"Four Mothers" shows why we need a global lens on modern motherhood

Abigail Leonard’s new book illustrates how policy and culture shape the lives of new mothers around the world. Plus, some other recommendations.

One of the most unexpected things about having children is how much your own parenthood makes you think about other people’s parenthood. In the first weeks after giving birth to my first baby, when I was in the sticky, bloody, exhausted haze of postpartum, what shocked me even more than the fact that I was now someone’s mother was the realization that this life-altering transition was an experience that was had, at least in some way, by every other mother who has ever lived.

This delirious moment of epiphany, which I probably had while breastfeeding my newborn for the sixth or seventh time in one night, felt nothing short of religious. As I paced the wooden floors of my Oslo apartment, rocking my baby back to sleep, my mind became consumed with the thought of other women doing exactly what I was doing, in real time, across every corner of this planet.

How many millions of us were there pacing the wood, or tiles, or dirt, or carpet, or linoleum of our floors? I wondered if they felt and worried about the same things as me. Or were the labors and stresses and insecurities of our lives too different? They probably were. But still, I felt a sense of kinship in this ancient, and present, community of mothers as we carried the collective weight of new life in our arms.

My kids no longer need to be rocked to sleep. They’re now six and two, and I’ve mostly stopped wandering my house with them in the dead of night. Still, I often think about other mothers and how their experience of motherhood might be the same, or drastically different, from mine, and the many reasons why that might be. And lately, I’ve finally found the time (and free arms!) to read about them, too.

Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through The First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries, which was just published last month, is written by Abigail Leonard, an American journalist who gave birth to her three children in Japan. Naturally, as an American mother also raising my kids abroad, and as someone who has a special interest in how culture and policy shape the experience of motherhood, I devoured it.

Leonard’s book follows four mothers from four countries – Japan, Kenya, Finland, and the United States – through pregnancy and their first year of motherhood. It’s a compact yet complex work of narrative nonfiction that shifts between the perspectives of these equally compelling women. Her writing weaves together intimate portraits with deeply researched insights into their respective countries’ cultures and political histories. Divided into three neat sections, the book focuses on the issues that matter most to mothers today: maternal health care, paid maternity leave, and child care.

In Four Mothers, Leonard shows us that yes, there are some experiences that many mothers across the globe can relate to. I’d guess that the sometimes blissful, sometimes maddening act of constantly holding and rocking our babies, as I did, may be one of them. But what this book really reveals is how much the lived perception and day-to-day experiences of new parenthood are shaped by external factors, particularly place, culture, and politics.

Through these women, we see the concrete, sometimes dramatic impacts on modern mothers of long-held cultural traditions and beliefs in addition to more recently created support systems. Through direct comparisons of these different countries’ social and cultural reactions to a woman’s entry into motherhood, we see how culture can shape policy, and policy can shape culture. Thanks to the incredible detail of Leonard’s reporting, we see the ripple effects of this through everything from gender relations in the home, to the corporate expectations of working mothers, to child care options and accessibility, to the very ways in which women give birth.

What stood out to me the most is that for every one of these very different mothers, it was their access to reliable sources of support – whether from their partner, a nanny, daycare, publicly provided centers, or family members – that proved to be the primary indicator of their mental health and overall sense of security. All of them are doing the majority of the care work, whether because of her partner’s obsession with working (Japan), his lack of paid leave and time off (the United States), or his disinterest in helping at all (Kenya). Even the mother in Finland can’t rely on her baby’s father to be an equitable partner in caregiving, though that seems to be partly because he’s from a different culture.

But while all of these mothers lacked adequate support and companionship from their partners, the kind of external support they found instead became an incredibly revealing way to measure how their countries treats mothers. I was impressed to learn that in Japan, there are community centers that mothers can visit every day to socialize with other women and their babies and get help from nurses. In Norway we have scheduled appointments with a nurse and one meet-up organized by our local public health station with a cohort of other new moms who live in the same area. But we’re expected to exchange information and make plans on our own, which requires extra logistics that many new moms don’t have the energy for. How wonderful it must be in Japan to know that you can just drop in for some company anytime you’re feeling lonely.

However, I was shocked by the fact that “to this day, Japanese women do six times more housework than men, the most of any OECD nation” meaning that those visits to the community centers probably don’t happen as often as they’d like, considering all the housework there is be done. And in both Japan and Kenya, there is still a social expectation that new mothers should be with their babies at all times, an impossible paradox in two countries where most women work also need or want to work outside the home. Babysitters seem to be almost nonexistent in Japanese culture, and while Chelsea, the woman in Kenya, was able to employ the help of nannies, they proved to be unreliable. Both of these mothers, along with Sarah, the American mother, became understandably exhausted and isolated by the constant, relentless work of solo caregiving.

As each of these four women plan their return to work after maternity leave, Leonard illustrates how good family policy often isn’t enough if the country’s work culture hasn’t also adapted to be flexible with the demands of family life. This is painfully apparent for most of these women, and also for their partners. Three of the four women have access to national paid leave, and use all of it. And yet, by the end of the book, three of the four women have either lost their jobs or considered leaving the workforce due to the incompatibility of early motherhood with the rigid expectations of their jobs.

Unsurprisingly, it was Anna, the woman in Finland, whose experience felt the most relatable to me as a mother in Norway. In many ways, Anna and I are very different. But like me, she has over a year of paid leave, is part of a work culture that understands her need for a gradual transition back to professional life, and has quality, affordable child care available to her.

The collective sum of these support systems gives her general sense of calm in her first year of motherhood compared with the other three women, who are constantly planning for future unknowns and are stressed by social and professional expectations to be everything to everyone. The presence of a strong social safety net provides Anna with sense of control over her life as a mother, something the other women often do not feel they have. She mostly has the support she needs, which gives her freedom to embrace their phase of life instead of constantly planning for the future.

Leonard writes, “she just enjoys watching [her son] grow…She’s careful not to torment herself with thoughts of all the things she can’t do…the professional goals she has yet to achieve. She knows that those days will come and has learned to comfort herself, as she would her children – now by recognizing the importance of motherhood itself.”

This has been my experience as a mother in Norway, too. Of course I get exhausted and overstimulated and stressed by the demands of motherhood. But what Anna has, and in general what I have, is a sense of autonomy over the kind of life and motherhood she wants to have. It’s a direct result of universal public policies that guarantee the same rights and protections for every mother in her country. Finland isn’t perfect, and neither is Norway. But these are societies with leaders and lawmakers who understand and empathize with the unique demands of modern life. Because of this, these countries have made it the collective responsibility of everyone to ensure the well-being of parents and their children.

Often, especially for us in the English speaking world, our perception of how people in other countries experience parenthood comes from narrow-visioned parenting books by expats, which I have a lot of critical thoughts about. And more recently, from momfluencers abroad who give us a rose-tinted (or otherwise Instagram-filtered) highlight reel. These accounts, especially the ones from “family-friendly” places in Europe may induce envy, and often for good reason. But this content often lingers on the superficial parts of parenthood, lacking deeper explanations of the social and political underpinnings of how that country’s culture of parenthood came to be. But in Four Mothers, we get an authentic lens into how other societies in the world actually treat mothers, told in their own voices.

Spoiler alert: this book paints a very dire picture of parenthood in America in 2025. While Chelsea in Kenya also struggles to afford motherhood and to find adequate child care, at least she gets guaranteed paid maternity leave, can access public healthcare, and has some network of help. For Sarah in Utah, America’s complete lack of any social safety net is laid bare. Sadly, her particular challenges are incredibly common amongst millions of American mothers.

What gives me hope for the United States, however, is to see how certain public policies can in fact create a cultural shift in a relatively short amount of time. Leonard writes that in 2022, only 17% of Japanese fathers took advantage of their right to a year of paid parental leave. But only a year later, this rate had nearly doubled to 30% — an astonishing leap. “That’s largely,” she writes, “because a new law went into effect requiring companies to disclose paternity leave usage. It was designed to encourage them to be more parent-friendly…and is an example of how policy can move culture forward.”

If there is one resounding universal truth about motherhood that’s revealed in Four Mothers, it’s simply that mothers need more support. As Leonard writes: “As I had come to understand, the way societies support families is critical to how women experience motherhood. Because while parents might feel like they have the freedom and responsibility to raise their children as they want, the truth is that many of the big decisions, like how much time to spend with their children and how to divide the emotional and physical labor with their partner, are heavily determined by the social structures of the place they give birth. And often women are asked to sacrifice freedom for support, when what they should have is both.”

Four Mothers shows us the many different kinds of support that can and do exist for mothers, from our partners, our employers, our communities, and our governments. In this global spectrum of possibility, we can discover new ideas for building a better society, where every new mother has the same opportunity to thrive.

Other things I’ve been reading, and listening to, and loving lately:

• I learned about Four Mothers from two of my favorite Substackers. First, in a newsletter written by Allison Lichter for The Matriarchy Report. Then, in Jo Piazza’s Over the Influence. Both pieces, which include interviews with the author, are excellent, and I highly recommend reading them for more insight into Leonard’s research, along with Piazza’s podcast interview with the author.

• Miranda Rake’s fabulous recent piece “Selling the Euro-Mom Fantasy” in The Cut. (I’m the “friend in Norway” quoted there, bringing in a dose of reality about what it’s like to move abroad.)

• My new writer friend Caroline Calvert’s piece “What Do Moms Really Mean When They Say ‘Pumping Sucks’?”, published this week in Slate. It’s is a powerful reflection on the forces of capitalism that are inherent in pumping culture and what it reveals about the state of modern American motherhood.

• The Mother Of It All podcast has been killing it lately, and I especially recommend their recent episodes with Jessica Grose and with Amanda Hess.

• Absolution by Alice Dermott, which is about a group of expat wives in Saigon in the 1960s. It’s one of the most haunting novels I’ve read in awhile, and her writing is exquisite. A warning that it deals with themes of infertility and miscarriage.

• Ambition Monster by Jennifer Romolini, which is one of the best memoirs I’ve read in a long time. It’s the antidote to hustle culture we all need right now.

• Touched Out by Amanda Montei, which I’ve owned for awhile and finally read in the lead-up to the amazzzzing four-week writing course I took with her earlier this spring. This book — and her writing in general — provides some of the most important commentary on modern motherhood and feminism out there.