How To Have a Kid and a Life: A Survival Guide

Here Souter draws on her work as a journalist reporting on parenting, as well as her own experience as a Black American mother of two who found herself struggling during and after her pregnancies, which she says were at once rewarding and difficult. For this book, she spent hundreds of hours interviewing mothers from a variety of racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds about their experiences of becoming parents; the interviews confirmed that she wasn’t alone in struggling. Souter examines factors compounding motherhood’s difficulty (poor maternity and paternity leave policies, unsubsidized childcare, inflexible work, weak labor protections, bias against working mothers) and offers guidance for returning to work after parental leave and dealing with the particular changes (to work, parenting, relationships) wrought by the pandemic.