**6. Limitations**

While the findings of this study present theoretical contributions, it is important to consider several limitations. The sample size was not incredibly large (310 people), and when asking participants to disclose their ethnicities, we neglected to put "Non-White Hispanic" as one of the options. This may have deterred Hispanic mothers from completing the survey. It is important to identify minorities when investigating a topic such as maternity leave, as ethnic minorities are more likely to work low-income jobs and thus have less access to maternity leave. We must also consider that quiet quitting is a new trend brought about by employee burnout during the pandemic, and as life continues to go back to normal and labor shortages are relieved, many employees who had to work overtime and take over projects to compensate for the lack of additional workers may be less likely to suffer from burnout and less likely to quiet quit. It would have been beneficial to add an additional question asking mothers which types of childcare benefits would be most helpful for them, and if their company offered these types of benefits, would they be more likely to continue going above and beyond at their jobs. There is still a lack of research on quiet quitting in general, as the trend became popular only over the past year. These limitations kept us from confirming our theories about coworker/peer interactions and how they could influence working mothers to engage in quiet quitting, as we had to rely mostly on news articles on quiet quitting and a few academic papers. It may also have been beneficial to ask mothers to disclose if they had a PMI during or after their pregnancy, such as postpartum depression or PTSD, and if they believed an extended maternity leave would have helped them handle the challenges of this illness or not, as our study focused mainly on burnout and mental health in general. Lastly, due to the observational data acquired in the study, the findings only present the correlational relationships in the model, rather than causal effects. It is suggested for future scholars to test the causal effects in the conceptual model to provide more in-depth investigations.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, T.Z. and C.R.; methodology, T.Z.; software, T.Z.; validation, T.Z.; formal analysis, T.Z.; investigation, T.Z. and C.R.; resources, T.Z.; data curation, T.Z.; writing—original draft preparation, T.Z. and C.R.; writing—review and editing, T.Z.; visualization, T.Z.; funding acquisition, T.Z. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by University of Central Florida, grant number GR105930.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of University of Central Florida (protocol code STUDY00004885 and 4 November 2022).

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data are not available due to privacy and ethical restrictions.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
