Reviewed and updated by Iris Hogan, MSW, LICSW, September 2026
My husband still reminds me of the first time I left my son.
To say I was uncomfortable is an understatement.
I worried. I wanted to check. I’m pretty sure I would have preferred to take him right back and forget the whole idea.
And it went okay.
My son was okay. I was okay. I came back. And with time, leaving got easier.
But for some women, that isn’t what happens.
And that doesn’t mean they need to just get over it, push through it, or learn to tolerate feeling miserable every time they leave their baby.
There is usually something worth understanding about why leaving feels so hard.
Maybe your body goes on high alert the moment you walk out the door. Maybe your mind starts scanning for everything that could possibly go wrong. Maybe you trust the person caring for your baby and still feel an almost overwhelming pull to go back.
Your rational brain may know your baby is safe.
Your body would like a second opinion.
That gap — between what you know and what you feel — is often where maternal separation anxiety lives.
And understanding what is happening there can be much more helpful than simply telling yourself you should be better at leaving.
When Missing Your Baby Becomes Something More
Missing your baby when you leave is not the same thing as having a problem with separation.
You might wonder how they’re doing, want a reassuring text, or feel that little pull toward home. Especially in the beginning, that can simply be part of adjusting to being apart from this tiny person who has become such a huge part of your world.
But sometimes anxiety starts taking up more space.
You spend the entire time away worrying about your baby’s safety. You check repeatedly. You can’t concentrate on what you’re doing. You feel guilty for leaving in the first place. Maybe you start avoiding separations altogether.
That’s when I become less interested in whether you should be able to leave your baby and more interested in what makes leaving feel so threatening.
Sometimes we hear the phrase maternal separation anxiety used to describe intense distress about being away from a baby. It’s important to know that maternal separation anxiety is not a standalone diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR.
For some women, difficulty separating may be part of a broader postpartum anxiety problem or may occur alongside intrusive thoughts, panic, or trauma-related symptoms. For others, it may not be part of a mental health disorder at all.
That’s why I’m less interested in the label than in understanding what is making separation so difficult for you.
Is anxiety making your world smaller? Is it keeping you from doing things you need or want to do? And what does your mind — or your body — believe might happen if you leave?
Those questions give us somewhere much more useful to start.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recognizes anxiety and anxiety-related disorders as important perinatal mental health conditions and recommends screening during pregnancy and postpartum care.
Read ACOG’s perinatal mental-health screening and diagnosis guidance.
Motherhood Has a Funny Way of Changing the Job Description
Before becoming a mother, you may have been responsible for plenty of things.
Work. Bills. Relationships. Maybe a dog who ate something expensive and completely indigestible.
Then a baby arrives.
Apparently we’re now responsible for preventing every bad thing that could ever happen.
No one remembers agreeing to these terms, but there they are.
For some women, that sense of responsibility feels familiar.
Maybe you’ve always been the dependable one. The fixer. The person who notices what everyone needs before they ask.
Maybe you learned early in life to pay attention to other people’s moods or to anticipate problems before they happened.
Those skills may have served you very well.
But motherhood can turn the volume up on them.
If I’m not paying attention, something bad might happen.
If something bad happens, it might be my fault.
When those beliefs get attached to someone you love as fiercely as you love your baby, leaving can feel like much more than walking out the door.
The Mothers Who Most Need a Break Often Struggle Most to Take One
Sometimes the mothers who are most exhausted are also the ones who have the hardest time stepping away.
You finally get an hour to yourself.
Someone you trust has the baby. You could get coffee. Walk around the block. Sit in your car and stare at absolutely nothing for forty-five minutes.
Instead, your mind gets busy.
What if she starts crying?
What if he can’t settle her?
What if she needs me?
Then comes the guilt.
I should probably just go home.
So you do. And almost immediately, you feel better.
That relief matters.
When going back, checking, or getting reassurance repeatedly makes anxiety drop, your brain can begin to learn something very understandable:
Going back made me feel better.
The next time you leave, going back may feel even more tempting.
