When 20 working mothers, from pretty much every industry you can name and at every stage from newborn juggle to empty nest silence, sit around a breakfast table, you know it is going to be a gem of a conversation. One story stayed with me, perhaps because it resonated most closely with where I am in my parenting lifecycle.

A mother whose daughters are now in their twenties told the room about a GCSE parents’ evening years earlier. She’d come home from work and was halfway out of her blazer when her 16-year-old stopped her. “Could you please keep your work clothes on? Your jacket, your heels, your dress.” Puzzled, she asked why. “I think it reflects really well on me, the fact that you’re at work,” her daughter said.

That single, unprompted comment did more to dismantle her working mother guilt than a decade of trying to reason with herself.

Impossible as it might be to imagine when your children are small, there will come a point when, rather than resenting your career for taking you away from them, they’re far more likely to respect you for having one in the first place.

Every working mother knows the sacrifices inherent in having a career and being a parent. Our WhatsApp groups are full of shared tales about what we’ve forfeited at various life stages, the missed plays, late pick-ups and forgotten dental appointments snagged between the jobs we didn’t apply for, promotions we missed out on and WFH agreements that didn’t last. While these struggles are real, too often they’re the only lens through which the juggle is viewed. Sometimes, the losses can overshadow the gains.

As that mother’s story reminds us, there are gains. Working motherhood is so much more than just a juggle: it actively enriches the next generation who are watching us catch all the balls. Sure, sometimes we might drop one. But there’s nothing wrong with seeing your mother fail. What matters is seeing her try.

Anyone who grew up with Freaky Friday will remember the lesson: a daughter spends a day in her mother’s working life, and both come out of it with more respect for the other. Lindsay Lohan was the teenage daughter in 2003. In Freakier Friday, she’s a working mother herself, with Jamie Lee Curtis still beside her.

I gave up my own big job when the travelling inherent in my role started to increase from ten weeks of the year to more than a quarter of it. Were my daughters happy about this selfless decision? No: they were perplexed. “I still can’t believe you did that,” my eldest would say as a teen. Now 20, she’s one of the hardest-working young women I know, frequently putting in long days in a hospitality role she somehow balances with studying for a philosophy degree.

I take no credit for this - my own student years were spent drinking subsidised beer in the student union - but maybe I should. A 2015 report by Harvard Business School (11 years old, but still widely cited) gathered data from tens of thousands of adults across 24 countries and found that, across the developed countries studied, daughters of working mothers earn 6 per cent more than the daughters of mothers who didn’t work outside the home. In the US, the gap was 23 per cent. A 2024 study from NBER (the National Bureau of Economic Research), meanwhile, found that girls who grow up around working mothers, including the mothers of their school friends, were more likely to keep working after having children themselves, and less likely to reduce their employment relative to men.

Which proves the adage ‘you’ve got to see it to be it’. While my daughters have witnessed first-hand that working motherhood isn’t easy, they’ve also seen that I’m surviving, if not always thriving. Crucially, they know I love my job, because I always make sure to tell them. Kids want their mothers to be happy: so long as the occasional “oh god, what a day” is balanced out with celebrating and sharing the wins, that is enough.

Which is why it’s so important that mothers can access support across the whole span of the parenting journey. While it’s absolutely right that we should be supported during and immediately after a baby’s birth, for too many women, support is front-loaded, dwindling to sparse and even non-existent by the tween and teenage years. Which is ironic, because for many women, this is when they need support more than ever. Show me a mum with a teenager and I’ll show you a mum wistfully reminiscing about how much easier life was when he or she was a baby.

Obviously, some pressures abate as your children age. They can feed themselves, dress themselves, tell you where it hurts and even share the life admin, if you teach them to. But there’s still a disconnect between the support a mother receives at key stages such as birth and returning to the workplace versus its absence at other, less well-defined stages. Motherhood is an intense 18-year stretch that also lasts a lifetime. Our role evolves and changes constantly as we navigate the toddler years, the school years, the teenage years, the empty nest and - increasingly - the boomerang years, when our young adults return to the nest because they can’t yet afford to feather their own.

Each of these stages brings its own distinct mental load, and its own kind of invisible labour. A mother of teenagers carries no lighter a weight because her kids are out of nappies. Despite their burgeoning independence, in many ways, the older your kids become, the more they need you. But no working mother can adequately support the next generation if she herself is not properly supported.

Important as it is to model calm competency during your daughter’s teenage years, it’s definitely not easy. What with her hormones and yours both running riot, tempers can run high and nerves can fray. Even if you can find support, carving out time to commit to it can be challenging. Bupa’s Mindplace centres are useful because they offer a range of therapy options, from counselling to cognitive behavioural therapy, as well as clinical psychology. With no need to commit to a series of sessions, they’re particularly valuable for the time-pressed (and which mother isn’t time-pressed?), as well as those for whom the financial cost of long-term support is out of reach.

Motherhood is a long game. We owe it to ourselves to look after mind, body and soul. More than this, we owe it to our daughters.

This article is in partnership with Bupa Mindplace, a wellbeing service designed with the individual in mind to make mental wellbeing as easy as going to the gym. To learn more visit Mental Health Counselling & Talking Therapies | Bupa UK