Selena, twenty-seven, pushed a shopping cart full of pasta, rice, tortillas, and other basic food staples that she and her family needed for the coming weeks through a big, bulk grocery store. It was her once a month, major shopping trip. Her son, Anthony, then three years old, was home with her husband. A close friend, Vanessa, joined her to shop that night, and they were bantering back and forth as they walked down the grocery store aisles. Selena was thirty-two weeks pregnant and looked like someone had stuck a balloon under her shirt.
A pain started as a nagging stitch, and she turned to her friend Vanessa and said, “For some reason my stomach is hurting.” Selena wasn’t that worried though, she wasn’t due for at least another six weeks, and it certainly didn’t feel like labor to her. She decided the pain would likely just go away, as many strange pinches and pains do during pregnancy, and continued shopping for her family.
Selena and her husband, James, were excited about their soon-to-be new baby. They had carefully worked out their finances to accommodate a second child. Like 61 percent of American families with children, they both worked.1 Selena and James relied on both of their pay to support their family, and they knew exactly where they stood financially when the new baby arrived. It wasn’t guesswork.
One night Selena and James sat down together, worked the figures of their monthly incomes, and calculated out to the hour how much time they could afford for Selena to take off from work. James was working in construction at the time, and Selena worked in an administrative capacity at a nonprofit organization.
Together they figured out that if Selena didn’t take any paid leave time for prenatal visits or anything else during her pregnancy, then she could use her accrued paid leave from her sick and vacation time for about two and a half weeks of paid leave after the baby was born (which, of course, left her without any paid vacation or sick leave if either she or her children got sick). After those first two weeks, they could afford for Selena to take off another one and a half weeks unpaid, but when that time was up she needed to be back at work bringing home a paycheck.
Selena was better off than many other American women facing similar predicaments. She lives in one of the four out of fifty states (Connecticut, Hawaii, Washington, and Wisconsin) that has laws guaranteeing the flexible use of accrued paid sick or other leave days to care for a new child.2
Yet Selena still shares a fairly common experience with new mothers across America—one of financial difficulties and time stretched too thin with the birth of a child. This experience isn’t as common in other nations. In fact, the United States is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have paid leave other than Australia (which does give a full year of guaranteed unpaid leave to all women, compared with the only twelve weeks of unpaid leave given to those who work for companies with more than fifty employees in the U.S.).3 A full 163 countries give women paid leave with the birth of a child.4 Fathers often get paid leave in other countries as well—forty-five countries give fathers a right to paid parental leave.5
By way of example, our close neighbor to the north, Canada, gives the birth mother fifteen weeks of partial paid leave for physical recovery, and then also gives another thirty-five weeks of partial paid parental leave that has to be taken before the child turns one. These thirty-five weeks of parental leave can be taken by the mother or the father, or can be shared between the two. The pay during the fifty weeks total of leave related to a new child is 55 percent of the average gross salary over the past twenty-six calendar weeks.6 All in all, there are fifty weeks of partially paid leave available for new Canadian parents to spend with their child.
Sweden, with about a year of paid family leave and some time specifically reserved for fathers, is often used as the example of a model policy.7 Not surprisingly, with this support, Ann Crittenden writes in The Price of Motherhood, “Swedish women on average have higher incomes, vis-à-vis men, than women anywhere else in the world.”8 Yes, Sweden has about a full year of paid family leave.
America, on the other hand, generally leaves it up to parents to patch together some type of leave on their own. Some states are starting to give more support to new parents, but only one of our fifty states, California, offers paid family leave. The federal government simply doesn’t offer a paid family leave program at all. A weighty consequence emerges from this lack of family support. Research reveals that a full 25 percent of “poverty spells,” or times when a family’s income slips below what is needed for basic living expenses, begin with the birth of a baby.9
The morning after her grocery-shopping trip Selena still felt the strange pain under her rib cage. Starting to get worried, she called her OB and set a time to come in to check everything out. The first available appointment was at 3 P.M. that day, so Selena worked through the day at her desk.