That doesn’t mean you should never check on your baby. And it certainly doesn’t mean you need to ignore a genuine concern.
The more useful question is whether checking is helping you respond to something that actually needs your attention — or whether anxiety keeps asking for reassurance because it never quite feels reassured for long.
Anxiety, unfortunately, is not known for saying, Thanks, that’s plenty of reassurance. I’m all set now.
Sometimes the Body Sounds the Alarm First
Sometimes the hardest part of leaving isn’t even what you’re thinking.
It’s what happens in your body.
A mother leaves her baby with someone she trusts. She knows the baby is safe. Then she gets into the car.
Her chest tightens. Her stomach drops. Her heart starts beating faster.
And then the thought arrives:
What if something’s wrong?
One woman described it to me this way:
“It wasn’t that I believed something was wrong. It was that my body reacted as if it could be.”
That distinction matters.
Anxiety doesn’t always begin with a conscious thought. Sometimes your nervous system sounds the alarm first, and your mind starts looking for an explanation afterward.
That can be especially confusing when you genuinely trust the person caring for your baby. You may know perfectly well that your baby is safe and still feel a powerful urge to turn the car around.
That doesn’t mean the feeling is meaningless.
But it does give us another question to ask:
What might your alarm system be responding to?
Why Separation Can Hit Some Mothers Especially Hard
There is no single reason that leaving a baby can feel especially difficult.
For one mother, it may be anxiety that was there long before she had a baby. For another, it may be what happened on the way to becoming a mother.
A difficult pregnancy. A frightening birth. A previous loss. Having a baby who spent time in the NICU.
If you’ve spent weeks or months worrying about whether your baby would be okay, your nervous system may not immediately get the message that the danger has passed.
Imagine a mother who spent the first weeks of her baby’s life watching monitors in the NICU.
She learned to pay attention to every change in breathing, every alarm, every number on a screen. Being vigilant wasn’t excessive then. It was part of living through something genuinely frightening.
Months later, her baby may be healthy and safely at home, but leaving can still bring that old alarm roaring back.
Her reaction makes sense in the context of what she’s lived through, even if the danger her body is responding to isn’t happening now.
For someone else, the issue may be different.
Maybe intrusive thoughts make it difficult for her to feel confident that her baby will be okay when she isn’t there. Maybe she has struggled with panic or postpartum anxiety. Maybe she doesn’t actually feel confident in the person caring for her baby.
Or maybe becoming a mother intensified something much older.
Some women have spent much of their lives being the person who notices what everyone needs, anticipates problems, and makes sure nothing goes wrong. Motherhood gives that part of you an enormous new responsibility.
And sometimes there is simply very little support. It’s difficult to become comfortable letting other people care for your baby when there haven’t been many reliable people available to share the job.
Research on postpartum anxiety supports this broader picture. A 2025 systematic review found that postpartum anxiety is associated with factors across several areas, including previous anxiety or depression, social support, cognitive factors such as parenting confidence, pregnancy and birth experiences, health, and infant and postpartum experiences.
That does not tell us why any individual mother is anxious, but it does reinforce that there isn’t one explanation.
Read the 2025 systematic review of postpartum-anxiety risk factors.
None of this means that every mother who has trouble leaving her baby has anxiety, trauma, or something from childhood that needs to be uncovered.
Instead of asking,
What is wrong with me?
I think a much more useful question is:
Why does this particular situation feel so hard for me?
“Will Leaving Hurt My Attachment With My Baby?”
This is one of the worries I hear most often in my practice from new moms who are afraid to leave their babies.
What if leaving hurts our attachment?
What if my baby needs me and I’m not there?
What if letting someone else care for her somehow changes our bond?
For women who carry this fear, this is often not a one-time conversation. We may come back to it again and again.
Because knowing something and feeling it are not always the same thing.
So let’s explore what we know — and also make room for what you feel.
What we know from attachment research is reassuring.
Attachment research does not define secure attachment as a mother being physically present every moment. Instead, it points to the broader pattern of sensitive, responsive caregiving within the parent-child relationship.
