I’ve been thinking a lot about job descriptions.
Not because I’m looking for a new job. God, no. Your girl has enough jobs.
But because it’s occurred to me that nearly every legitimate job comes with some sort of description of what, exactly, you’re expected to do.
If you’re a dentist, there’s a job description. If you’re a teacher, there’s a job description. A CPA, police officer, attorney, therapist, CEO? Somewhere, somebody has taken the time to list out the responsibilities, skills, hours, expectations, and general vibe of the position.
And then there’s Motherhood.
Arguably one of the most consequential jobs a human being can perform and we’re basically told: You’ll figure it out.
Good luck!
I don’t think that’s good enough. (I’m sure this comes as a huge surprise from the woman who created The Motherhood Setup.) In fact, I think every woman should be given a job description for Motherhood. I’m not entirely sure who should hand it to her. Her OB-GYN? The hospital? Maybe the pediatrician slips it into that giant folder of paperwork you leave with after having a baby.
But somebody should.
Because if we’re going to ask women to perform this enormous, decades-long role, the least we can do is tell the truth about what the job actually entails.
What’s the Job Description for Motherhood?
Here’s the problem: we don’t really have one.
We have cultural ideas about what a “good Mom” looks like. We have Mother’s Day cards telling us Mothers are angels. We have plenty of commentary about how rewarding Motherhood is supposed to be.
But an actual accounting of the work?
Not a lick.
And I think that omission has consequences.
Because when we don’t accurately name the work of Motherhood, it becomes very easy to overlook it. When the work is overlooked, it’s difficult to appropriately value it. And when nobody around a Mother seems to recognize just how much she’s doing, eventually she can start wondering why she’s having such a hard time doing it.
And that’s where this becomes more than semantics for me.
A Mother who believes, This is an exceedingly demanding job, interprets her exhaustion very differently from a Mother who believes, Everyone else seems to be managing this. What’s wrong with me?
I write about this extensively in Good Girl, Bad Mom, because I think one of the most pernicious myths about modern Motherhood is that so much of this work should simply come naturally to women. We tend to fold it all into love, instinct, or “it’s just what Moms do,” as if the actual labor disappears because we love the people we’re doing it for.
But love doesn’t schedule the pediatrician appointment or remember that Wednesday is crazy-hair day, the permission slip is due Friday, your kiddo needs new shoes because his feet definitely grew overnight, and you’re down to three acceptable lunch foods because he’s suddenly decided peanut butter is disgusting. (True story.)
Someone is doing that work. And very often, that someone is Mom.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Mother?
Ok so this is where things get interesting, because once you start trying to write down the responsibilities of a Mother, the list gets unwieldy pretty fast.
There’s the obvious caregiving: feeding, bathing, comforting, keeping another human being alive stuff.
But Motherhood also involves healthcare coordination, education, transportation, household logistics, scheduling, research, advocacy, emotional support, discipline, safety, financial management, social development and approximately 47,000 decisions nobody else seems to realize are being made, which may explain a thing or two about decision fatigue.
And those responsibilities don’t happen one at a time.
This is an important distinction, people. Listen up.
A traditional employee might move between responsibilities throughout a workday. A Mother can be performing several of hers simultaneously while someone’s asking her where their other shoe is.
And there’s actual data to back this up. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks what it calls “secondary childcare”—the time a person is responsible for a child while simultaneously doing something else. In 2025, women living with children under 13 averaged 5.74 hours of it per day.
So if we were finally going to write the thing down, here’s what I think it would look like:
The Motherhood Job Description
Position: Motherhood
Hours: Monday through Sunday, 24 hours a day
Vacation Time: N/A
Total Time Invested: 219,000 hours (newborn to 25 years)
Financial Compensation: $0
Emotional Compensation: Varies wildly
Training: Primarily on the job…
Performance Expectations: Extremely high and occasionally contradictory.
POSITION OVERVIEW:
Motherhood is a multifaceted and all-encompassing shit-show that involves a broad spectrum of rewards and daily sacrifice. Fundamentally, it’s about protecting your sanity and, if you’re lucky, your well-being, while offering any residual love, support and compassion to your children as they navigate the nuances of life. All this while you hope they grow into a more mentally stable and resilient individual than you’ll ever be.