The pain started getting worse as she made the forty-five minute freeway drive to her OB’s office, by then “it was a constant terrible pain, but it wasn’t coming and going like labor.” She finally made it to her destination, but couldn’t find parking—she didn’t want leave her car in the parking garage because she was worried about the cost of parking adding to her growing stack of bills that were waiting for her at home. So she parked three blocks away and was in tears by the time she reached her OB’s office.
To make a long story short, the OB put Selena on a fetal monitor, found out she really was in labor, and then tried unsuccessfully with several different medications to stop the early labor. Selena’s baby boy, Connor, was born six weeks early the next morning.
Their baby was rushed out of the room and up to the Neonatal Intensive Care unit, Selena’s husband rushed up with him, and Selena found herself alone in a hospital bed realizing that she was going to go home well before her baby. She had a tough decision to make.
After their son stabilized, Selena’s husband James came back down to her room. They had another difficult talk about finances and Selena’s leave from work. They couldn’t afford for her to take more time off than originally planned, but both wanted Selena to have the most time possible to bond with her son. With her son stable in the hospital, but not knowing how long until he could come home, the choice was between Selena taking time off when he was in the hospital or waiting to take time off when the baby was released from the hospital and could come home. “There was no way we could afford for me to take off more than we planned,” recalls Selena.
They made a difficult decision: They decided it would be best if she waited to take time off until the baby came home. So after Selena had the baby on Thursday, she was released from the hospital Friday, and was back at her desk on Monday morning. “It was the hardest two and a half weeks of my life,” she says recalling the ache of being away from her newborn son and the rigorous family schedule at that time.
Her days ran on a complex timetable: She’d get up, drop her older son Anthony off at daycare by 8 A.M., and then she’d go to work, taking regular breaks to pump breast milk for her newborn son. Around 1 P.M. she’d leave work early to go visit her son in the hospital before having to pick up her older son, Anthony, at daycare. Often the family would then go back to the hospital again in the evening after dinner so her husband could spend time with their newborn son as well. “I was in tears every day.”
During those weeks her supervisor and co-workers were very understanding. Selena shares how they handled her situation, “Thankfully my supervisor sent out an e-mail that said, ‘The person that looks like Selena really isn’t her, and she really isn’t here.’ ” This was done so people wouldn’t give Selena new or difficult projects during that time, “I just did easy, busy work like filing and data entry to clock in hours—all those projects you need to do but never have time to complete. That way if I left the next day, I wouldn’t leave any loose ends and I was prepared to leave at a moments notice.”
While Selena’s workplace of about fifteen staff accommodated her needs in every way open to them, they couldn’t afford to offer Selena what she needed most, paid family leave. The fact that in order to make ends meet Selena still had to go to work every day after the premature birth of her son is a dramatic example of the need for a broad paid family leave policy. Selena needed time to focus on her own recovery and that of her family without the worry of financial ruin.
It’s not just Selena’s family that would see such benefits from paid family leave. “Studies show that parental leave results in better prenatal and postnatal care, more intense parental bonding over a child’s lifetime, and lower accident rates in the first year of life. Parental leave policies also increase the likelihood that children will be immunized and, as a result, are associated with lower death rates for infants,” notes a 2005 report published by the National Partnership for Women and Families.10 There is a strong correlation between parental leave entitlements and thriving children—one study found that a year of job-protected paid leave is tied to 25 percent fewer post-neonatal deaths, and those benefits continued forward in the child’s life with 11 percent fewer deaths of children between one and five years old.11 Twenty-five percent fewer deaths is a pretty strong argument.
Finally, after more than two weeks in the hospital, Connor was strong enough to go home. Selena delighted in taking her planned time off—partly using accrued paid sick and vacation time, and partly with unpaid leave. Then, like more than half of all mothers of children under one-year-old,12 and 72 percent of all American mothers, Selena went to work.13
Alfreda, thirty-one, is one of many women facing the overlapping problems of unpaid maternity leave and insufficient childcare options. She loves waking up and walking across her bedroom to see her new son, M’Kai, greet each morning from his crib, “My favorite thing to do with him is to look into his eyes and talk to him because he’s a special baby. I really love when he gets up in the morning—he tries to see what’s new, adjusts to the lighting, and then he starts laughing. He laughs and he smiles really, really hard and gets cheeky—and I think that’s really cute. I’ve determined he’s a morning person. He really likes the morning.”
