THE FIRST STAGES of parenting are sometimes called “the longest shortest time,” as an award-winning podcast on parenting attests. For a newborn and a new parent, the days are dense. Everything matters.
In the United States, many families’ caregiving-rich days of new parenthood are curtailed by work. A fifth of new mothers return to work within days or weeks of having a child, often driven by financial precarity. More than half of parents surveyed who were able to take some parental leave from work said they took less time off than they needed or wanted, the majority citing fear of lost income or jobs. As one mother, a call center employee with a newborn, said in an interview for a 2018 Center for Public Justice report, “My work doesn’t pay for maternity leave ... If I don’t go back to work in two weeks, we will not have enough money to pay our electric bill.”
From the biblical account of creation through the prophets’ visions of shalom, Christian tradition presents family life as fundamental to human life and society. Essayist Wendell Berry reasoned that a good human economy is one that “proposes to endure.” The nurture of children and care for loved ones, of course, is one way our society endures.
Following industrialization, many nations enacted pro-family policies to protect family caregiving. Publicly funded “mothers’ pensions” enabled widowed and single mothers to parent children in the home. Beginning in the 1950s, nations began to develop leave programs to ensure parents could access time off with pay following the birth or adoption of a child.
The benefits of paid leave for new parents are well documented. In 1977, Norway replaced an unpaid job protection program with four months of paid maternity leave. Thirty years later, high school graduation, college attendance, and earnings were higher for children whose mothers had paid leave, according to a 2015 analysis. Multinational studies associate increased weeks of paid maternity leave with lower rates of infant and child mortality.
While other nations expanded their family policies, protections shrank in the U.S. Mothers’ pensions fell by the wayside, replaced by anti-poverty programs that remain embattled to this day. Not until the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act did the U.S. require some employers to provide some employees with job-protected unpaid leave for parenting.
Nearly three decades have passed since the Family and Medical Leave Act was enacted. It is time for the U.S. to take the next step. Because outcomes for child well-being are so clearly demonstrated, a paid parental leave proposal should be designed with child welfare in mind. One policy that could achieve this goal with bipartisan support is a simple, flat-cash benefit covering 18 to 24 weeks of paid parental caregiving. The publicly funded benefit should be sizeable enough—$600 per week per child—that parents are empowered to take time off. According to an analysis I co-authored with Lyman Stone for the Institute for Family Studies, such an approach would ensure that every child’s early life is free of unnecessary material deprivation.
Child-centered parental leave should be universal—not a reward for parents’ work record but an investment in each child’s worth and future.
Rachel Anderson is a resident fellow at the Center for Public Justice and director of Families Valued.
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