The SKIMS co-founder says naming her limits is the most honest thing she can do for other working mothers
Emma Grede walked onto the TODAY set on April 14, ready to defend herself, and she did not flinch. The 43-year-old SKIMS co-founder and Good American CEO, who went viral after describing herself as a “max three-hour mom” in a Wall Street Journal profile published April 4, told co-hosts Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones that the backlash was entirely predictable and that she stands by every word.
When Jones asked whether the public reaction caught her off guard, Grede was blunt. “Well, you know I just think that headline would never be written about a man,” she told Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones on TODAY. “But, no. Was I caught off guard? Absolutely not because I think that’s what happens to women.”
Her point was not just about media double standards. It was about the impossible position working mothers occupy, expected to be both relentlessly present parents and high-performing professionals, with no acknowledged ceiling on either demand. Grede shares Grey, 11, Lola, 9, and twins Lake and Rafferty, 3, with husband Jens Grede.
The Reality of Weekends After a Full Work Week
Rather than walking back her comments, Grede reframed them as a form of practical honesty she believes the conversation around working motherhood desperately needs. “Let’s give a list of all the things I don’t do. Because you know what’s helpful? That’s what’s helpful to women,” she said on TODAY. That philosophy runs through her new book, Start With Yourself, released the same week as her TODAY appearance. In it, Grede argues that women are socially conditioned to minimize their ambitions and mask their limitations.
“There’s a lot of social conditioning that happens to us,” she told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin on the “CNBC Changemakers and Power Players” podcast. “‘She’s a good girl,’ and it teaches you to be small and be quiet and to be a pleaser.”
Grede also pushed back on the premise that three hours is a shockingly low number. She pointed out that the math of a working parent’s weekend rarely adds up to eight uninterrupted hours of child-focused time, regardless of how devoted that parent is.
“When you go to work every day Monday through Friday, you are spent by the time you get to the weekend,” she said on TODAY. “Anyone who has children, you know that you don’t spend eight hours on a Saturday and Sunday with them. You have errands to run, you have things to do.” When Bush Hager noted that children also benefit from time on their own, Grede agreed without hesitation, adding that she actively tries to build independence in her kids.
A Philosophy Rooted in Her Own Upbringing
Grede grew up in East London, raised by a single mother with limited financial resources, and that experience shaped both her drive and her views on honest ambition. In her original Wall Street Journal profile, she described her motivation plainly: “I wanted a different existence. I wanted to be in charge of my happiness.” That same logic extends to her parenting philosophy.
In a 2024 conversation with People, Grede described the boundaries she has drawn as a working mother, saying: “I don’t do pick up and drop off every single day. But if my kid’s in a play, I’m going to see my kid in the play. It’s not cookie-cutter, it’s different for every person.” Her household runs with a team of nannies, a chef, housekeepers, and a chief of staff, infrastructure she has been transparent about as part of what makes her schedule possible.
What This Says About Working Motherhood
The intensity of the reaction to Grede’s comments points to something larger than one entrepreneur’s weekend schedule. Working parents, and working mothers in particular, are routinely caught between two sets of expectations that cannot both be fully met.
Grede’s willingness to name that tension publicly on national television rather than deflect it with reassurances about balance and gratitude is, for many women, genuinely unusual. Her broader message in Start With Yourself extends the same logic to professional life, pushing back against the idea that women should keep quiet about wanting success.
There is a reason Grede’s three-hour comment spread so quickly: it named something many working parents feel but rarely say out loud. The cultural script for high-achieving mothers still tends toward reassurance — the idea that with the right systems and enough love, you really can do it all. Grede is explicitly rejecting that script, and the backlash she received suggests just how uncomfortable that rejection still makes people.
For parents navigating their own version of this tension, her argument is worth sitting with: the most useful thing a working mother might offer another working mother is not inspiration, but honesty about the trade-offs she actually makes.