After a lot of soul searching, Alfreda decided to stay home with her second son for the first several months of his life. Using the unpaid federal Family and Medical Leave Act, she took a leave of absence from her job of the last seven years, and, as her workplace policy allowed, took 240 hours of advance sick leave (essentially six weeks), which leaves Alfreda with a paid leave deficit that will take two years to earn back. This also left Alfreda without any paid sick or vacation leave for those two years, and in a bind if she or either of her two sons gets sick.
Alfreda found that at six weeks she wasn’t ready to go back to work and leave her infant son in the care of others. She decided to stay home and care for him for his early months. In order to do so she had to make the difficult choice between going on welfare and taking out a loan. As of now, she’s planning to take out a loan against her future paychecks and is trimming her budget down to the raw edge of comfort, “I’m cutting back on groceries like bread, eggs, milk, and dairy. Things that cost a lot of money—things that are basically essential.”
“I’m also giving up ‘luxury’ driving or frivolous driving. I know I now have to go straight to my son’s school, pick him up and bring him back home,” says Alfreda. “If I’m visiting a friend in the area, then I’ll ask if I can hang out there until I have to pick up my son,” just so she doesn’t spend the extra gas money.
She’s committed to being a good mother and also to nursing her baby. She says the best thing about “being home with my baby is that I get to bond with him and nurse him. If it wasn’t for me bonding with the baby, seeing his growth, and the different things that interest him, I’d be back at work because realistically I have to go back.”
Her son, M’Kai, nurses ten to twelve times a day, and, unlike her older son who took a bottle easily, absolutely refuses a bottle. “The first time I tried to bottle feed him; he stuck his tongue out to block it. Then every time I tried to put the bottle in he’d move his tongue to stop the bottle. That’s how I knew I’d have trouble.”
Breastfeeding and paid family leave are tied together.14 It can 28 Motherhood Manifesto be quite hard, sometimes bordering on impossible, to regularly provide an infant with breast milk when the mother has to work full-time immediately after delivery. A Harvard report noted this fact, stating, “Research evidence has shown that paid maternal and paternal leave improves children’s health outcomes by making more time available to parents to provide essential care for their children. Paid maternal leave facilitates breastfeeding and reduces the risk of infections. . . . Countries with paid parental leave policies have lower infant mortality and morbidity rates. Paid leave policies also encourage the formation of bonds between parents and children, contributing positively to children’s psychosocial development.”15 In fact, in terms of infant mortality rates, the U.S. tied for thirty-eighth in the world with Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Arab Emirates in 2003.16
Alfreda’s also worried about putting her infant son in childcare, particularly when he rejects the bottle so vigorously. She’s having a difficult time finding an affordable place for him to stay when she goes back to work, although she’s been on several waiting lists for infant childcare centers since she got pregnant. And she’s concerned about how her son will be treated, “There are a lot of people who watch babies whose nerves are bad, and my baby has a piercing cry. So I worry that they will either just let him cry or not be nice. It just really scares me.”
The lack of accessible, affordable, quality infant childcare compounds the problems parents face without paid family leave. Many parents simply have to go back to work to keep their families financially solvent, yet early infant care is often difficult to find and is far more expensive than childcare for older children. In fact, a recent study found a widespread scarcity of infant-toddler childcare in all communities, but particularly in low-income communities, across the nation, and noted that “although finding good-quality infant-toddler childcare can be a critical influence on the well-being of infants and toddlers, finding good-quality infant-toddler childcare can be especially challenging for low-income families.”17
Without access to infant childcare centers (where, again, she’s been on waiting lists since she got pregnant), and without other options, Alfreda’s thinking of leaving her infant son with a friend of her sister’s when she goes back to work, “There’s this one lady that my sister knows. She’s kind of moody, but she’s really good with kids and I might have to use her. But I really don’t want to.” Yet Alfreda can’t live on loans for too long, and she has no choice but to go back to work while her son is still an infant.
