In 2014, Neha Ruch was at the height of her career. She had just graduated with an MBA from Stanford University and landed a job leading brand marketing at a tech company. On paper, everything was ideal, yet something was missing. “I didn’t feel like I was truly challenged by it anymore,” Ruch told me in a recent interview. “It felt like I was playing a game more than learning.”
The birth of her first child, a son, opened up an entirely new world. Ruch became captivated by his developing brain, sleep rhythms and the everyday moments that fascinated her. In a way she hadn’t before, she also experienced a deep sense of belonging. “He doesn’t want me to be anything other than who I am,” said Ruch, author of the new book “The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids — and Come Back Stronger Than Ever.”
After her son was born in 2016, Ruch’s perspective began to shift: “There’s no more itching for belonging. I don’t need to climb — I can just be.” She knew “in my soul” she wanted to be home, she wrote in the book.
So Ruch downshifted to part-time work at first, and eventually stepped away from her job to focus on her family. Ruch, who was 4 years old when her family immigrated from India to the Boston area, has a son and a daughter, now 9 and 6.
At home, she felt challenged and found herself “discovering a little bit of who this new version of myself was.”
But whenever she was asked, “What do you do?” Ruch felt “naked.” She wrote in her book, “It was clear I had work to do when it came to embracing my new identity as an at-home parent.”
In addition to her own personal growth, Ruch set out to reshape the narrative of modern motherhood, normalizing career pauses for parenting and reframing at-home motherhood as both personally enriching and professionally valuable. “The Power Pause,” released in January, serves as a guide to experiencing stay-at-home motherhood as a fulfilling and enriching phase of life. “A power pause is your chance to discover who you are for the long haul, and to build an even more robust, nuanced, and sustainable identity in which no single role — paid or unpaid —dominates,” writes Ruch, who acknowledges that staying home is a choice not available to all parents.
The struggle to balance parenting and career, however, is a common one. According to research commissioned by Ruch, 1 in 3 women working outside the home will pause their careers in the next two years, 1 in 2 will “downshift” their career, and 84% of millennials expect to take a career break. “This means that our employers are going to get used to seeing career pauses as part of the story,” Ruch told me.
She went on to found Mother Untitled, an online community of 250,000 women navigating career pauses and the transition back into the workforce. Her goal isn’t to persuade women that working or staying home is better, but rather to help them “tune in to what feels right for you” in each phase of parenting.
She offers guidance on how to talk about career breaks — suggesting phrases like “Right now, I get to be with my kids” — and reframing success at home. Ruch also has advice on positioning experiences at home as valuable for reentering the workforce — for example, one mother who rearranged a bus route for her local community later described the work as “implementing a significant technical infrastructure change for a local organization.”
“It’s about taking all that traditional experience and layering on the nontraditional experience,” she said.
Ruch recently spoke to the Deseret News about leaning into a life chapter dedicated to family, what this means for mothers’ identities, and how the time at home can prepare women for professional success in the future. The interview was edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: It seems like the perception of what it means to be a stay-at-home mother falls short of the multidimensional reality of mothers at home today. What’s missing in the way the society talks about and views parents, and mothers in particular, who choose to stay home?
Neha Ruch: I came face to face with this as soon as I announced I was going to pause. I heard: Well, are you going to be bored all day? Are you giving up? Did you waste your education? And I think it really speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the day-to-day of at-home parenthood looks like.
In our research, we found that if you ask the general public about what they think of an at-home parent, the most common answer is June Cleaver, a fiction left over from the 1960s, from the sitcom “Leave It to Beaver.” Not that she wasn’t a lovely woman, but she lived in very much servitude of her family and her homemaking, whereas the day-to-day of family life is much more dynamic now; it’s much more demanding. There’s a lot of socialization that actually happens in taking care of our kids and building community in digital and physical spaces.