A large 2024 meta-analysis involving more than 22,000 parent-child pairs found that sensitive caregiving was associated with greater attachment security. Importantly, that association was found for both mothers and fathers.
Read the 2024 meta-analysis on caregiver sensitivity and attachment security.
But knowing that may not immediately change how leaving feels.
You can understand all of this and still have your stomach drop when you walk out the door.
That feeling deserves some curiosity, too.
What are you afraid the separation might mean? What does your mind imagine could happen while you’re gone? And what would it mean about you as a mother if your baby needed you and you weren’t there?
Those questions can tell us something that reassurance alone cannot.
You can be deeply attached to your baby and let someone else hold them.
You can leave.
And you can come back.
Coming back matters, too.
Notice What Anxiety Asks You to Do
Anxiety usually wants action.
Check.
Text.
Call.
Look at the camera.
Go back.
Maybe don’t leave next time.
Sometimes there is a perfectly good reason to check. Your baby is with a new caregiver. Something feels genuinely off. You need information.
But anxiety can also keep asking for certainty long after you have enough information to know your baby is safe.
You check the camera. Everything is fine.
Ten minutes later, you want to check again.
You get a reassuring text. You feel better.
And then another what if? shows up.
So rather than making a rule that you shouldn’t check, I think it can be more helpful to ask:
Am I checking because something has actually changed?
Or am I checking because I’m trying to make this uncomfortable feeling go away?
There’s an important difference.
The goal isn’t to stop caring or to ignore your instincts. It’s to begin noticing when you’re responding to something that needs your attention — and when anxiety is asking you to solve a danger that isn’t actually happening.
If You Want to Practice Leaving, Start Small
Once you have a better sense of what makes leaving so difficult, you may decide that you want to practice being apart.
You do not have to start with dinner out and three hours away.
Start smaller than you think you should.
For one mom I worked with, starting small meant gardening outside while someone else stayed inside with the baby.
And yes, the windows were open.
That was enough separation for her to begin with.
For someone else, it might mean walking around the block, sitting outside for ten minutes, or going to Target and buying one thing.
Five minutes counts. Nobody is handing out medals for maternal separation.
Sometimes five minutes is also all the time you have. I wrote more about making those small pockets of time count in 5-Minute Postpartum Self-Care.
The point isn’t to prove that you’re strong enough to leave or to force yourself to tolerate overwhelming anxiety. It’s to give yourself a chance to have a different experience:
I left. I was uncomfortable. My baby was okay. I came back. We reconnected.
Over time, experiences like these may help leaving feel less threatening.
But this is also where understanding why leaving is so hard matters.
If you don’t actually trust the person caring for your baby, that deserves attention. If leaving brings back the fear you lived with during a frightening birth, a NICU stay, or a previous loss, simply telling yourself to push through may not be particularly helpful.
And if intrusive thoughts, panic, trauma-related reactions, or postpartum anxiety are making separation feel overwhelming or nearly impossible, it may be more helpful to work through what is happening with a perinatal mental health clinician rather than trying to force yourself through it alone.
There isn’t one right way to do this.
The goal is not to become a mother who doesn’t mind leaving her baby. It’s to have more choice about when you stay and when you go, rather than having fear make that decision for you.
Let Other People Become Capable Too
Sometimes leaving is hard because no one else does things quite the way you do.
And they probably won’t.
The bottle may not be held at precisely the angle you would choose.
The diaper may be fastened in a way that seems to defy basic engineering.
Your partner may apparently have an entirely different interpretation of what constitutes appropriate baby socks.
Different does not automatically mean unsafe.
I think motherhood comes with a built-in growth challenge: learning to live with a certain amount of imperfection and building some muscle around uncertainty.
Because there is plenty of both.
And yes, maybe you really are the person who can soothe your baby the fastest.
You know that particular cry. You know the bounce that works. You know that if you hold her exactly this way and walk through the kitchen, she will probably settle.
But there is also value in your partner having the chance to figure out how to soothe your baby their way.
They may do it differently or take longer, and your baby may fuss while they figure it out. Over time, the two of them get to learn each other.
