Jessica Cuevas loved her job as a college counselor at a high school. But after giving birth to a son in January 2021, she switched to a remote corporate job at a grocery store chain because it gave her more flexibility and saved her commuting time. After her second son was born two years later, she quit that job, too.
She had been relying on her mother for help, but her parents have been spending more time in Mexico, leaving her without an affordable and reliable child care option.
Ms. Cuevas, who is 35 and lives in Chicago, works part time from home for an education nonprofit, though the work is sporadic and the pay is inconsistent. She wants a full-time job — in part so she and her husband can buy a bigger house — but she is concerned that the expense of child care would wipe out any financial upside.
“I feel like right now, considering the economy, considering just the cost of living, we feel stuck,” she said.
The share of women in their prime working years who are in the labor force has reached new highs coming out of the pandemic, hitting a record 78.1 percent in May.
But there are signs that the labor force participation gains among women with children under 5 has plateaued since September, according to an analysis from the Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group at the Brookings Institution.
While economists are not sure exactly what has caused the downshift, one frequently cited factor that could be preventing more mothers from working is the continued lack of available and affordable child care options.
“The lesson of the pandemic is there’s a higher participation rate among these mothers with young kids than we thought there would be — the ceiling is higher,” said Lauren Bauer, the associate director of the Hamilton Project. “The fact that it is returning to earth here, to me, signals that greater investment in the institutions that support women’s labor force participation are necessary.”
Coming out of the pandemic lockdowns, the labor force rebound was stronger among women than men, and it was particularly notable for mothers of young children. Economists attribute that to several factors, including the ability to work remotely, federal subsidies that made child care more available and affordable, and a tight labor market that helped drive up wages.
But the $24 billion in aid that the government allocated to the child care industry expired in September. Some employers are tightening expectations about working on site, making it more difficult to balance job demands with needs at home.
For mothers of young children hoping to get back into the work force, the result may be that longstanding barriers to child care are rearing up again.
“We know for a fact that moms in particular get pushed out of the labor force regularly when there isn’t access to affordable child care and when we don’t have paid family medical leave,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director of MomsRising, an advocacy group.
Evelyn Gu, 34, continued to work at a nonprofit organization for people with disabilities after having her son in 2020, encouraged by the newfound flexibility of working from home and having family members close by to help with child care. When her daughter was born in 2022, she tried to continue with the same work-from-home setup.
But the arrangement became difficult. She had tried sending her son to day care, but he got sick too often, and the weekly cost of more than $400 was a burden. With her son back at home, she hired a nanny to lighten the child care load for her family members, but she had trouble finding someone satisfactory. And at $20 an hour to take care of just her baby, that also got expensive. The inadequate child care, coupled with a higher mortgage on a new house, was too much of an emotional and financial challenge. She left her job in April 2023.
“Our whole family, we never really thought of me as quitting and staying home,” she said. “We always just thought we would work something out.”
Now that her son is set to start preschool in August, Ms. Gu, who lives in Herndon, Va., is starting to think about going back to work. She intends to begin looking for jobs in the nonprofit or information technology sectors — ideally ones she can do remotely.
“It’s a good time to really look back at what I want to do,” she said.
Many economists say there is still room for growth in the overall participation rate among women 25 to 54.
That is partly because the sustained increase continues a notable shift that began before the pandemic. Around 2015, the participation rate for women in their prime working years started to pick up again after peaking in 2000 and then falling off. The recent rise was bolstered by low unemployment and booming labor demand in service industries — only to be curtailed when the economic shock from the pandemic pummeled those jobs.
“This upward trend was interrupted specifically for women who bore a lot of the burden of the downturn of the pandemic,” said Nela Richardson, the chief economist at the job market data provider ADP.
On average, about 21 percent of prime-age women who came off the sidelines took jobs in health care and social assistance, according to the job site Indeed, which analyzed Census Bureau and Labor Department data from June 2023 to June 2024. That sector, traditionally dominated by women, has added roughly 1.7 million jobs since February 2020.
Another 13 percent of prime-age women who re-entered the work force went into educational services, where jobs now also exceed the prepandemic level.
By contrast, more than a third of prime-age men who have returned to the labor force took jobs in retail trade, construction, transportation and warehousing.
“The sectors that are growing quickest now were the ones that were hit hardest by Covid,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed who did the analysis, adding that the kind of jobs being created “does affect who is going to benefit and be more likely to find a job and take those jobs.”
That has been the case for Nancy Pontius.
After a teaching career that began in the Philadelphia public schools, Ms. Pontius left her part-time job as a music instructor when her son was born in November 2019. She was concerned about being away from her baby 14 hours a day and lacking enough time to pump breast milk.
The coronavirus pandemic derailed her plan to return to work the next year, and she remained out of the work force until a second child, a daughter born in July 2022, turned 1.
Then she reversed course. “I was so ready to not be a stay-at-home mom anymore,” she said.
Ms. Pontius, 37, began teaching full time in June at a preschool near her home in Warminster, Pa. Her children, now almost 5 and 2, attend the school at a discounted tuition, which made the job more alluring, given the cost of child care.
“I was not willing to take this job until I knew it made financial sense,” she said.