good as it sounds?

Journalist Abigail Leonard had the same questions, and went out and found the answers for us. Her book, Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries, follows the experience of four new moms in Japan, Kenya, Finland and the U.S.

And yes, it is that different. The U.S. does not look good. Compared to what Leonard saw in Finland and Japan the differences were stark.

“When you came back after so many years abroad, you could see the negative space where those programs should have been, and the suffering their absence caused,” she wrote when she returned to the U.S.

Her work shows us how better ways of caring for women and children absolutely are out there. They are already a reality. I hope this conversation inspires you to see how better ways—and systems – can be ours, too.

(My original, longer version of this conversation is here.)

This book would be a great Mother’s Day gift for your representatives in Congress

What did you learn, looking at these other places, that mothers in the U.S. could benefit from in terms of support for parents?

I structured the book in three parts: looking at maternal health care, paid leave, and child care.

Those are the three big levers that policymakers have in order to change the daily experience of motherhood. And it was really stark and striking how much of a difference having paid leave made in the daily lives of the women I profiled.

The woman in the U.S. and the woman in Kenya both got three months. But the American woman’s leave was not fully paid. The woman in Kenya’s leave was fully paid because it’s nationally guaranteed.

But for both of them, it felt like it was too short, and they were pretty stressed out and anxious, particularly as the time approached when they were going to go back to work. And they were both pumping, which the women with longer paid leave never did, because they never had to leave their babies.

But early motherhood is not easy for anyone.

Universally, it’s a difficult experience. But for the women in Japan and Finland, there was an ease with which they approached that part of it. They had longer to spend with their baby and adjust to becoming moms.

I really got the sense from the woman in Finland that she felt like she had control over the experience in a way that the others didn’t, because there was so much flexibility. She could have agency in her motherhood, in the way that the others were being buffeted from one thing to the next.

You write that pronatal policies are not necessarily pro-woman policies. In Finland, those policies that might be considered pronatal did actually give her agency, and a sense of control. So what’s the difference between something that’s pronatal, but not pro-woman?

It was this interesting combination of policy and culture.

Finland has a more egalitarian culture around gender roles and parenting. In Japan, there’s this idea that men should work. They work really long and grueling hours. And women historically have been professional housewives, essentially.

But now that’s no longer economically feasible. More women are working, and so they’re balancing both, but they still do something like seven times more of the work at home. So even though they have all these really generous social policies, there’s a culture that exists that’s making it impossible still to have the parenthood that I think a lot of the women there want.

An interesting thing is happening in Japan: more dads want to have time with their kids. So the government has actually responded by asking companies to publish the percentage of men that take paternity leave, as a way to shame companies into doing better. It’s actually working. The rates are going up.

In terms of pronatal versus pro-woman, I think an idea of centering the mother is key, and also providing a lot of flexibility in some of these systems. The flexible return to work is huge.

The author Abigail Leonard. Her book would be a great gift for RFK Jr’s staffers.

You also describe how much female activism there has been in Kenya for maternal health, for paid leave, for childcare. You have an amazing scene where this Member of Parliament rushes into the legislature with her baby, and that forces the government to build the daycare center they’d said they were going to build, but had been dragging their feet on.

Yes, and the reason they have paid leave is because there was a woman in the 1970s who was the only female parliamentarian who fought for it, and it eventually became law.

Since then, there have been a lot of female legislators that are paying attention to issues around workplace protections for mothers. And also there’s an active NGO presence there that, I think, does a lot around women’s rights.

So they’ve been pretty successful around a lot of things.

Especially when you contrast it with the U.S. We’ve been trying to get both paid leave and paid childcare. And it just keeps getting stymied by the same forces of racism and sexism and corporate interests. It will come up again and again. Female activists will lead on this, and it doesn’t go anywhere.

Kenyan activists have actually been a lot more successful in this area than women here have been able to be.

When I was reading the experience of the woman in Finland, and her “baby box” full of supplies provided by the state, and her longer paid leave, I just was so full of jealousy.

I thought it was so interesting what happens when she separates from her partner. When they’re together but unmarried, they’re treated as married. When they break up, and she’s single, she also gets child support. These systems create agency and possibility for women to continue to live their lives – married or unmarried. Is it as rosy as it seems to be?

Her story does speak to this idea about having agency and parenthood. Her relationship totally crumbles. It’s very acrimonious. But she doesn’t feel like she needs to stay in the relationship for any financial reasons. There’s such a strong public system and a strong public safety net, and so it really allows her to navigate that relationship and parenthood exactly as she wants to.

But I don’t think Finland is perfect. It’s not as economically vibrant. You know, there’s a lot of reasons why living there is not as good as some people’s lives in the United States.

But the U.S. has a lot more disparity in terms of income inequality and the inequality of benefits, right? Some people live here like they’re in Finland. They work for tech companies, and they have six months paid leave.

I often think we should focus on bringing this to the level of the state, and different states could become like their own little Finlands.

That is what is effectively happening: All this stuff is happening at the state level, whether it’s paid leave or childcare programs. Sometimes I think we tell ourselves it’s impossible, and I don’t know if that’s true. It just hasn’t been a priority.

I also think there are a lot of stories we tell ourselves, like maybe taking long leave will hurt women’s careers. But there’s actual research that shows that six months is not going to set you back, and might even help, because you stay in the workforce.

I spoke with a Congressman who made this point to me: It’s really not good for our democracy if there’s such different things going on in the different states. If some people have really generous benefits and some people don’t, we lose even more of a sense of cohesion as a country.

So it is important to have national policies, and not just state-by-state, if only for preservation of democracy.

Yeah, I think about that a lot, especially in terms of abortion access, where that disparity is so huge state by state.

I think it’s really important to remember that motherhood can’t be disentangled from politics and policy. It’s inherently political, because your experience of motherhood is going to differ based on where you have a baby. So you’re involved whether you like it or not.

A lot of the things that we think of as being personal responsibilities and maybe even personal failures, as far as how hard motherhood is – they’re really just because we exist in a bigger system.

I found that to be helpful to remember that it’s not my fault. There are things being asked of me that shouldn’t be. It’s not only child care. It’s also gun violence and safety issues. You’re supposed to keep your own child safe in a society that seems not to value children’s safety. You’re supposed to be doing your own research and figuring out if the food supply is safe. These are basic things that a functioning society would do to guarantee the safety of its children.

The answer is organizing. We need to recognize that there’s a real inequality in this country. Some people already have some of these protections and benefits, and those people still need to advocate for them, because it needs to be a unified movement.

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