After my daughter was born nearly four years ago, I decided that I wanted to breastfeed for one year. It was a challenging journey for so many reasons, but I can tell you with absolute certainty what made it possible: The fact that at the time, I worked a fully remote job. I never had to squeeze in a cramped room to pump milk at the office or commute to work with painfully clogged ducts. 

These circumstances are among the reasons that some moms and other breastfeeding parents don’t return to their jobs after giving birth—or end up quitting breastfeeding before they are ready so that they don’t lose their jobs. As one mom recently explained, these working conditions are simply unfair and untenable for parents. 

In a rant posted to Reddit, the mom in question wrote that her 7.5-month-old baby has never taken a bottle. It was never a problem for her, as she worked from home. But after her previous manager left the company, she was told she would need to start coming into the office at least twice a week.

The new arrangement has already proved challenging for both mom and baby. She claims the first day she went back into the office, her baby didn’t eat for 10 hours. According to her replies in the comments, she’s tried a straw cup, introducing more solids, and “every sort of bottle and nipple flow out there” without much success. 

The mom now feels like the sudden change in expectations at work is totally unjustified, given that she rarely has meetings and has proven to be an efficient and competent worker who can function without issue from her home. “I'm just so disgusted and fed up with how corporate America treats mothers.”

Multiple commenters agree that the company was “just trying to make you quit,” as one person put it. Others tried offering suggestions, which included leaving that company altogether.

“I'd start putting out some resumes and get ready to leave to a more flexible job. Or look at a daycare near work instead where you can maybe pop over to feed her there,” wrote another commenter. 

Mom doesn’t want to leave her current job, even though her work schedule is so incompatible with her ability to parent, writing that “the thought of trying to get another job with the job market how it is right now sounds absolutely exhausting.” But with being the only full-time income in her family, she has no choice but to work, even though, as she put it, “being back to work with a 6-week-old is just criminal.” 

She’s not the first mom to feel pulled impossibly between work and parenthood. The phenomenon that she, and so many other mothers face, is called the motherhood penalty, in which moms returning to work are less likely to get promoted, are paid less than non-parents, and are deemed less competent and committed to their jobs than their counterparts without kids. But as a lot of parents know, parenting is one of the most valuable job skills there is.

These disadvantages leave mothers skeptical of going back to work at all. According to one 2024 survey of 1,000 mothers, one in three “said that they have considered, or are considering, leaving the workforce entirely,” according to Fast Company. They even expressed concern about how they would balance caregiving immediately after finding out they were pregnant, worrying over how much paternal leave they would be given and how they would find childcare once they did have to go back to work. 

The mom who posted to Reddit ultimately felt happy about her decision to tell her story. “I feel very validated in my frustration,” she wrote.

She added that she decided to ask for a note from her baby’s doctor explaining their circumstances in the hopes that they would delay her return to the office—while crossing her fingers that in the next few months, her baby would learn to take a bottle.