Too many American parents must quickly return to work after the birth of a child. Without viable alternatives, parents frequently end up using low quality infant childcare in order to put food on the table. Often these parents worry about their baby’s safety and development. This concern is well-founded as studies show young children have a higher rate of cognitive development in the usually more expensive and inaccessible childcare centers than with less expensive informal in-home care.18 The 30 Motherhood Manifesto outcome of this early lack of support may be felt by this child as she/he goes through school and on into the future.
Christine, a California resident and the sole wage earner in her household, is having a less stressful experience with new parenthood.
At 7:59 A.M. on May 15, 2004, a newborn cry of life pierced a hospital room in San Francisco, California, and Christine became a mother at thirty-three years old: “I was pretty stunned how quickly it all happened.”
Just the day before, Christine had closed the office-building door behind her as she left work at 5 P.M. She thought she had at least three weeks until her baby arrived.
She met her husband for an early evening beach walk along a stone path looking down to a sandy shore—a regular walk for them. The only difference she noticed was that she felt more tired than usual, barely making it two hundred yards down the path before turning back.
They left the beach for an Italian restaurant and Christine remembers relishing the pasta as only someone who’s eaten for two can understand.
Sometime in the middle of the night her water broke. It was a trickle more than a flood, so Christine waited to call her doctor until the morning. After making an 11 A.M. appointment, she called in sick to work. Her husband picked up “the bag,” an accessory Christine thought unnecessary, since her due date was more than three weeks away.
She was wrong. “The doctor took one look at me and sent me right across the street to have a baby,” recalls Christine. The doctor’s office was next to a big red brick hospital, the same one in which Christine was born. And after getting settled into her cozy peach-colored hospital room, complete with comfy chairs and big picture window, Liam was born without complications.
But Christina’s journey into motherhood hadn’t started with as few complications as her son’s delivery. At one point she found herself thirty-two, pregnant, with a husband who had just been laid off. There were points of sheer panic along the way.
Several months earlier, newly wearing maternity clothes, Christine had pushed up from her desk in northern California and taken a short walk down a corridor of cubicles. She’d requested a meeting with the Human Resources Director at her work, and now it was time to sit down face to face.
Fortunately, the Human Resources Director was among the few with an office door that actually closed in the 150-plus company. It could be a private conversation.
“I reached the physical and emotional point where I needed to face the reality of a new baby and get some answers,” says Christine, noting she was starting to feel pretty big and unwieldy. The pressure was on because Christine was the sole wage earner, and, as such, her job provided health insurance and other benefits for the entire family.
In a small neutral-colored office, amidst piles of stacked papers and a general feeling of corporate sterility, Christine’s options were laid out with graphs and charts. First, she found out her company, like many others, didn’t even have a maternity policy. In fact, very few companies do have family leave policies. “A survey of personnel managers, conducted in 2000, found that just 12 percent of companies offered paid maternity leave and just seven percent offered paid paternity leave,” notes a National Partnership for Women and Families report. “Eighty-five percent of respondents reported no maternity or paternity leave benefits.”19
Sharing what she thought after learning her company didn’t have a family leave policy and that the federal Family and Medical Leave Act didn’t offer monetary support, Christine comments, “I was really naïve and shocked that federal family leave wasn’t paid. I feel like everyone is winging it. It feels like every time family leave time comes up, it’s the first time the company faces it. It’s not like, ‘Oh, this is our policy, and these are your options.’ ”
After processing the bad news—the fact that her company didn’t have a maternity policy, and the federal family leave program was unpaid, she felt the good news sink in—she qualified for paid family leave under a new California state law. Christine recalls her feelings at the time, “I was surprised there was so little, and then relieved to hear about the new California paid family leave—since my husband wasn’t working, I was pretty much sick with fear about it for months.”
California is the only state in America with paid family leave, and is one of only five states (along with New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Hawaii) with short-term disability payments that can be used for disability due to pregnancy and childbirth. Both programs in California are paid by employee contributions into a state fund. California’s Paid Family Leave program began July 1, 2004, and employee costs are minimal. For instance, a low-wage worker would pay about $2.25 per month.20 Christine’s son was born with perfect timing to take advantage of the new program.
