Lead
Two feelings coexist for many parents on leave: the anxiety that "doing nothing during leave will leave me behind," and the reality that "between nursing and night wakings, there is nothing left for learning." This article is not here to push you either way. It is here to lay out the data that belong in that decision before you make it — what parental leave actually looks like for learning, how wage profiles change after career interruptions, and what international comparisons suggest about where the real constraints lie.
Learning During Leave: What the Reality Looks Like
"Get a certification during leave," "upskill while you have the time" — these ideas circulate socially, but a parent's realistic capacity to study depends heavily on the infant's age and the household's circumstances. In the first three months, when night feeds are ongoing, chronic sleep fragmentation is the norm. Harrison and Horne (2000) showed that cognitive performance: the ability to concentrate, make decisions, and process information accurately under sleep deprivation is substantially worse than under rested conditions [1]. Stacking a learning objective on top of that is not simply a matter of willpower.
When external pressure frames "doing something during leave" as a norm, that pressure implicitly discounts the cognitive and emotional work of caring for an infant around the clock. Parental leave is not an empty gap from work — it is time spent on a different kind of labor that happens to run 24 hours a day. Whether to pursue any learning is a personal judgment based on one's own situation; it is not something for others to evaluate.
That said, a genuine concern does exist: some industries change fast. In roles that rely on digital tools, a one- to two-year gap can mean new platforms, updated workflows, and shifted industry standards. Confirming "what has changed" before returning to work is a different thing from "feeling pressure to upskill" — it is practical preparation with a specific purpose.
Wage Profiles After Career Interruption
Bertrand, Goldin, and Katz (2010) followed MBA holders over time and found that, despite small income differences right after graduation, a gap of roughly 40% opens between men and women over the ten years following the birth of a first child [2]. Goldin (2014) identified the primary driver not as time off, but as access to flexibility: workers in "greedy jobs" — roles that reward continuous, on-demand availability — see their earnings diverge from those in more flexible arrangements [3].
The implication is important: the gap does not arise mainly because one parent studied or failed to study during leave. It arises because of which jobs are available and accessible afterward. Structural constraints do more of the work than individual effort.
The OECD Family Database (2023) documents a consistent pattern across member countries: the gap between the legal existence of reduced-hours arrangements for parents and their actual take-up is wide [4]. Workplace culture suppresses utilization even where formal policies exist.
Yavorsky, Kamp Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan (2015) described this as "the production of inequality" — the way that caregiving becoming concentrated in one person's schedule asymmetrically constrains that person's professional options [5].
Remote Work and Childcare: What the Data Showed
After COVID-19, there was hope that the spread of remote work would ease the tension between childcare and employment. Petts, Carlson, and Pepin (2021) found that remote work did contribute to some parents remaining employed through the pandemic, but that it did not close the gender gap in caregiving [6]. The framing of "you can work while caring for the baby at home" risks degrading both — productivity at work and quality of care — simultaneously.
A more grounded framing treats "the boundary design between work time and care time" as the task, rather than "doing both at once." In practice, physically or temporally separating work and care is often what lets each function at adequate quality.
Three Practical Framings
Option A — When deciding about learning during leave, the question can shift from "I have to do this" to "I am in a state where I can, and I choose to." If there is a genuine concern about what has changed in your field, that is worth a specific check — but that is different from vague pressure to prove productivity.
Option B — When considering a shift to reduced hours after returning, it is worth investigating specifically how your workplace and industry treat part-time or flexible arrangements: do they affect promotion tracks, bonus eligibility, project assignment? Knowing this in advance, rather than discovering it after, is the more useful preparation.
Option C — If remote work is in the picture, designing it as a "work efficiency tool" rather than a "childcare compatibility tool" tends to reduce the interference between the two. Explicit time boundaries — when work begins, when it ends — are the mechanism.
Summary
Both the anxiety ("if I do nothing during leave I'll fall behind") and the reality ("I have nothing left over for learning") are legitimate. Before attributing either to individual effort or failure, it is worth understanding the structural forces at work: how institutional flexibility gaps, workplace culture, and the design of "greedy jobs" shape what options are actually available on return. As Goldin's work makes clear, most of the career divergence that follows childbirth is determined not by what happened during leave, but by what kinds of jobs are available and accessible afterward. Having a map of those constraints is more useful than pressure in either direction.
Keeping a record of the rhythms, energy levels, and daily realities of the leave period has its own value: it becomes a document of what you actually managed during that time, and how it changed. An app like Memori can serve that function alongside its primary use as a child development log.
References
- Harrison Y, Horne JA. The impact of sleep deprivation on decision making: a review. J Exp Psychol Appl. 2000;6(3):236–249. doi:10.1037/1076-898X.6.3.236. PMID: 11014055
- Bertrand M, Goldin C, Katz LF. Dynamics of the gender gap for young professionals in the financial and corporate sectors. Am Econ J Appl Econ. 2010;2(3):228–255. doi:10.1257/app.2.3.228
- Goldin C. A grand gender convergence: its last chapter. Am Econ Rev. 2014;104(4):1091–1119. doi:10.1257/aer.104.4.1091
- OECD Family Database. PF2.1: Key characteristics of parental leave systems. OECD; 2023. Available from: https://www.oecd.org/social/family/database.htm
- Yavorsky JE, Kamp Dush CM, Schoppe-Sullivan SJ. The production of inequality: the gender division of labor across the transition to parenthood. J Marriage Fam. 2015;77(3):662–679. doi:10.1111/jomf.12189. PMID: 26038628
- Petts RJ, Carlson DL, Pepin JR. A gendered pandemic: childcare, homeschooling, and parents' employment during COVID-19. Gend Work Organ. 2021;28(S2):515–534. doi:10.1111/gwao.12614