We’re actually having children much later than our 1960s counterparts, meaning many women already accrued a foundation of work experience. We’re getting married later. Our relationships actually are much more equitable. We’re not June Cleavers serving cocktails and cookies at the end of the day. What we’re seeing is this mismatch between the modern reality of ambitious professionals, who are just making complicated choices around work and family, versus these dated archetypes that were very shut in and more monotonous.
And I think when I heard the stereotypes for the first time, I interpreted them in the form of judgments or critiques about my choice: If you take your foot off the gas, you’re somehow giving up on your ambition. And that’s really the work that I’ve sought to do with Mother Untitled. I wanted to create a moment where we could reexamine the old tropes and say let’s forget what we’ve known and architect a much more ambitious feminist identity so that at least we can walk through this option with more confidence, because that’s the more realistic portrait.
DN: You discuss how the space between stay-at-home and working motherhood, and parenting in general, is no longer so stark. Can you talk about what you call the “gray area” in the book?
NR: The “gray area” speaks to this in-between of the old black and white ideas about parenting. And I think if we can lean into this idea of the gray, then we allow women to be able to dial up and dial down without shame and without penalty, without feeling like whatever choice you’re making, you’re shut into it forever.
It’s also about this booming and burgeoning freelance and entrepreneurial economy. Women on pause are quite often involved in volunteering, online certification classes, side projects and small businesses, advising their friends and family, hobbies. There are a lot of women holding onto side projects alongside family and using community and digital tools to tinker with ideas they’d always had. Women are actually keeping themselves connected to their networks and creative pursuits.
I think we’ve dumbed down family life to things that can be easily outsourced — like diapers and laundry. The real work of parenthood is figuring out your kids’ sleep, feeding systems, the way that they learn so that you can create the right scaffolding to help advocate for them in the education system. You’re advocating for their physical health diagnoses with insurance companies, you’re forging networks for your children with their friends, you’re regulating your own emotions and dealing with their emotions. It’s actually really complicated work that does demand time, headspace and support.
I think the gray area speaks to this new frontier where women are saying: Well, we want to make room for family life, we need it — and we also want to make room for ourselves to grow and contribute alongside.
DN: How should workplaces change to accommodate parents and their caregiving responsibilities?
NR: There is work in educating employers not to count out this entire portion of the talent pool and also in putting more options on the table. We’re doing the work of creating new systems in real time. I was in Dallas, and there was a woman who worked in finance and she had figured out a two-day workweek, which is unheard of in finance. I asked her how she did it. She called a friend of a friend who’s at J.P. Morgan, who had negotiated a two-day work week and she had borrowed the template to tell her employer how it would work. And she made it work. Oftentimes, the employers want to retain the talent, but they can’t go through the legwork of coming up with the processes.
You’re also seeing a boom of women going to small and medium businesses in a fractional capacity or freelance capacity. More women-owned businesses hiring other mothers, because they understand and value their talent. I think there’s a lot of forging of new options and models that is happening right now.
DN: Stepping away from a more traditional work arrangement can mean redefining what counts as success. How can we adjust our perception of what success and growth look like at home?
NR: So often we’ve been fed this myth that your career pause is a career ender, that you’re not growing anymore. And if you’ve spent any time with your children, you know that you’re growing in the day-to-day. You step in from this very regimented traditional workforce with its metrics of success — promotion, salary bump. Now how do you know you’re doing a good job? You can quickly fall into the trap of, I guess it must be how clean my house is or how well-behaved my kids are. And that just adds a different level of unhealthy expectation of the reality of caregiving.
I want to reframe it for women to be able to walk through this stage of life as a time for them to grow. It’s about reclaiming your own metrics of success. During this time, we can ask ourselves: What are authentic goals for me? If I look back on this stage of life in five years or 10 years, how will I want my kids to remember me? How will I have wanted to show up? This can become a filter of how we’re moving through our days, and it actually dignifies our time.
And we see that women reshape their perspective after career pauses for family. Oftentimes, you’re seeing these pivots because you’re finally giving yourself a chance to explore in new ways and that’s an exciting thing.