Struggles of Mothers in Youth Ministry
Why many mothers leave youth ministry, and what it's like when they stay
All through my years in youth ministry, I noticed a trend that many women would leave youth ministry after having children. Sometimes they left purely because they desired to devote their full energies to the work of raising children. Others left for different career paths or alternative ministry positions that were easier to balance with their lives as mothers. And for the mothers that are still working in youth ministry, many of them are are considering either 1) leaving their youth ministry position for the same reasons, or 2) decreasing their work hours.
Apparently, being a mother and working in youth ministry don’t always mix together well.
It makes sense. Being a mom is hard work. Research shows that women tend to spend a lot more time in the activities of parenting and housework than men do. If I’m honest, though, I never thought that much about what balancing youth ministry work with motherhood was like, until I heard others describe it in more detail.
These mothers in youth ministry pointed out that they are usually the ones that have to do things like:
staying home with a sick kid
sitting in school carpool lines in the middle of the day
staying on top of way too many school-related messages
coordinating with other moms for play dates
dropping off forgotten lunch boxes at school
booking babysitters
cooking meals
Most of these things will mean interruptions to their work days, which I can imagine gets very difficult.
But it’s more than just interruptions and schedules. As one woman said,
The mental exhaustion of balancing both roles is extreme, and I often find myself depleted energy-wise as I finally sit down with a student (after moving heaven and earth to find babysitters, play dates, or rushed to get dinner on the table so I can run out the door to meet students as soon as my husband gets home). Youth ministry requires the ability to be present and undistracted, and those are two things [I rarely have].
The mothers I know that have stayed in youth ministry are so grateful that their churches have accommodated their schedules, allowing for full-time work at odd hours or scaling them back to part-time work. They’ve also often found that they can bring children along with them (most teenage girls would love to hold a baby while chatting over coffee, after all) or drop them off at the church’s nursery or children’s ministry during parts of their jobs.
However, even with all of this, the things they are trying to balance are mentally, emotionally, and physically demanding and exhausting. It’s one of the factors that leads women to higher rates of burnout than men.
Research has shown that balancing work and life is often harder for working mothers than for working fathers across the board, regardless of the woman’s specific vocation. When it comes to ministry, though, it is noteworthy than many mothers find other ministry work easier to balance with being a mother. Therefore, sometimes after having children, they purposely move into roles where they work with children or women, for example, because the schedule works better for them. Youth ministry puts unique demands on your schedule and energy. The relational ministry, overnight retreats, text messages from students, and evening programs and activities can be really hard to balance with family life1… not to mention the emotional energy it takes to care for teenage girls.
Furthermore, because many mothers leave youth ministry, they often have a hard time finding peers in their field to relate with. They likely don’t know many other women trying to balance youth ministry with raising a family. And since women need others who understand their experiences to help them manage stress, as I’ve discussed previously, this lack of peers who are also mothers in youth ministry is a recipe for higher stress.
If you’re a mother in youth ministry reading this, know that your efforts are seen and they matter. I’d also love to hear any more thoughts you have about what I (as a single woman) don’t know about what it’s like to be a mother in youth ministry. Your feedback can help me serve others better as I continue supporting and resourcing women in youth ministry. And if you know more mothers in youth ministry, I’d love it if you shared this post with them.
P.S. In a future post, I’ll cover the other end of the spectrum - the struggles of single women in youth ministry.
Hence the need to think through how we run our youth ministries, as I discuss in this post:
