Guilt and its Intersection with Well-Being: Implications for Working Mothers, Their Families, and Organizations

I have long had a passion for the plight of working mothers. You may think my choice of language too bold but having been a working mother for thirty years and a single working mother for six of those years, I understand how difficult the situation facing many working mothers can be. From my own experience and from talking with many working mothers over the last twelve years, I know they often sacrifice their own well-being in their efforts to provide the best they can for their family. But a burned-out, exhausted, unhappy working mother is neither the best worker nor the best mother.

How can we help working mothers build their well-being and that of their children so they both develop well-being enhancement tools to last a lifetime?

The good news is there are quick and simple strategies working mothers can deploy to build their well-being. These strategies are emerging from the field of positive psychology, the scientific study of well-being that originated with the efforts of Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania and other luminaries in the psychological sciences at the end of the twentieth century (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). This relatively recent psychological domain is focused on helping individuals, families, and the communities they inhabit to thrive (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Thriving is not the experience of most working mothers, however. Aside from threats to overall well-being, studies show higher mortality risk among working mothers, especially those who are single (Sabbath et al, 2015).

In 2016, when I was accepted as a student in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of Pennsylvania, I knew I wanted to learn how I could use concepts from positive psychology to improve the well-being of working mothers. In response to a question I asked in class about how mothers’ working impacts their children’s emotional health, Seligman threw down the gauntlet. When he responded, “I don’t know, Frawn . . . someone really should investigate that, ”I knew this research was my calling.

The Negative Impact of Maternal Guilt

After exploring the relationship between the well-being of working mothers and that of their children during MAPP, I embarked on doctoral research with the intention of further exploring the well-being of working mothers. Higher mortality risk among working mothers is but one end—some might say an extreme end—of the lack-of-thriving spectrum. On any given day, working mothers deal with stresses from the simple “not enough time in the day” to the more complex, “Am I damaging my children by working?” concerns (Morgan, 2023). Maternal guilt over returning to the workforce or building a career is a very real challenge for working mothers, especially for those who have no choice but to work for economic reasons (Guendouzi, 2006). In fact, in the initial stages of my recent doctoral research on the well-being of working mothers (conducted via survey during and immediately after the global pandemic-related shutdowns), maternal guilt was the most oft-reported answer to the query about issues or emotions the respondent working mothers dealt with daily—and the only one that was not related to the challenges of the pandemic (Morgan, 2023).

(Morgan, 2023, Figure 1)

Although working and the engagement, or flow (the sense of timelessness and elation that can result from becoming fully engaged in an activity), that can result from working improves well-being and emotional health in working mothers (Barnett, 2004, Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), the impact of maternal guilt can have a depressing effect on overall well-being among working mothers and their daily experiences (Aarntzen et al., 2019; Constantinou et al., 2021; Guendouzi, 2006; Maclean, 2020).

Pervasiveness of Maternal Guilt

Astonishingly, guilt—in particular maternal guilt—has been insufficiently researched (Maclean et al., 2020). Aarntzen and colleagues (2019) refer to maternal guilt as a “straightjacket”, which lowers personal well-being and drives psychologically destructive behaviors, ultimately decreasing job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and satisfaction with the experience of working while also managing family and domestic responsibilities in a pervasive and continuing manner. The perverse social acceptance of, in fact social expectation for, working mothers to experience guilt as a result of their choice to work (Aarntzen et al., 2019; Constantinou et al., 2021) exacerbates the situation and not only creates an imperative to study the impact of maternal guilt (Maclean et al., 2020), but also underscores the urgency for interventions intended to mitigate the experience of maternal guilt and its negative consequences.

Baumeister and colleagues (1994) posit that guilt is a matter of self-evaluation, often against abstract or self-imposed standards, and that guilt affects not only feelings and actions but also the decision-making process. Maternal guilt can constrain a working mother’s behavior at work, reduce job satisfaction and organizational effectiveness, and negatively impact overall well-being (Aarntzen et al., 2019; Constantinou et al., 2021; Weziak-Bialowolska et al., 2020).

Guilt is psychological discomfort that can also result when we judge our actions against our values or social expectations (Baumeister et al., 1994; Brown, 2021). When guilt produces cognitive dissonance, that dissonance can be used to positively change behaviors (Baumeister et al., 1994). However, the danger is that the cognitive dissonance resulting from guilt can also morph into shame (“the intensely painful feeling of believing we are flawed and unworthy”), which is corrosive to one’s sense of self-worth and self-determination (Brown, 2021).

Given the pervasive nature of maternal guilt and that mothers, more so than fathers, are subject to feelings of guilt (Aarntzen et al., 2019, Etxebarria et al., 2009), the urgency for addressing the negative impacts of maternal guilt is high. Maternal guilt presents an “effective target in future psychological interventions” (Maclean et al., 2020) aimed at reducing stress and improving job satisfaction and organizational effectiveness through overall improvements in maternal well-being (Dreer, 2021; Rai, 2023; Weziak-Bialowolska et al., 2020).

Enter Positive Psychology

Maternal guilt is complicated as it is pervasive and based in self-critical attitudes, and its depth and impact are not easily identified by the working mother experiencing it. The good news is that the negative impacts of maternal guilt can be mitigated using tools and interventions based in positive psychology. After identifying guilt as the primary concern of the working mothers who participated in my doctoral research, I designed an intervention to address the complicated issue of maternal guilt.

The core of the intervention identified the actual feelings of guilt and determined if these feelings were from what Burton (2020) distinguishes as authentic regrettable actions or from unrealistic self-imposed expectations. This psychological process is referred to as affect labeling (Torre & Leiberman, 2018), with the identification of the guilt (or any emotion) starting the emotional regulation process. We then reframed the situation in a way that lessened the feelings of guilt. Following that, we explored the basic steps of effective self-compassion (Neff & Germer, 2019). Self-compassion is the opposite of self-criticism, which drives most maternal guilt. I also discussed and taught other well-being enhancing tools, such as gratitude, positive communication techniques, and habit formation, as a way of cementing the concepts and further improving well-being.

The result of this intervention was that all participants experienced reduced feelings of guilt (overall 67%) and enhanced well-being in all five PERMA elements—positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning/purpose, and accomplishment (Seligman, 2011 & 2018). Many participants also reported an increase in job satisfaction, overall effectiveness, and increased personal energy levels. When queried four months after the intervention, all continued to experience similar positive outcomes, supporting the “stickiness” of the intervention. Although the sample size was small—of the 11 who began the workshop, only six working mothers completed all six modules of the intervention—the fact that all participants experienced positive benefits, as evidenced by their survey results both immediately thereafter and at four months post-workshop, is significant. As this workshop was conducted immediately following the global pandemic, workshops were conducted via a virtual meeting platform; in-person results cannot necessarily be inferred from these results. All participants were professional working mothers, including lawyers, engineers, homebuilding executives, and commercial loan representatives, located in the Western United States.

Pre-workshop to post-workshop PERMA levels comparison, based on survey for those who completed all workshop modules (N=6)

(Morgan, 2023, Figure 2)

Implications for Working Mothers and Their Organizations

The promising aspect of this research is that it demonstrates that maternal guilt and its negative effects can be mitigated and that overall well-being can improve with positive-psychology-inspired interventions. With overall well-being shown to have a strong impact on job and work satisfaction (Dreer, 2021; Weziak-Bialowolska et al., 2020) and with improvements in organizational effectiveness tied to personal well-being and job satisfaction (Rai, 2023), there is a strong imperative for business leaders and organizations to prioritize the importance of the well-being of their working-mother populations.

There must be a shift in organizational focus from productivity to that of improving employee personal well-being; for working mothers, the mitigation of the negative impacts of maternal guilt are an easy target to achieve that end.

Employers must develop programs that offer employees, especially working mothers, tools to improve their well-being. Although maternal guilt is just one element impacting the well-being of working mothers, my research suggests that mitigating the negative impacts of maternal guilt can positively impact overall well-being!

Conclusion

Mitigating the negative impact of maternal guilt and raising overall levels of well-being is not a simple feat in a population as wracked with challenges as working mothers, but it is possible. The negative impacts of maternal guilt affect not only mothers, but also the immediate family—extending to work colleagues and other relationships then outward to the entire relationship circle of the working mother. Given the detrimental effect of maternal guilt on overall maternal well-being, the correlation of well-being levels with depression risk, and the correlation between maternal depression and adolescent depression (Morgan, 2017), the positive effect of enhanced maternal well-being can be positive for the entire family. This is truly good news and contributes to Marty Seligman’s goal of 51% of the world population experiencing well-being by 2050!

As society emerges from the impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic, personal well-being has taken center stage, and business organizations are now addressing issues related to employee well-being. Personal well-being is directly tied to job satisfaction and job satisfaction to organizational effectiveness (Dreer, 2021; Rai, 2023; Weziak-Bialowolska et al., 2020). It seems logical, therefore, that interventions designed specifically to improve the personal well-being of working mothers would be of interest and benefit to organizations.

What better time than now to introduce effective, efficient programs specifically designed to increase the well-being of working mothers and improve their levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment?

References

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Morgan, F. (2017). Having it all–Career, motherhood, and emotionally healthy children: Helping working mothers protect their children from the risk of depression. (Masters Capstone Project, University of Pennsylvania). https://repository.upenn.edu/entities/publication/6a29f0ab-b3fc-4b7a-8fd3-ff0978615e2c

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About the author | Frawn Morgan (C’17) cares deeply about the experience of working mothers, having been one for 30 years. Since 2012 she has researched and written about the working mother experience. Her recent doctoral research explored the well-being of working mothers during the global pandemic and concluded with an intervention designed to mitigate the negative impacts of maternal guilt. After a 4-decade career in real estate development and institutional finance, she now is focused on better understanding how to raise well-being in working mothers.

She holds a Doctor of Education in Organizational Leadership (Northeastern University), a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (University of Pennsylvania), and a Masters of Science in Organizational Communication (Northeastern University).