Between the new California Paid Family Leave program and California short-term physical disability payments, Christine was able to patch together twelve weeks of partial paid leave (six weeks with from the California paid family leave law, and six weeks from California short-term disability payments).
Geographically speaking, Christine was in a good place.
But what if Christine was in one of the other forty-nine states in our nation? She’d be left in the same situation as Selena, having to go right back to work. Or even like Alfreda, using all her paid sick leave, taking out a loan, and then having to go back to work without any banked paid time off. These are not healthy solutions. For example, the repercussions of using all available sick and vacation days can be profound: There won’t be any time off left if the new baby in daycare gets sick. What to do then?
Of the fifty states in our nation, only one has the paid family leave program Christine was able to access. There are two main federal laws that relate to women and childbirth, and neither offers paid leave time: The first is the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which passed in 1978 and made it illegal to discriminate against working women on the basis of pregnancy or childbirth. Prior to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, women were often pushed to leave their jobs when they became pregnant or had a baby. The second main federal law is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which passed in 1993, and grants a female or male employee working at a large company (fifty or more workers) up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave during any twelvemonth period for the following reasons: the birth and care of the newborn child of the employee; placement with the employee of a son or daughter for adoption or foster care; caring for an immediate family member (spouse, child, or parent) with a serious health condition; or taking medical leave when the employee is unable to work because of a serious health condition.
Yet the FMLA doesn’t cover anyone working at a smaller company (less than fifty workers), leaving a huge portion of our population without any federal coverage at all. A mere 46.5 percent of private-sector employees are both covered by and eligible for FMLA due to the eligibility restrictions that limit it to employees of large companies that have worked there at least 1,250 hours per year for at least twelve months.21
For those that do qualify for FMLA, during the unpaid leave the parent retains health benefits and his or her job is guaranteed, but the FMLA doesn’t include provisions for paid leave while parents take time out of the workforce. This leaves millions of parents in a financial bind and ultimately unable to take the uncompensated leave the law allows.
The ability for parents to take leave without fear of losing their job is important. That said, “Paid leave significantly decreases infant mortality, while other leave has no significant effect. This suggests that if leave is provided without adequate payment and job protection, parental leave-taking behavior may not be very responsive. . . . As a result, other leave does not have a significant effect on improving infant health,” notes an Economic Journal report.22 In other words, it’s paid family leave that makes the big difference.
Selena, Alfreda, and Christine’s experiences give texture to the need for national paid family leave. Although the current law helps many, the twelve weeks of unpaid leave is not available toall employees and ignores the very real financial strains most families endure when they are having children. For those with better financial means, the current law allows some comfort that their job will be there after they take some time off to have children. Many families also need the option of taking far more time off than the twelve weeks guaranteed under current law. The current act is a start, not an ending.
Some states are slowly moving forward to increase the help they give new families. A report, Expecting Better: A State-By-State Analysis of Parental Leave Programs, uses ten legislative indicators to rate the types of assistance states give:23
Most of the state columns are woefully blank in the report. In fact, a full nineteen states don’t have any of the above legislation.
Bright spots are showing up across the nation, however, with several states making progress. “There are a lot of different states that are chipping away at the issue—some states have laws where you can use your sick time to take care of your child or family member; some states have lowered the eligibility for using the FMLA to twenty-five employees; and some states are trying to improve on FMLA in other ways,” points out Netsy Firestein, Director of the Labor Project for Working Families. Given those successes, what’s ultimately needed is still a national paid family leave law.
Some companies and organizations are individually trying to find ways to support new parents in the workplace. Selena’s nonprofit workplace is one such place. After Selena’s time home with her premature son was up, she went straight back to work—and she took her newborn son with her.
In an office of fifteen people positioned in cubicles throughout two large rooms that were joined by an enclosed conference room in the center, Selena had a space in the back corner complete with a window and two desks. The utilitarian grey blue décor—desk, cubical walls, carpet—was quickly transformed when a fuzzy cream colored blanket for tummy time was laid over the staid carpeting, an electronic bouncy chair was moved in next to Selena’s desk, and a cozy reclining infant car seat was placed next to the hallway. Her second desk became a changing table. A happy, gurgling baby completed the transformation.
