It was a golden opportunity.
Amrita Khurana, 41, had been offered a position to be the director of marketing for an art company in New York City. The mother of three from Mahwah had only one requirement before taking the job: She needed to leave each afternoon at 4:30 to pick up her sons from daycare.
The company said no.
But Khurana retooled. She became a real estate agent, and wound up earning more money and having the flexibility to be home when her kids got off the bus. For her, being a stay-at-home mom was never an option, she said. She was too ambitious, and didn’t want her life to be defined by taking care of her children.
“I’m not that kind of person,” Khurana said.
Mothers in New Jersey are choosing to head back to work after giving birth at the highest rate in the past decade, thanks to the state’s high cost of living, more family-friendly policies and changing expectations about who should care for children. But, as Khurana and many others find, staying in the labor force can still present challenges.
More than 72 percent of women with a child or children under six said they were in the labor force in 2017, compared to 65 percent of those moms in 2007, according to the latest Census data. The trend also holds true for mothers who had given birth in the past year, with about 69 percent reporting they still held a job in 2017, compared to 57 percent in 2005.
Mothers with children older than six were even more likely to be working, data shows.
Yana Rodgers, director of the Rutgers Center for Women and Work, said women are seeing the benefit of better policies that don’t make them choose between working and permanently staying at home to care for their children.
New Jersey first enacted family leave insurance in 2009, allowing workers to take time off from work to care for a child or family member and be reimbursed a portion of their lost wages. This week, Gov. Phil Murphy greatly expanded the program, increasing the amount of money workers can receive and the length of time they can be away from work.
“Right now is a perfect storm of a tight labor market and a new administration with family-friendly policies,” Rodgers said.
Cultural changes have helped, too, Rodgers said. An increasing number of fathers help with childcare and chores around the house, she said. While women still do the majority of housework, Rodgers said, the stigma around dads has eased.
Laxmi Arte, 41, of West Windsor, formed a tech consulting firm when her daughter was four years old. She said her husband, who grew up with a working mom, kept everything running when she was balancing new work with a young child.
“I always say to my friends, there’s no law that all the cooking has to be done by a woman,” Arte said.
She never considered quitting work. She was too invested in the challenges of the job, and she wanted to be a role model for her daughter to have independence and a career separate from her partner.
Elena Ashkinadze, 46, a genetics counselor at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, said she struggled at first to nurse her son while commuting three hours a day. She had an adaptor to pump breast milk in the car when she got stuck in traffic on the Garden State Parkway. Later, her son developed a severe daily allergy, so she had to monitor his diet closely.
“When you have a child with special needs, the work is compounded 20 times,” Ashkinadze said.
But she said she found a balance. On Wednesday, she said she took a day off for her health and was grading papers and baking brownies with Dexter, her pet goldendoodle.
“No one actually realizes how much they can handle until they do it,” she said.
Erin Petenko may be reached at epetenko@njadvancemedia.com.Follow her on Twitter @EPetenko. Find NJ.com on Facebook.