Zoe Blaskey
Working parents are the population most likely to leave in the two years around having a child, and employers lose them at the exact point they are most expensive to replace. The problem is rarely the policy. It is the collapse in confidence, identity and sense of belonging that parental leave triggers, which no enhanced benefit on its own repairs.
Zoe Blaskey helps organisations keep and re-engage working parents through the confidence and identity shift of early parenthood, drawing on her work as founder of Motherkind and author of the Sunday Times bestseller of the same name.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Zoe Blaskey
- She addresses the specific reason parents disengage after leave, the loss of identity and confidence psychologists call matrescence, rather than treating the problem as a benefits or flexibility gap.
- Her material is drawn from coaching thousands of parents and from interviewing experts like Dr Becky Kennedy, Dr Gabor Maté and Philippa Perry on her podcast, so audiences get tested tools, not anecdote.
- A Sunday Times bestselling book and a podcast with over five million downloads give her a recognition with working-parent audiences that translates into unusually high engagement in the room.
- She speaks credibly to senior women, having coached the Executive Editor of Goop and worked with brands including Meta and Dove, which makes her relevant to retention conversations at leadership level, not only early-career.
Biography highlights
- Founder of Motherkind, a coaching platform and podcast supporting working parents, and a qualified transformational coach trained at the Co-Active Training Institute.
- Author of Motherkind: A New Way to Thrive in a World of Endless Expectations, an instant Sunday Times bestseller published by HQ/HarperCollins.
- Host of The Motherkind Podcast since 2017, with over five million downloads and a top-10 ranking from Apple.
- Podcast guests include Dr Becky Kennedy, Glennon Doyle, Dr Gabor Maté, Dr Rangan Chatterjee and Philippa Perry.
- Featured in The Times, The Telegraph, Psychologies, Stylist, Red, Goop, SheerLuxe and the Evening Standard, and invited by Arianna Huffington to write for Thrive.
- Corporate and brand partners include Meta, Dove, Barbie and Sweaty Betty.
Biography
Most employers treat the return from parental leave as a logistical event: a date, a phased schedule, a keeping-in-touch day. The harder problem is psychological. The person who comes back is not the person who left, and the gap between their old professional identity and their new reality is where confidence, ambition and retention quietly erode. Zoe Blaskey built Motherkind to close that gap.
She came to the work from corporate marketing in London, where the absence of any real support around her own transition into motherhood prompted her to start a podcast in 2017. The Motherkind Podcast has since passed five million downloads and earned a top-10 ranking from Apple, with guests including Dr Becky Kennedy, Dr Gabor Maté and Philippa Perry. The Telegraph called it the antidote to the toxic perfectionism of modern motherhood.
Her book, Motherkind, became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on publication by HarperCollins. Underneath the public platform sits a coaching practice: Blaskey trained at the Co-Active Training Institute and has coached thousands of parents, from full-time mothers to global executives, including the Executive Editor of Goop. That range is what lets her speak to a retention problem at every level of an organisation rather than only the early-career tier.
For employers, the value is concrete. Parents are among the most expensive talent to replace and the most likely to leave in the years around a child’s birth, and Blaskey’s work targets the confidence and identity collapse that drives those exits. Her corporate sessions draw on the same evidence-based tools she has tested across hundreds of podcast conversations and brand partnerships with Meta, Dove and Sweaty Betty.
Key speaking topics
- Matrescence and parental identity
- Working-parent retention and engagement
- Burnout and perfectionism
- Confidence after parental leave
- Employee wellbeing for working families
- Supporting senior women through career and family transitions
Ideal for
- CHROs and heads of talent tackling attrition among working parents
- DEI and employee-experience leads building parental-transition and returner programmes
- Employee resource groups and women’s networks
- Wellbeing and benefits teams looking for substance beyond standard provision
Audience outcomes
- A clear account of why parents disengage after leave and what employers can change
- Practical tools to manage burnout, guilt and perfectionism that parents can apply immediately
- A vocabulary for matrescence that helps managers support returning team members
- Renewed confidence for parents reconciling ambition with a changed sense of identity