What is Quiet Quitting Motherhood?

Saturday, April 19, 2025.

“Quiet quitting,” the workplace meme where burned-out employees do only what’s required, has crawled out of the cubicle and made itself a casserole.

Enter: quiet quitting motherhood.

It’s not abandonment. It’s not negligence.

It’s opting out of Pinterest-board-level performance while still feeding everyone and keeping them alive. It's Target-brand granola bars instead of organic bento.

It's saying "no" to a bake sale and "yes" to not losing your mind.

What sounds like slacking is, in fact, an intelligent reprioritization of labor in response to structural exhaustion.

This meme captures a cultural pivot away from the unrelenting, performative labor of millennial motherhood—a generation handed the gospel of “intensive parenting” with no institutional scaffolding to hold it up.

Sociologist Sharon Hays (1996) coined the term “intensive mothering” to describe a culturally dominant parenting ideology requiring mothers to devote extraordinary time, energy, and resources to childrearing.

It’s emotional, labor-intensive, and often economically irrational. Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung (2012) observed the double-bind of the “second shift”—where women work a full job and then clock in again at home.

Quiet quitting motherhood, then, is not failure. It is adaptive rebellion.

Research affirms that “good enough” parenting—coined by British pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1965)—is often more beneficial for children than perfectionist parenting.

Children raised in atmospheres of psychological realism, where boundaries are clear and emotional regulation is modeled without martyrdom, tend to have better long-term outcomes in autonomy and resilience (Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Eggum, 2005).

Defining the Phenomenon: What Is Quiet Quitting Motherhood?

Borrowing from the labor world, “quiet quitting” refers to workers who fulfill their job descriptions but stop going above and beyond—no more unpaid overtime, no more hustling for recognition. In motherhood, the same logic applies: a slow detachment from the myth of maternal totality.

The Quiet Quitting Mother still loves her children.

She still shows up.

But she no longer conflates doing everything with being a good mom. The cheerfulness is gone. The ambition to optimize every aspect of her children's lives has dissolved. Her Pinterest board is dead. The Elf on the Shelf never moved. The mental load has become visible through her refusal to carry it alone.

Importantly, quiet quitting is not an abandonment of love—it is an abandonment of performance.

What’s Driving It?

Chronic Maternal Overfunctioning

Research by Suniya Luthar (2012) on "intensive parenting" and maternal distress shows a strong correlation between overinvolved, perfectionist parenting and psychological strain—especially among highly educated mothers.

These are women trying to parent in ways their mothers never imagined, under conditions their mothers never faced: dual-income expectations, competitive school cultures, and 24/7 digital parenting surveillance.

They are the class of women who were told they could “have it all.” What they got was doing it all, and smiling about it. Until now.

The Collapse of the Village

American mothers are quietly quitting in part because they are alone.

In the absence of multi-generational homes, affordable childcare, or universal healthcare, the myth of the supermom has become untenable. What used to be shared work—communal, reciprocal, collective—is now privatized emotional labor with no off switch.

As sociologist Caitlyn Collins (2019) writes, “In the U.S., mothers are expected to parent like they don’t work, and work like they don’t parent.”

Quiet quitting is a coping mechanism for this contradiction.

The Commodification of Good Mothering

As I mentioned earlier, motherhood has been absorbed by what Sharon Hays (1996) called intensive mothering ideology—a belief system where mothers are expected to be self-sacrificing, child-centered, emotionally available at all times, and constantly improving themselves for their children’s benefit.

Modern parenting culture, from mommy influencers to corporate advertising, has monetized this expectation.

When every moment of motherhood is content, labor, or optimization, it stops being human.

It becomes exhausting. And women are quietly opting out of the unpaid overperformance.

The Symptoms of Quiet Quitting Motherhood

• The mother who sets out one snack, not three choices.

• The mother who says “ask your dad” and means it.

• The mother who doesn’t decorate for the holiday.

• The mother who doesn’t attend the PTA meeting and feels… nothing.

• The mother who tells the therapist, “I just don’t care anymore—and I like it.”

Clinically, this may look like flattened affect. But emotionally, I find that it can be a reclamation.

A mother who stops faking joy to appease an impossible standard is not failing. She is departing the play she didn’t audition for.

What Makes This Different from Burnout?

Burnout is collapse. Exhaustion. A loss of functioning.

Quiet quitting is strategic underfunctioning.

It’s a refusal to absorb everyone else’s anxiety. It’s the mom who lets the field trip form go unsigned. Not because she forgot, but because she’s decided that the world will not fall apart if she no longer micromanages it.

It’s a kind of emotional boundary setting masquerading as apathy

Predictably, quiet quitting motherhood has triggered online backlash.

From traditionalist commentators who see it as moral decay to gentle parenting evangelists who frame it as “unregulated nervous systems,” the pressure to try harder remains immense.

But what if the refusal to over-give is actually a nervous system finally regulating itself?

What if healthy parenting doesn’t look like martyrdom—but like partnership, delegation, and a less gendered division of labor?

The Role of Fathers, Partners, and Systems

Quiet quitting isn’t just about moms.

It’s about what happens when other parties—fathers, schools, systems—take mothers for granted as emotional labor machines.

Men who think of themselves as “helping out” rather than co-owning the household are inadvertently pushing their partners into either overdrive or shutdown.

A 2021 study in Socius found that even among egalitarian couples, women did 66% more invisible household labor.

Quiet quitting is not just a maternal decision. It’s a relational mirror.

What We’re Seeing in Therapy Rooms

Therapists across the U.S. are reporting an uptick in what might be called “maternal flatlining.”

Women who once cried in sessions now say: “I’m just done.” There’s less guilt, more resolve. These mothers are not breaking down—they are opting out.

Couples therapy reveals this, too.

One partner has quietly abdicated the project of parenting-as-perfection. The other is confused, maybe angry. But underneath the tension is something more honest: a demand for redistribution, not just appreciation.

The Existential Layer

The deeper story here isn’t just about overwork. It’s about the psychic structure of modern motherhood: the internalized belief that her worth is proven through depletion. Quiet quitting, then, is not just pragmatic—it is spiritual disobedience.

It is a mother saying, I refuse to disappear for you anymore.

So why does society panic when a mother steps back?

Quiet quitting motherhood is not the end of care. It’s the end of martyrdom. It’s the beginning of something harder but truer: co-parenting, systemic pressure, emotional honesty, and the demolition of the Good Mother myth.

These women are not lazy. They are lucid. They’ve seen the bill for decades of self-erasure, and they are choosing, day by quiet day, not to pay it anymore.

Because, frankly, motherhood is the final frontier of unpaid labor ideology.

It is where cultural narratives about love and sacrifice fuse into something quietly unsustainable.

Nancy Folbre (2001) argues that the care economy is systematically undervalued, precisely because it is entangled with the language of devotion. A woman quietly opting out of aesthetic overfunctioning threatens the illusion that love must always look like exhaustion.

Interestingly, there’s contrasting research to consider.

Some scholars argue that maternal involvement is directly correlated with child achievement (Bornstein, Putnick, & Suwalsky, 2012).

But context matters: what kind of involvement? Helicoptering? Performing? Or a kind, steady presence that includes saying, “Figure it out, sweetie, mommy’s reading”?

Quiet quitting doesn’t mean tuning out.

It means cutting through the noise. It’s opting out of gilded cage ideologies in favor of sustainable sanity.

It's what happens when the inner child says, "Not this again," and the adult mother listens.

So when you see a mother say no to matching outfits, themed snacks, and 17 extracurriculars, don’t call it laziness.

Call it evolution. Or call it boundaries. Or call it the beginning of a matriarchal renaissance.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES

Bornstein, M. H., Putnick, D. L., & Suwalsky, J. T. D. (2012). Mother–child interaction, maternal sensitivity, and child behavior problems across time: A developmental cascade framework. Infant and Child Development, 21(4), 412–429. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.1802

Collins, C. (2019). Making Motherhood Work: How Women Manage Careers and Caregiving. Princeton University Press

Eisenberg, N., Spinrad, T. L., & Eggum, N. D. (2005). Emotion-related self-regulation and its relation to children’s maladjustment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 1, 495–525.

Folbre, N. (2001). The invisible heart: Economics and family values. New York: New Press.

Hays, S. (1996). The cultural contradictions of motherhood. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hochschild, A. R., & Machung, A. (2012). The second shift: Working families and the revolution at home. Penguin Books.

Luthar, S. S., & Ciciolla, L. (2016). Who mothers Mommy? Factors that contribute to mothers’ well-being. Developmental Psychology, 52(8), 1372–1383. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000188

Offer, S., & Schneider, B. (2011). Revisiting the gender gap in time-use patterns: Multitasking and well-being among mothers and fathers in dual-earner families. American Sociological Review, 76(6), 809–833. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122411425170

Sullivan, O. (2021). The gendered division of housework and childcare: Contexts, causes, and consequences. Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, 7, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231211032048

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. London: Hogarth Press.