Welcome,
Part 3 of our survey results looks at going back to work and just how supported, and appreciated do mums feel at work and in the community? And really isn't it about time we stopped even categorising mums as "working" or "stay at home"?

We just can't win: Aussie mums put up with flack for both working and staying at home.

There's no denying that going back to work after having a baby is incredibly stressful. The difficulty in finding child care and negotiating terms with employers notwithstanding, the actual emotional part of going back to work and leaving your baby at home can be extremely difficult.

"Mother guilt" is still felt very keenly by Australian working mums. In our survey 32% of working mothers said that mother guilt was the hardest thing about going back to work. TAS, NT and SA mums feel it more than most (over 35%) compared to only 28% of NSW and VIC mums.

ACT mums are least likely to feel mother guilt (just 24%), but then a slightly higher proportion of mums in the ACT state "career progression" as their key motivator to return to work and they are more likely to get help from employers than mums in any other state.

ACT working mums also feel more valued at work than those in VIC and NSW, with 21% saying they feel more valued after having a baby compared to 15% of NSW and VIC working mothers.
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Going back to work after maternity leave is a massive undertaking and suddenly you also have to be 10 times more organised than you were before when it was just you and no kids.

And it's not as trivial as it sounds. In fact, clutter in our lives has been proven to have negative psychological effects, but also that getting rid of clutter is actually, literally painful.

So have you ever been overwhelmed by a junk drawer, wardrobe, overstuffed garage, or huge pile of paperwork or unfiled bills and found it hard to actually throw it all out? You're not the only one and a recent study published in Psychology Today found that letting go can literally be painful.

Researchers at the Yale School of Medicine recruited both non-hoarders and hoarders, and then asked them to sort through items like junk mail and old newspapers. Some of the items belonged to the experimenter, and some actually belonged to the participant. Participants had to decide what to keep and what to throw away. While this was happening, researchers tracked their brain activity.
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