What Should Your Maternity Leave Look Like? It Depends on What You and Your Family Need

Maternity leave raises both logistical and emotional questions about how you want your life, family, and career to look. At Tribeca Maternity, we won’t leave you alone during this sometimes wonderful, always difficult, and frequently complicated time. We’ll help you explore what you need and want for both your family and your career.

Take All the Time You Can Get (Really)

Parenting a newborn is a full-time job. No matter how much maternity leave you have, it’s never enough. So when you find out what your company’s maternity leave policy is, use it. We also understand that leave doesn’t always mean no work—working from home and being on call are the nature of the corporate world. At Tribeca Maternity, we’ll support you in:

Establishing boundaries with work both pre- and post-baby
Insisting on those boundaries when needed
Taking as much advantage of your leave as you can while also being realistic

Stepping Away From Work Can Be a Hard Transition

What you do for a living is a big part of who you are, and being with a newborn all day is very different. It might be wonderful in many ways but at times, it can also be tiresome, draining, emotional, and (let’s face it) sometimes downright boring. In therapy at our offices in Tribeca, as well as our remote therapy offerings, we’ll help you:

Build a plan to get creative and mitigate boredom
Incorporate work or a project that fits your schedule
Stay connected socially
In some cases, return to work sooner than expected

And Then There’s the Transition of Going Back to Work

And then there’s the other side. While you’re still in the thick of new parenting, there’s yet another transition: going back to work. The transition back to work and away from your baby can be extremely difficult. In therapy, we’ll help you process the emotional weight of this latest change, continue to establish appropriate boundaries even once you are back at work, and help you come up with a plan for getting your baby the right care so you can work.

Couples Experience All of These Transitions Together

The transition to and out of maternity leave also impacts the day-to-day flow of a couple’s relationship. In couples therapy, we explore what maternity leave, paternity leave, and the return to work have been like—both how they have affected each partner and how they have affected the relationship as a whole.

Meet our founder and clinical director, Matt Lundquist, LCSW, MSEd

A Columbia University-trained psychotherapist with more than two decades of clinical experience, I've built a practice where my team and I help individuals, couples, and families get help to work through difficult experiences and create their lives.