I AM ALL ALONE is the sentence that I hear most often from moms and women in general, in our work together. I believe them.

This is not surprising, given the one-single- family-unit model that was instituted in the last 100 years due to industrialization, rural uprooting and massive urbanization. The support of the village is long gone, and our way of living today is unnatural, i.e. against human nature.

Here’s what I found about mothers in my research:

• 72% of mothers feel invisible and 93% feel unappreciated, unacknowledged or unseen once they’ve had children. Another 93% said that since having a child, their identity has been reduced to only being a mother. (survey in the UK)
• A study by the U.S. Census Bureau found that between two years before the birth of a couple’s first child and a year after, the earnings gap between opposite-sex spouses doubles. The gap continues to grow until that child reaches age 10. Though it narrows after that, it never disappears completely. This is referred to as the “Motherhood Penalty”.
• Due to the Motherhood Penalty, on average, mothers make 63 cents for every dollar paid to fathers. Even full-time employed mothers make 71 cents for every dollar made by a father.
• 35% of counties in the US are considered maternity care deserts. This means that in 1,104 US counties, there is not a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician. Areas with no access to maternal care affect over 2.3 million women of reproductive age and 150,000 births in 2022. These regions affect 1 in 12 women across the US.
• In the United States, 1 in 5 women suffer from a mental health disorder in the months before or after giving birth — and the vast majority of them never get care.