Women in the UK are furious, according to a new report that found we’re the angriest in Europe. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that cultural expectations of endless work with minimal support during early motherhood have something to do with it — not just all day, but all night too.
The apparent consensus is that once half a couple is back at work after having a baby, they should be excused from dealing with them overnight. Thanks to the UK’s abysmal parental leave system, in a heterosexual relationship, the person returning to their desk tends to be the man, leaving the woman to deal with the baby 24 hours a day. I’ve been staggered by how friends and acquaintances take a mother’s nighttime shift – and a father’s undisturbed sleep, ready for the office – for granted.
The more I think about it, the more my blood boils. Since I had a baby eight months ago, my partner and I have tried to split the labour of caring for him as evenly as possible – “tried” being the operative word. With both biology (breastfeeding) and society (nine months maternity versus two weeks paternity leave) conspiring against us, it can feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. Nonetheless, we keep shoving, and sharing the nights has been pivotal.
The hours of hands-on care mean that my partner has a wonderful connection with his son, and our relationship is stronger, too. Meanwhile, I have enough sleep to feel like a functional person in the morning — as well as the sense that I’m not doing this parenting thing alone.
No longer a newborn, our little boy needs less and less attention in the wee small hours. But in those early months, when we were lucky to stitch a few hours of sleep together at a time, being part of a team felt essential. If I’d had to cover nocturnal nappies and mad 2am lullabies, as well as doling out milk, all while my partner snored next to me, I know I would have struggled – if not exploded. Yet, for many new mothers, that wildly unequal division is absolutely standard fare.
In my pre-baby life, I was perfectly used to working hard, but I can categorically say that looking after an infant is far, far more demanding than any job I’ve ever had. I’ve been juggling freelancing with motherhood since he was a few months old and the days I spend at my desk rather than with the baby feel like a cakewalk – not a measure of how much I enjoy work versus my child, but of how unrelentingly intense a baby’s demands are on your body, your attention, your patience, your stamina.
Emails in need of a reply will wait for you to pop to the loo, make a cup of tea, or even walk around the block, before you deal with them – but a baby? No chance.
As such, the idea that a person going into an office for eight hours needs more sleep than someone wrangling their kid round the clock would make me laugh if it wasn’t somehow taken as a given. This assumption arguably gets to the heart of structural gender inequality. Protecting men’s careers and earning power while belittling the vital, gruelling work of childcare eventually ripples out into a society that takes nurturing roles for granted and pays them a pittance (statutory maternity pay is less than half the minimum wage after six weeks), if at all.
Worst of all, the whole construct is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a mother is always responsible for settling a child, she’ll inevitably get better at it than her partner, leading to a vicious cycle of extra responsibility. So, while I know that my family’s deal is an outlier, the status quo seems to me much more distorted. I’m lucky to have a partner who does his fair share – but by that token, so is he.
Becoming someone’s mother has been the most extraordinary experience of my life. It has also slapped me round the face with the starkest gender inequity I’ve ever personally encountered; while we can’t control the macro factors such as government policy and social attitudes, micro adjustments in our own homes make a world of difference. Splitting the night shift might sound like a tiny thing, but I promise it doesn’t feel that way at 2am.
So much of the way we do motherhood in 2026 in the UK is isolating, yet this small but mighty tweak would go a long way to making women feel less lonely, simply by recognising the work we’re doing as valuable – deserving of rest, if not (yet) fair pay.
Something to sleep on, anyway.
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