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When Amy Howarth hears some mothers grumbling about how little maternity leave they have with their new baby before returning to work, she has to bite her tongue.
After having her second daughter Coco, who has now turned one, Amy was back at her desk working when her baby was only five days old. She felt exhausted and was desperate to spend time with her new daughter.
Instead, Amy found herself juggling meetings and calls with clients, while cradling her baby and trying to establish breastfeeding, all while trying to recover from the ordeal of giving birth. She had stitches after the birth and was bleeding at her desk.
“Looking back, I should have listened to my body and realised I needed that time and break to allow my body to recover,” Amy tells i. “Some people compare going through labour as the equivalent trauma to your body as having a car crash at 30 miles per hour. But as women, you’re not really allowed to take that time to recover because you then have a newborn to feed and look after, and you are getting up several times during the night.
“On top of that, I was having to think about what meetings I had, and what presentations I needed to be completing, and how could I juggle the feeds so Coco would be settled for my next call. Rather than being led by her, that completely flipped, and I was having to think about what I had to deliver for my clients.
“I was still very much bleeding heavily, had stitches and was exhausted, and felt very emotional with all the hormones flying around. But I was running on adrenaline and I think that’s how I got through managing to work so soon after giving birth.”
Amy, 44, who lives in Southwark, London, and is self employed as a freelance marketing consultant, stresses that it was her decision to go back to work so soon after giving birth and says her clients were incredibly supportive. “This was my choice – it was never my clients forcing me to work,” explains Amy. “But it was only my choice because of the financial situation and I had to go back to work to make ends meet.”
Amy, who is married to Stuart and has daughters Tallulah, four and Coco, one, tells i they paid for six rounds of IVF to have their family, so were on the back foot to begin with. She said their financial situation, coupled with the economic climate, was much worse the second time around.
Before having Tallulah, Amy worked in the marketing industry within retail for 18 years. After trying to become pregnant for a long time, knowing she couldn’t continue with the long hours and travelling, she left her job and began IVF while setting up her own freelance consultancy.
After three rounds of IVF, she became pregnant with Tallulah and gave birth in 2018. She was able to take a year off work to spend with her. “It was a very different world in 2018 to what we live in now,” explains Amy. “I was able to save up and take maternity leave with Tallulah and was a stay-at-home mum for that year. We didn’t have the pressures of higher interest rates for the mortgage or nursery fees to pay.”
When Tallulah was a year old, Amy and her husband began trying for a second child. After another three rounds of IVF, Amy became pregnant with Coco, who was born in December 2021.
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This time, Amy felt she had no choice but to return to work five days after giving birth. “It was the start of the cost of living crisis and we were on the tailwind of the pandemic,” recalls Amy. “We had a mortgage to pay and all our bills, and we also had nursery fees for Tallulah to pay this time around.”
She adds: “The other factor is that when you’re freelance, too much time out of the working environment makes it harder to get back in and you have to reconnect with your clients and build things back up. It’s almost easier just to continue working.”
Amy explains that with the demand for nursery spaces, taking Tallulah out of nursery while she was at home with Coco wasn’t an option. “It’s so difficult to get nursery spaces,” she says. “With both girls, I put their names down for a nursery place the day they were born. A lot of my friends put their names down for a nursery place the moment they found out they were pregnant. But with everything we had been through with IVF and because it had taken us so long to get pregnant, I didn’t want to jinx ourselves with the idea of being lucky enough to bring home a baby at the end of it.
“With it being so incredibly difficult to get a place in nursery and for the days you need, for us to take Tallulah out of nursery would only have created a problem further down the line.”
Realising that as someone who was self employed, she was only entitled to statutory maternity pay or maternity allowance of about £156 a week, Amy knew that wasn’t nearly enough to pay their bills, mortgage and nursery fees. “I had to make that decision not to take maternity pay and instead go back to work where I could earn a lot more across the week. However, as a result of that, I couldn’t have proper time with my baby while I was working.
“It was my choice, but it wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to enjoy my new baby, who we had worked incredibly hard to get. The fact I couldn’t just sit and enjoy her and feed her while eating biscuits and watching TV was actually very sad. But that’s the reality a lot of people face, particularly when they don’t have the safety net of a company that offers maternity leave and pay with a job to go back to afterwards.”
Amy returned to working five days after giving birth to Coco and was working around five or six hours every day. When Coco was eight months old, Amy put her in childcare three days a week, and she works in marketing for a fertility clinic on those days. On the other two days, Amy does her freelance work and uses a mixture of having Coco next to her playing with her toys and using Bubble, the on-demand, flexible childcare app used by more than 200,000 people in the UK.