But… highly doubtful.
Motherhood demands patience you didn’t know you had and an unyielding devotion you didn’t know was possible, all in service of shaping the next generation. By doing so, you make a significant impact on the planet we lovingly call home.
Translation: Mothers are key actors in building a brighter future and fostering a sustainable world. Bet you didn’t know you were signing up for that when becoming a parent.
But here we are. One foot in front of the other, shall we?
CORE DEPARTMENTS + FUNCTIONAL ROLES
Candidates will be expected to fulfill the following position concurrently and with little to no training.
- Full-Time Caregiver: Emotional support, nurturing, and physical care.
- Educator: Teaching children morals, values, knowledge, and essential life skills. Hopefully you’ve already got a handle on these yourself — otherwise, get ready for a crash course in self-awareness.
- Scheduler + Logistics Coordinator: Managing calendars, appointments, activities and family logistics while anticipating what’s coming next and keeping a running inventory of approximately 900 things nobody else knows are on the list.
- Chef: Planning and preparing meals, daily. Culinary school optional, but helpful.
- Counselor: Offering emotional support, guidance, and a listening ear. But god help me because I can’t even figure out my own problems.
- Financial Manager: Planning, budgeting, and managing household finances. (Ha!)
- Driver: Shuttling children to school, sports, and appointments — a critical role that also happens to be a black hole of time. If you can swing a comfortable car, do it. I drive 90 minutes round-trip to school each day.
- Housekeeper: Creating a clean, organized home environment. Honestly, I can’t. How is it that three days post-purge, my son’s room is magically full again?
- Advocate: Championing your child’s rights and needs in a multitude of settings. I enjoy this one — though I’ll admit, it’s terrifying if you’ve struggled to make your own voice heard.
And these, dear reader, are just a few examples. Parenting demands wearing more hats than a Broadway costume closet and fulfilling roles you were nowhere near prepared for — but will be, once Motherhood is done with you.
Dun-dun-dunnnn.
I’m kidding. (Mostly)
Which brings me to one of the biggest problems with trying to create a single job description for Motherhood.
There really isn’t one.
The Role of a Mother Changes as Her Child Grows
Motherhood isn’t one job.
It’s a career made up of evolving positions.
The woman caring for a six-week-old baby is doing a fundamentally different job from the woman raising a seven-year-old. And the Mother helping a seventeen-year-old navigate college, sex, driving, friendships, mental health, money and whatever fresh hell has appeared on social media isn’t performing the same role she was when she was cutting grapes in half and installing outlet covers.
In Chapter 10 of Good Girl, Bad Mom, “Motherhood Is a Joy, But It’s Also a Job,” I broke the work into six distinct stages because I couldn’t make one job description accurately capture the scope of the role.
I call them:
Stage 1: The Survivalist
Years: Newborn–One Year Old
Hours: Monday–Sunday, 24 hours/day
Vacation Time: N/A
Total Time Invested: 8,760 hours
Financial Compensation: $0
Emotional Compensation: Varies
The job of a Mother caring for a newborn through the first year of life encompasses a far wider range of duties and responsibilities than you can arguably imagine. In fact, if women really knew the extent of what’s required, they might run screaming from the room. And that’s why we don’t warn the sisterhood ahead of time, for fear of the end of civilization as we know it.
Year one consists of round-the-clock care. And I do mean around the whole, entire, circular clock. Feeding, diaper changes, soothing, keeping baby safe, monitoring growth, pediatrician appointments, and trying to establish sleep routines—which don’t exist, by the way. For baby maybe, but you? That’s a negative, Ghost Rider.
Stage 2: The Ringmaster
Years: One–Five Years Old
Hours: Monday–Sunday, 24 hours/day
Vacation Time: N/A
Total Time Invested: 43,800 hours
Financial Compensation: $0
Emotional Compensation: Varies
The task of raising a child between the ages of one and five is best summed up in two words: diverse and demanding. Can’t wait to dive in head first, right? This stage involves guiding your child’s early learning and development while providing consistent, nurturing care.