That relationship matters, too.
When you have been the person who knows the baby’s rhythms, recognizes every cry, remembers when they last ate, and knows exactly how they like to be held, it can be surprisingly hard to step back.
Sometimes we leave physically without fully stepping back mentally.
We leave instructions. We text reminders. We check in.
Technically, someone else is caring for the baby.
But we’re still managing the whole thing from somewhere else.
There is a difference between:
I am the only person who can do this correctly.
and
I am one of the people who loves and cares for this baby.
Accepting that difference requires a little trust, a little tolerance for uncertainty, and sometimes a willingness to let things be done imperfectly.
Motherhood gives us plenty of opportunities to practice all three.
Get Curious About What You’re Actually Afraid Of
Sometimes it helps to get very specific about what you think might happen if you leave.
Not just:
I’m worried about the baby.
But what are you actually worried about?
I’m afraid she’ll cry and no one will be able to comfort her.
I’m afraid something will happen and I won’t be there.
I’m afraid she’ll need me.
I’m afraid leaving makes me a bad mother.
Those fears may sound similar on the surface, but they can come from very different places.
What are you most afraid will happen? If that happened, what would it mean to you? Do you feel responsible for preventing anything bad or uncomfortable from happening to your baby? Do you trust the person you’re leaving your baby with?
And sometimes the question is even simpler:
What feels hardest about walking out the door?
You don’t have to interrogate yourself until you find the perfect explanation.
Because I shouldn’t feel this way doesn’t give us much to work with.
I wonder why this is so hard for me gives us somewhere to begin.
When It May Be Time for More Support
Having a hard time leaving your baby does not automatically mean you need therapy.
You can miss your baby terribly, feel uncomfortable when you leave, prefer being home with them, and still be doing just fine.
I become more concerned when anxiety starts making your world smaller.
Maybe you can’t leave your baby with anyone, even someone you trust. Maybe you spend the entire time away checking, worrying, or fighting the urge to go home. Maybe leaving brings on significant panic.
Or perhaps you’ve stopped doing things you need or want to do because being away from your baby feels too difficult.
That’s when it may be worth getting some support. You can learn more about how I work with women during pregnancy, postpartum, and early motherhood on my Maternal Mental Health & Postpartum Therapy page.
And the work isn’t necessarily about teaching you how to leave your baby.
First, I want to understand what is making leaving so hard.
For one woman, we may be working with anxiety and intrusive thoughts. For another, there may be a frightening birth, NICU experience, trauma, or loss that still gets activated when she is away from her baby.
For someone else, we may discover how strongly she carries the belief:
If I love someone, I am responsible for making sure nothing bad ever happens to them.
That is an enormous responsibility to carry.
Part of the work may be learning the difference between being responsible to the people we love and believing we can be responsible for everything that happens to them.
Motherhood asks a great deal of us. It does not give us the ability to prevent every hard thing, remove every uncertainty, or make every moment go perfectly.
And perhaps that is part of the work, too — learning that you can love your baby fiercely without being able to control everything that happens when you are together or apart.
Leaving may still feel uncomfortable sometimes, and you may still miss your baby.
The goal isn’t to become a mother who never worries when she walks out the door.
It’s for fear not to be the only thing deciding whether you can.
Until We Meet Again
Until we meet again — breathe gently, walk slowly, and treat yourself with kindness.
— Iris
Research & Sources
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (2023). Screening and Diagnosis of Mental Health Conditions During Pregnancy and Postpartum: ACOG Clinical Practice Guideline No. 4. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 141(6), 1232–1261.
Madigan, S., Deneault, A.-A., Duschinsky, R., et al. (2024). Maternal and paternal sensitivity: Key determinants of child attachment security examined through meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 150(7), 839–872.
Jones, K., Folliard, K., Di Malta, G., Oates, J., Gilbert, L., & Harrison, V. (2025). Risk factors associated with postpartum anxiety in Australia, Europe, and North America: A systematic review and narrative synthesis. Journal of Affective Disorders, 373, 478–494.