Amy says she feels huge guilt that Coco didn’t get the same time and attention from her that her first daughter Tallulah did. “I feel guilty as Coco didn’t get all of me. I tried to be led by her, but I couldn’t really because there were times when I had to leave her screaming with my husband as I was trying to work.
“With Tallulah, I was always very responsive and was there for her as much as she needed me at the start. There is huge guilt there with Coco. Obviously, she is not going to remember it, but it will always hang in my heart.”
Amy says she knows of many women returning to work earlier than they’d like.
This is backed up by research from Pregnant Then Screwed, the charity dedicated to ending the motherhood penalty, which found that 29 per cent of those who are pregnant or have a child under the age of 12 months are taking the length of maternity or paternity that they want.
One in five mothers revealed they will be taking six months or less maternity leave, while one in 20 mothers said they would be taking three months or less maternity leave due to the cost of living crisis.
Amy says: “The problem is with childcare costs, you’re almost going back to work to pay for your child to go into nursery. Just for three days of nursery a week, we pay £1,100 a month. If we had to pay for five days nursery a week, I wouldn’t make any money at all and would genuinely be paying to go to work.
“There are also a lot of women who want to go back to work even though they aren’t effectively earning any money because they don’t want to lose out on their career progression, while other women go back for their own sanity.”
Ari Last, founder and chief executive of Bubble, the on-demand flexible childcare app, says: “Maternity pay in the UK is dismal, and it’s even worse for people who work freelance and live contract to contract [on] six weeks of low-paid support.
“It’s not easy to be away from your child in the early months, but parents still need to pay the bills. So it’s no wonder that so many mums are having to go back to work earlier than they would like to and find patchwork childcare solutions – a complicated combination of family members and flexible childcare providers – all just to make work work.
“There is a huge need for flexible childcare to match parents’ individual needs. The working world has changed, and now it’s time for childcare to flex too.”
Anna Whitehouse, author and founder of motherhood blog Mother Pukka and Flex Appeal, the campaign for more flexible working for everyone, tells i: “We have the third-worst ranking maternity pay in Europe, so it’s really no surprise that mothers are going back to work while their bodies are still recovering from giving birth.
“With the cost of simply living going through the roof, many mums are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“Flexible working is crucial to getting these mums back into work. We need to support mums as they return and help them to settle into a childcare pattern that enables them to do so.
“We need to invest in mothers and in flexible working. If we do this, then the economy will benefit. When we invest in parents and in childcare, everyone wins.”
Statutory maternity pay is currently £156.66 per week and from 2 April 2023, it will go up to £172.48 per week. Women get 90 per cent of their average weekly earnings, before tax, for the first six weeks. They then get £156.66 or 90 per cent of their average weekly earnings, whichever is lower, for the next 33 weeks.
Statutory maternity pay is paid in the same way as wages, either monthly or weekly and tax and National insurance will be deducted.
Statutory paternity pay for eligible employees is either £156.66 a week or 90 per cent of their average weekly earnings (whichever is lower). Tax and National Insurance needs to be deducted.
Maternity Allowance is a payment women can get when they take time off to have a baby. They could get this if they are employed but cannot get statutory maternity pay; are self-employed, or have recently stopped working.
Those who are self-employed can get between £27 and £156.66 a week maternity allowance. How much they get depends on how many Class 2 National Insurance contributions they’ve made in the 66 weeks before their baby is due.
However, for many families, the gulf between what is paid in statutory maternity and paternity pay and what is needed is vast and is a huge drop compared with what they would have earned while working.
Before the current financial crisis, the Child Poverty Action Group estimated the cost of raising a child under the age of one to a socially acceptable living standard was £295.72 a week.
A Government spokesperson tells i: “The UK has one of the most generous maternity leave entitlements in the world, and from April, statutory maternity and paternity pay will increase by 10.1 per cent.
“We have also spent more than £20bn over the past five years to improve the cost, choice, and availability of childcare, as well as setting out plans to make the right to request flexible working a day one right for all employees, helping parents work around childcare arrangements.”
The increase in statutory maternity and paternity pay that will come into force from April this year is calculated in line with September’s Consumer Price Index figure.
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Joeli Brearley, founder of Pregnant Then Screwed, says: “When the Government says that we have one of the most generous maternity leave entitlements in the world, they are wrong.
“UK maternity pay is the third worst in Europe – only Ireland and Slovakia have a worse deal.
“That means that many women cannot afford to take the leave that they would like to, or indeed the leave they need to recover and bond with their new baby.
“While we welcome the inflationary increase to maternity pay, it’s [nowhere] near enough to put us on a level playing field with other countries.
“More and more women are heading back to work well before their maternity leave ends because they have no other choice.
“This could have a long-term impact on both the mother and her baby.”