And no, you can’t just keep them alive. You’ll need to support language development, social skills, motor coordination, creativity, and curiosity, while shaping their sense of self-worth and core values. In other words, the emotional, intellectual and moral foundation of a human being is being laid.
No biggie. See you on the other side.
Stage 3: The Producer
Years: Five–Ten Years Old
Hours: Monday–Sunday, 24 hours/day
Vacation Time: N/A
Total Time Invested: 43,800 hours
Financial Compensation: $0
Emotional Compensation: Varies
The job (which it is) of guiding a child between the ages of five and ten includes providing support for academic development (spoiler: their homework will be your homework), fostering independence, and nurturing overall growth.
Emotional support and communication become even more important at this stage because they’re now officially little people, living their very own reality housewife drama. The Mother offers guidance, encouragement, and mentorship while setting boundaries, facilitating hobbies, managing extracurriculars, and running high-intensity, multifaceted research queries about her child’s interests and talents.
And just for the record, I could use this person in my own life—and I would happily pay her six figures. (Just saying.)
Stage 4: The Alchemist
Years: Ten–Fifteen Years Old
Hours: Monday–Sunday, 24 hours/day
Vacation Time: N/A
Total Time Invested: 43,800 hours
Financial Compensation: $0
Emotional Compensation: Varies
And you thought it was hard before, eh? Mere child’s play, dear reader. Mere child’s play. For this stage ushers in the long-dreaded (and under-prepared for) arrival of hormones. Gasp! Welcome to the transition from childhood to adolescence, a veritable three-ring circus of emotional meltdowns, physical changes, and academic demands.
The Mother plays a crucial role in fostering independence and sound decision-making while setting clear expectations and firm boundaries. Communication becomes even more critical as your child begins navigating identity formation and a far more complex social world.
Stage 5: The Launch Coach
Years: Fifteen–Twenty Years Old
Hours: Monday–Sunday, 24 hours/day
Vacation Time: N/A
Total Time Invested: 43,800 hours
Financial Compensation: $0
Emotional Compensation: Varies
Fostering independence and self-sufficiency becomes the name of the game between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Responsibilities include navigating the complexities of adolescence, early adulthood, career exploration (!), and personal development.
Ongoing support and guidance remain a cornerstone of the job (j-o-b) as the Mother shifts into the role of mentor and confidante. These young adults (wait, are we not calling them kids anymore?!) now face real-life challenges and decisions, and the Mother must be ready to offer insight, wisdom, and the occasional snack.
Overall, the Mother’s role is to fill out every college application for their child.
Just kidding! She empowers them to become capable, confident, and resilient while secretly wondering how to do that for herself.
Stage 6: The Anchor
Years: Twenty–Twenty-Five Years Old
Hours: Monday–Sunday, 24 hours/day
Vacation Time: N/A
Total Time Invested: 43,800 hours
Financial Compensation: $0
Emotional Compensation: Varies
The Mother now serves as a source of wisdom (that’s one word for it), offering emotional grounding as the young adult navigates the turbulence of twenty to twenty-five. Her role shifts from hands-on caregiving to steady guide, the calm in the chaos of early adulthood.
Responsibilities include supporting independence and self-reliance while remaining a reliable touchstone for life’s big decisions: career moves, relationship drama, and whether grad school is actually worth it. Ultimately, her job is to provide a loving, safe, and supportive foundation where the young adult can stretch, stumble, and—hopefully—thrive.
And if they don’t?
Well, we know exactly who to blame.
(mWahahaha… mUahahaha)
And, of course, twenty-five isn’t graduation day. Ask the Mother of a forty-seven-year-old how often she stops being a Mother.
I’ll wait.
How Would You Describe Motherhood?
For some, Motherhood may feel like a calling, but for all of us, it’s also a job. And like any job, it can inspire soul-satisfying growth, motivate, and elate. It can also exhaust, disappoint, and disillusion. In either case, the notion of a “job” implies responsibility; a steady continuum of tasking in pursuit of a desired outcome. Plainly stated, it’s no picnic.