Selena had been in her job for three years when she had Connor. She needed to work in order to bring home money to help keep her family afloat, but she also wanted time with her new baby. “I wanted some time for us to bond, especially since we got such a rocky start.” The studies that report putting newborns in childcare isn’t good for them worried her. Like many new parents, Selena had deeper emotional issues at play as well, “It scared and worried me just to think of leaving him before he was three months old. It made me sad because I didn’t want to give him away, I just got him. I worked very hard for him, and I wanted to have him with me all the time.”
Selena had never been comfortable with the idea of putting her new baby in childcare before he was three months old. Fortunately he could then go to the same trusted childcare provider that watched his older brother. Once he was born her mind was made up. She wanted Connor with her at work.
She recalls, “I asked if bringing Connor to work would be an option before he was born.” Her employer said they could discuss the option after he was born. Then when Connor was born, “I convinced the Executive Director that he had the perfect temperament for this arrangement. I desperately wanted to be with him and was very grateful to be able to spend time with him while earning the money I needed to feed and diaper him,” says Selena.
Her co-workers and supervisor were incredibly helpful. She comments, “It’s an office of all women who love babies.” Every afternoon one of her co-workers would take Connor for a walk around the building, usually at about 2 P.M. Another co-worker was in charge of taking care of him every time Selena had to go to a meeting, and still another co-worker took him for about a half hour every day to play. It was a team effort.
For her part, Selena perfected the art of using a half moonshaped blue Boppy pillow to hold her baby so she could breastfeed and type on her computer keyboard at the same time. At three months old, Connor started going to the childcare provider during the day as planned, and Selena remains employed at the same place now two years later.
This is a heartening example of an organization that found a way for a new parent to work with an infant. Since the United States doesn’t have a structure to support new parents in our society, Selena’s family likely would have been one of the families reflected in the statistic that 25 percent of new “poverty spells” start when a baby is born. Since her workplace stepped up to the plate, Selena did not have to face the excruciating choice of leaving her tiny baby or facing a “poverty spell.”24
Unfortunately, not that many employers can or will offer that kind of flexibility to new parents. Selena’s solution isn’t widely available or possible in all jobs. There’s still a clear need for a national paid family leave program—not just for parents, but for businesses as well.
There are very real negative impacts on businesses due to the lack of a paid family leave policy in the United States. In The Price of Motherhood, Ann Crittenden writes, “With no right to a paid leave, many American mothers who want to stay at home with a new baby simply quit their jobs, and this interruption in employment costs them dearly in terms of lost income.” This turnover in employees cost companies too. Paid family leave is shown to also benefit employers by saving them the costs of recruitment and training due to high employee turnover, and leading to greater job satisfaction which then translates to higher worker productivity.25
In each of the stories shared—that of Selena, Alfreda, and Christine—the edges of other motherhood issues are waiting to take center stage. The need for paid family leave comes at the beginning of a family life that commences with the birth of a daughter or son. As babies grow older, parents need work that allows them to also fulfill their family responsibilities. Flexible work hours, affordable healthcare, quality childcare, and living wages are critical pieces that, along with paid family leave, are all needed in order to help our families flourish. To truly value and support our nations’ children we must provide a solid foundation. Providing paid family leave is the first step.
Currently mothers are punished simply for being mothers— they are forced to make choices no one should have to make by mortgaging their futures to take care of their babies. Babiesrequire a period of intensive love and attention from their caregivers. Parents should be able to choose to provide this care joyfully, not under the threat of financial ruin. These babies are our most basic natural resource. In thirty years, when today’s adults are getting older, these babies will be the economic engine of our nation. We need to be sure our children have been provided with the nurturance required to become strong, intelligent citizens that carry our nation into the future.
Paid family leave is not a lofty idea, but rather a basic structural support we must put in place to ensure the health of our children and to make motherhood compatible with the workplace. We call on the nation, and every state within it, to give American mothers and families this critical support.
