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This paper focuses on three countries with distinct policies towards the dilemma of combining motherhood with an employment career: the United States, Germany and Sweden. We investigate how the parental leave policies in these countries work with regard to (a) fostering mother's labor market attachment; (b) securing mother's status as labor market insiders during employment interruption; and (c) buffering the negative career consequences resulting from mothers' time out. Using longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the German Life History Study, and the Swedish Level of Living Survey, we analyze how different types of welfare states produce and institutionalize different patterns of return to the labor market after childbirth and how these structures stratify the subsequent career trajectories of women. Using event-history techniques we first explore how long women in the different institutional contexts interrupt employment after the birth of a child. Second, we examine what their career prospects upon return are: Do mothers on leave retain their status as labor market insiders and return to a job similar to the one they had before, or are they more likely to become outsiders and experience a downward occupational move? What role do individual characteristics and institutional context play in this process? Finally, we assess whether the time women spend away from work after child birth affects their subsequent careers. We find that the timing of return and the consequences for the occupational career are highly dependent on the policy structure these careers are embedded in. In the U.S. – promoting a 'primary earner strategy' – three quarters of all women are back at work only six months after the birth of the first child. In Sweden – the country with an 'earner carer strategy' – three quarters are back after five years, and in Germany – with its 'primary caregiver strategy' – not even after eight years. Parental leave policies seem to impact the timing of reentry, rather than the type of reentry: In all three countries most mothers return to a job with a prestige level comparable to their previous position. These women also tend to interrupt for shorter periods than their peer compatriots, as the majority returns to their previous job. Across countries we find a 'memory effect' of previous time out, though: In the U.S., with few women taking parental leave, we identify a career punishment in terms of a higher downward mobility risk, also for short times out. In Germany, where the legal parental leave period is long and mother's time out the norm, we find a negative linear relationship between time out and women's return to their previous occupational position; the longer the time out, the greater the risk to change to a new job, be it associated with an upward or downward move. In Sweden with a policy allowing shorter but financially compensated parental leaves, we find a negative effect of time out on upward moves. Hence, even in 'woman friendly' Sweden, mothers are better off if they return sooner rather than later to the labor market.