As soon as Lauren Smith returned from maternity leave after her first child, she encountered a question that still makes her shake her head: “Is your baby sleeping through the night?” She had just come back after four months away. Her baby was barely old enough to begin sleep training. “That’s impossible,” she remembered thinking, “unless you have one of that very small percentage of babies that do.”

It sounds like a small moment, a well-meaning but clueless question from a colleague. But for Smith, senior director at Maven Clinic, it represented something fundamental about how companies misread the return-to-work experience for new parents. They think the hard part is the leave itself.

They’re wrong.

That insight anchored a From Day One webinar titled, “From Maternity to Return to Work.” Shern-Min Chow, journalist and founder of Smart Media Content, moderated the conversation with Smith, who drew on more than seven years at Maven, during which she also had two children, to share what meaningful postpartum and return-to-work support actually requires.

Fragmented Care Is a Core Problem

For HR leaders, the challenge of building family benefits often resembles what Smith called “a game of Whack-a-Mole,” pulling one lever to address breastfeeding support, another for mental health, another for parenting resources, none of them connected. The experience for employees on the receiving end is just as disjointed, she says.

“When your baby is born, frankly, that’s when the healthcare system forgets about you,” Smith said. New parents are left to navigate on their own between OB-GYNs, pediatricians, mental health providers, HR teams, and managers. And that’s before even accounting for complications like preeclampsia or a NICU stay.

The consequences are predictable: avoidable emergency room visits, extended leaves, and what Smith called “quiet attrition,” employees who reduce hours or leave entirely because they never felt like they had a plan.

Her prescription is a single integrated platform where employees can access postpartum care, mental health support, lactation consulting, pediatric guidance, and return-to-work resources in one place. “You have to ensure that those benefits span clinical, emotional, and practical needs and are not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “Having a benefit like Maven checks a lot of boxes, but it doesn’t just check a box.”

Mental Health Doesn’t Announce Itself

One in seven women report severe depressive moods postpartum—a figure most HR professionals know. What’s less understood is that symptoms can last up to a year and frequently appear in people who have never experienced anxiety or depression before. Among Maven’s own members, nearly a quarter report experiencing anxiety when they join the platform, and the numbers include fathers and non-birthing partners.

Smith recounted filling out a pediatrician’s intake form after her son was born, and encountering a mental health questionnaire. “I kept thinking, there is no way I am going to tell this pediatrician that I’ve known for an hour about any of my mental health needs,” she said. She checked boxes to move the process along.

That same instinct, to hide vulnerability rather than ask for help, plays out in workplaces every day. The antidote, she says, isn’t just offering mental health resources. It’s proactive outreach: a manager, an HR contact, or an onboarding buddy who reaches out and says, simply, ‘How are you doing?’ “Without that, it feels like, as the individual, you are the one knocking on the door,” Smith said.

Return to Work Is a Phase, Not a Date

Managers often believe that once they’ve secured paid leave and childcare assistance, they’ve done their job. Smith pushes back hard on that framing. “Women are juggling physical symptoms during pregnancy and then postpartum physical recovery, emotional health challenges, breastfeeding logistics, and just overall identity and career questions,” she said. “Can I be on a promotion track, and how do I do all of this?”

When those challenges go unaddressed, women come back without a plan—and they are far more likely to reduce hours or leave entirely.

What does a real return-to-work plan look like? Smith said it starts before the employee leaves. A strong pre-leave transition should align on dates, clarify flexible-return policies, build a genuine coverage plan, and (crucially) discuss career path and performance expectations before the leave begins. “It really sets the stage on, we value you as an employee,” she said.

That support shouldn’t end when the employee walks back in the door. Maven originally offered three months of postpartum support, which Smith called groundbreaking at the time. “Very quickly after we realized there was a huge gap in needing to extend that even further.” The platform now supports families through the first year postpartum and beyond.

The Business Case Is Clinical

For HR professionals who need to make the case to a CFO or board, Smith offered a direct framing: addressing maternity spend is not a perk—it’s a risk management and equity strategy.

Maternity-related costs rank in the top five expenditures for most employers she has worked with. 

A vaginal birth versus a C-section represents a cost difference of $10,000 to $12,000. A NICU admission can run $30,000 to $70,000 per case. Across more than 25,000 births studied over a decade, Maven has found a 15-20% lower C-section rate and a 28% lower NICU admission rate among its members.

In one case study, a Fortune 10 company enrolled nearly 2,000 families in Maven’s maternity and return-to-work program, says Smith. The result: 95% of members returned to work, more than half specifically crediting Maven, and the company saved over $1.2 million annually from increased productivity and reduced attrition.

Identity-Matched Care Builds Trust

Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. have doubled over the last decade, and Black women face disproportionately higher risk of complications and death during childbirth. Many arrive in the healthcare system already carrying distrust, Smith noted, and with good reason.

Maven addresses this through what it calls care matching: using clinical data and personal preferences to pair members with specialists who share their background, identity, and language. A Black female member, for example, would be matched with a Black female care advocate, OB-GYN, doula, mental health provider, and career coach. “What that really does is build trust in a system that has a lot of distrust in it,” Smith said.

Across Maven’s provider network, 40% of providers identify as BIPOC and 11% as LGBTQ+, and care is delivered in 35 languages. About 6% of mental health providers in the U.S. identify as Black; at Maven, they account for more than a quarter of mental health specialists.

The platform also uses virtual doulas, a concept that sometimes raises eyebrows. But with 36% of U.S. counties lacking an OB-GYN, and maternity wards closing in underserved areas, in-person care is often simply unavailable. Two appointments with a virtual doula have been associated with a 40% decrease in C-section rates at Maven.

Leave Equity Matters Too

During Q&A, Smith was asked about disparities between leave offered to birthing and non-birthing parents. She didn’t hedge. “I am a big fan of equity when it comes to leave,” she said. Shorter leaves for non-birthing parents signal that their caregiving role is secondary, creating long-term effects on family involvement and gender equity at work.

Research from Maven finds that 90% of non-birthing parents report parenthood-related anxiety. Same-sex couples, adoptive parents, and parents through surrogacy face the same caregiving challenges as birthing parents and deserve policies that reflect that reality.

The thread running through Smith’s advice is consistent: stop treating maternity and postpartum support as a checklist and start treating it as the high-variance, deeply personal medical and emotional experience it actually is. The employers who do that, she says, end up with not just healthier employees, but also stronger teams, better retention, and a measurable return on investment.

Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Maven Clinic, for sponsoring this webinar. 

Grace Turney is a St. Louis-based writer, artist, and former librarian. See more of her work at graceturney17.wixsite.com/mysite.

(Photo by JLco - Julia Amaral/iStock)