Mothers need time to have babies. Giving a mother no choice but to come back to work mere days after the birth of a child or face financial ruin is bad social policy. Society needs to share the cost of bringing new life into the world.
ACTION: Mothers want
- Paid family leave for parents with a new child in the home.
- Short-term disability leave for childbirth recovery comparable in scope to other developed nations.
i. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies/images/report.pdf
ii. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies/images/report.pdf
iii. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies/images/report.pdf
iv http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/asp/gateway.asp?hr=en/ei/types/special.shtml&hs=tyt#Maternity3
v. http://www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/2004/06/inbrief/se0406102n.html
vi. Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood, pages 239–250. Quote p. 248
1. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Employment Characteristics of Families Summary," news release, June 9, 2005, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm.
2. Jodi Grant et al., Expecting Better: A State-by-State Analysis of Parental Leave Programs (Washington, D.C.: National Partnership for Women and Families, 2005), http://www.nationalpartnership.org/portals/p3/library/PaidLeave/Parental-LeaveReportMay05.pdf, 48–49.
3. Jody Heymann et al., The Work, Family, and Equity Index: Where Does the United States Stand Globally? (Boston: Project on Global Working Families, 2004), http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies/images/report.pdf.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, “Employment Insurance (EI) and Maternity, Parental and Sickness Benefits,” http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/asp/gateway.asp?hr=en/ei/types/special.shtml&hs=tyt#Maternity3.
7. In Sweden, according to the European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO), “Parental leave runs for 480 days, of which 390 days are paid at the same rate as for sick pay—i.e. 80 percent of normal pay (up to a ceiling). Parents each have a legal right to take 50 percent of the leave, but one parent can transfer some of their entitlement to the other. However, 60 days of the leave may not be transferred. This part of the leave is called the ‘mother months’ and ‘father months’ respectively.” Annika Berg, “Commission to Examine Parental Leave,” European Industrial Relations Observatory Online, http://www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/2004/06/inbrief/se0406102n.html.
8. Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued (Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 248.
9. Grant et al., Expecting Better, 7.
10. Ibid., 6.
11. Christopher J. Ruhm, “Parental Leave and Child Health” (working paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, May 1998), http://www.nber.org/papers/w6554.
12. Kristin Smith et al., Maternity Leave and Employment Patterns: 1961–1995, Current Population Reports, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, D.C., 2001, http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p70-79.pdf.
13. Barbara Downs, Fertility of American Women: June 2002, Current Population Reports, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, D.C., 2003, http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p20-548.pdf.
14. Ruhm, "Parental Leave and Child Health."
15. Heymann et al., The Work, Family, and Equity Index, 7-8.
16. World Health Organization, The World Health Report 2005: Make Every Mother and Child Count, 182-185, http://www.who.int/whr/2005/annex/annexe2a_en.pdf.
17. Emily Fenichel et al., Partnerships for Quality: Improving Infant-Toddler childcare for Low-Income Families (Princeton, NJ: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., 2002), http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/pdfs/partnership.pdf.
18. Susanna Loeb et al., “Childcare in Poor Communities: Early Learning Effects of Type, Quality, and Stability,” Child Development 75, no. 1 (2004), http://pace.berkeley.edu/Stanford_Child_Dev_Findings.pdf.
19. Grant et al., Expecting Better, 8.
20. Grant et al., Expecting Better, 9.
21. Jane Waldfogel, “Family and Medical Leave: Evidence from the 2000 Surveys,” Monthly Labor Review 124, no. 9 (September 2001), 17–23.
22. Sakiko Tanaka, “Parental Leave and Child Health Across OECD Countries,” Economic Journal 115, no. 501 (2005), 7–28.
23. Grant et al., Expecting Better.
24. Ibid., 7.
25. Heymann et al., The Work, Family, and Equity Index, 8.
26. Smith et al., Maternity Leave and Employment Patterns. Also see Katherin Ross Phillips, Getting Time Off: Access to Leave Among Working Parents (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, 2004), http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/310977_B-57.pdf.
27. Grant et al., Expecting Better, 8.