When I knew that I was pregnant, I decided to take an extended break to care for my baby. At first, I thought that this was the end of my working journey as a professional since I haven’t been able to figure out how to divide my mind between raising children and pursuing KPIs for a company. But after two years, I was missing being busy and talking with someone aside from discussing tantrums in children and stuff.

So, here we go, I am back to work. But before deciding, I was thinking that transitioning back to work after parental leave is hard. Some judgments are going to burden you to don’t leave your baby. But I think we shouldn’t bad feel because we are excited to back to work. 

Did you know that several studies have found that working moms might be healthier and happier than stay-at-home moms? A study in the Journal of Family Psychology concluded that new mothers who held a paying job were in better health in general, regardless of whether they worked full-time or part-time. They also found that working mothers were less depressed than stay-at-home mothers.

They interviewed more than 60,000 U.S. women. Their survey results found that stay-at-home moms were more likely to report depression, sadness, and anger. They defined “stay-at-home moms” as any woman not employed and who has a child under 18 years old living at home. They looked separately at unemployed women who were looking for work. 

They found that stay-at-home moms experienced fewer positive emotions. They were less likely to smile, laugh, experience enjoyment, or learn something interesting. They were also less likely to report experiencing happiness “yesterday” and were less likely than employed moms to rate their lives highly enough to be considered “thriving.” 

Why do you feel guilty?

Even though research shows that kids and moms often do better when the mom is working, many working mothers experience a lot of guilt. And guilt can be a confusing emotion at times. You might experience it when you make a mistake—like when you accidentally hurt your friend’s feelings. 

But you also might experience it when you’ve done nothing wrong. Perhaps you feel guilty whenever someone is angry with you (even if you didn’t behave out of line). Or maybe you feel guilty whenever you can’t help someone feel better (even if you're not the one who hurt them).

As a mom, there’s a good chance you’ll feel guilty quite often—when your child is upset or insists you are mean, when you can’t afford to send your child to the same summer camp that their friends are attending, or when you can’t make it to the ball game.

So it’s not surprising that feeling a twinge of excitement (or maybe a whole lot of excitement) about going to work might also be met with some guilt.