So, yes, while Motherhood can absolutely be a joy, at its core, it’s also a job.
And I think we need to perform the very important exorcism of separating the job of Motherhood from the love you have for your child. You can love your child and still dislike the labor of Motherhood because the two are not inextricably linked. One is not a direct reflection of the other, though they’re so often conflated.
We need loving, transparent messaging about the reality of parenting: how much it asks of you, how much life will change, the full spectrum of feelings you’ll face, some brand new, some wickedly unnerving, and how often you’ll wrestle with them.
Motherhood is all the good things you’ve been promised…and all the hard things no one wanted to say out loud.
We hesitate to say how hard the job is, or how we don’t always enjoy it, because we’ve mistakenly tangled up the love for our child with how we feel about the role. But they are separate. Let them remain separate and never the twain shall meet.
Say it with me: I love my child and don’t always like the job.
See how freeing that is?
You get to have all the love in the world for your child while being liberated from pretending to like the job.
Motherhood is a joy. But it’s also a job.
Why Calling Motherhood a Job Matters
Because when we don’t talk about how much work Motherhood is, no one truly knows how much work it is.
As a result, the role doesn’t get the respect it deserves. It looks like maybe I’m “doing nothing,” when I’m actually doing everything, which only further invalidates the woman and the work.
Motherhood is invisible labor masquerading as a personal choice. And it’s that illusion that keeps the work undervalued, dismissed as instinct rather than effort, sacrifice rather than skill, devotion rather than labor.
We’ve tangled the work so completely with the love that it becomes difficult to talk honestly about one without feeling as though we’re somehow diminishing the other. But loving your child doesn’t make the work less demanding. And admitting that the job can be exhausting, monotonous, overwhelming, or simply too much sometimes doesn’t say anything about how much you love the person you’re doing it for.
If Motherhood looks easy, or easy enough, because we’ve failed to legitimize it, women will keep shaming themselves, wondering why “other Moms can do it so well,” when it’s never been a lack in them. The job has always been demanding. We just weren’t talking about it.
And that distinction has real psychological consequences.
And she may be exhausted for good reason. Research on the mental load of Motherhood continues to find that Mothers carry a disproportionate share of the cognitive work and emotional labor required to keep family life running.
That’s one of the ideas at the center of what I call The Motherhood Setup. Women are handed enormous expectations around Motherhood while much of the labor required to meet those expectations remains invisible. When the reality of the job collides with the fantasy of what Motherhood was supposed to feel like, we’ve been conditioned to assume we’re the problem.
But perhaps the problem was never that women weren’t capable enough, grateful enough, organized enough, maternal enough, or good enough.
The job has always been enormous. We just weren’t talking about it.
Women Deserve Informed Motherhood
Not in a doom-and-gloom, here are all the horrible things nobody told you way. But in a loving, transparent, grown-woman conversation about what becoming a Mother may actually ask of you.
Because we do a pretty remarkable job preparing women for the baby. We talk about breastfeeding and formula, bottles and diapers, car seats, strollers, cribs, sleep schedules, pediatricians and what to pack in the hospital bag.
But where is the briefing on the actual job?
Where do we talk honestly about what Motherhood may ask of you psychologically, emotionally, physically, relationally, professionally and financially? About what it can do to your time, your identity, your body, your relationship, your career, your earning power, your freedom, your mental bandwidth, and the sheer amount of invisible labor and decision-making you may suddenly find yourself carrying?
None of this means Motherhood isn’t beautiful. It doesn’t mean it won’t bring extraordinary love, meaning, joy, or fulfillment. It means women deserve the dignity of being told the whole truth.
Women deserve to know what they’re signing up for.
And somewhere between the first prenatal appointment and the moment somebody hands you a baby, I think somebody ought to hand you the job description, too.
She is the creator of The Motherhood Setup, a framework for understanding how the Motherhood Fantasy, Good Girl Conditioning, and Invisible Labor collide to leave so many Mothers overwhelmed. Her work asks what changes when we begin to make the invisible visible, Count the Work, and recognize Motherhood as both a joy and a job.
Explore Dr. Dowling's work on modern Motherhood