Best News: The United States is the only industrialized country without a law guaranteeing paid maternity leave to new mothers: Only 12% of workers have access to paid leave through their employer

No family left behind

America's current maternity policy has nothing to do with families and everything to do with politics.

No family left behind

America's current maternity policy has nothing to do with families and everything to do with politics.

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Seconds after my daughter was born a nurse placed her tiny pulsing body on my chest. The sight captivated me, and as she lay there I thought of nothing else but the marvel of her new life.

In the days that followed, the complicated and busy world came into view again, and I began to hear the inevitable ticking of time. In 12 weeks, I would somehow have to find the courage to ignore the hormones that primed my body and mind for complete devotion. I would have to leave this helpless being, my first child, and return to work.

I'd taken for granted that 12 weeks of leave is a standard benchmark, thanks to the Family and Medical Leave Act, which requires companies of a certain size to give employees that much unpaid leave in the event of childbirth or adoption. But I couldn't explain how we arrived at that number. Surely it must be based on the recommendations of child development experts, or reflect the difficulty of caring for a three-month-old baby, or even take into consideration the physical recovery after childbirth.

It turns out that none of these things is true. Indeed, the amount of time American women (and men) are given to care for a newborn is based on nothing but decades-old politics. As the president and Congress look to expand paid parental leave for workers, that number remains incontrovertible despite evidence that longer leave can be better for families.

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If things had gone the way Patricia Schroeder planned, every American woman would get at least six months off after the birth or adoption of a baby.

When the former Democratic congresswoman gave birth to her son and daughter, in 1966 and 1970, her employer didn't offer any maternity leave at all. One day she was pregnant and employed, and the next she had a baby but no job. "It was just assumed you were going to quit," she said. "They kind of counted you out at that point."

That experience, in part, motivated her to sponsor the FMLA in the House of Representatives. She began with ambitious plans. After consulting T. Berry Brazelton, the pediatrician and child development expert, Schroeder felt six months was optimal for exclusive breastfeeding and parent-child bonding.

Her original bill proposed six months for mothers and time off for fathers as well as a pilot for paid leave. But the legislation stalled and that number quickly seemed out of reach under President Ronald Reagan and with a Republican-controlled Senate. To attract co-sponsors and votes, Schroeder reintroduced the bill with four months of job-protected leave. It fell far short of the generous paid leave offered in European countries, but was revolutionary for American policy-making. The whittling, however, had just begun.

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It absolutely was a political process to reach the final number.

Patricia Cole, director of government relations for Zero to Three

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The Chamber of Commerce and other business lobbies opposed the legislation, and some politicians claimed it would destroy American companies. By the time the bill passed nine years later — after two vetoes by President George H.W. Bush — the bill applied only to companies with 50 employees or more and Congress had reduced the number to 12 unpaid weeks.

During that time, Zero to Three, a nonprofit child development organization founded by Brazelton and other leading experts, recommended a minimum of six months, if not a year.

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Mashable composite, Christina Ascani

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"It absolutely was a political process to reach the final number," said Patricia Cole, director of government relations for Zero to Three and a former Congressional staffer in the 1990s. "It was not determined by science, but political realities and negotiations."

Schroeder viewed the bill's passage as a first step; she expected it to eventually include longer, paid leave and apply to smaller companies. When Congress invited her to celebrate the bill's 20th anniversary in 2013, she refused to attend. "What's to celebrate?" she said. "You haven't expanded it at all."

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The United States is the only industrialized country without a law guaranteeing paid maternity leave to new mothers. Only 12% of workers have access to paid leave through their employer, and I am one of those fortunate employees. The 12-weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave the U.S. does offer, while better than nothing, only covers 59% of U.S. workers, though nearly half of those eligible don't take leave for financial reasons, according to the results of a 2012 Department of Labor survey.

Here's another way to put it: Two in five American women of childbearing age do not qualify for job-protected leave under the FMLA, according to a Center for Economic and Policy Research report. This includes the part-time cashier or fast-food worker who doesn't log the necessary 1,250 hours in a year to be eligible for FMLA leave. It includes the waitress at a family-owned restaurant that employs fewer than 50 staff. It includes the full-time worker at a big retail chain who hasn't yet been employed by the company for a year. While you might expect each of these women to receive some kind of maternity leave, they have no legal right to it.

In the first three months of life, babies barely emerge from a cocoon-like state.

This isn't the case elsewhere in the world. A 2013 Pew Research Center report that analyzed the policies of 38 countries found that the median amount of fully-paid time off for new mothers is five to six months. Many countries offer even more time. Swedish parents receive 480 days of paid leave. German parents are entitled to as many as 14 paid months. French women get at least 16 weeks of fully paid leave and can request a few years of leave from their employer. My own UK-based colleague, Amy-Mae Elliott, took nearly a year off to be with her daughter. The first 39 weeks of her leave were partially paid. When we discussed the U.S. policy, she told me returning to work after 12 weeks seemed impossible.

There's a very good reason for that. In the first three months of life, babies barely emerge from a cocoon-like state. They must eat every two hours if not more. They must be bounced, rocked or nursed to sleep for longer than their nap actually lasts. For parents the sleep deprivation is like a dense fog, enveloping you in a single mental and sensory experience: exhaustion.

At six to eight weeks, babies reach what's called peak fussiness. My daughter thrashed and wailed for hours at a time at night while I struggled to stay awake and soothe her. That phase convinced me that 12 weeks is not nearly enough time to fully absorb the demands of parenthood. I wasn't alone, either. Several of the new mothers I met felt anxious and depressed about returning to work at three months; some returned part-time or even quit.

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If three months is a marker of anything, it's when biology begins to organize the chaos. Babies often begin sleeping longer at night. They become social, even smiley, and the fussy crying diminishes. The quirks of breastfeeding have mostly given way to a seamless routine.

If that sounds like the perfect time to return to a job, Dr. Michael Yogman, a pediatrician and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health, has a different point of view.

"You could argue that just as parents have been through the hardest part of dealing with their own baby blues, sleepless nights, fatigue, getting nursing going and [colic], what do we do?" Yogman said. "We send them back to work."

He advises parents to prolong their leave if possible. This gives them an opportunity to enjoy this more playful, social time with their baby. Yogman is careful to note that returning to work earlier doesn't jeopardize the developing bond between a baby and parent, particularly when an infant receives high-quality childcare.

"The argument is not so much what's the best time to go back to work — that leaves parents holding the bag in terms of guilt," Yogman said. "What probably makes more sense is to think about how can we support them if and when they have to make that transition back to work."

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There are no randomized trials that compare different lengths of leave, because randomly pairing babies with mothers would not be feasible or ethical. Research, though, shows longer periods can be beneficial.

Babies whose mothers take more time are more likely to go to regular doctor's checkups and receive immunizations. They are also more likely to be breastfed, which helps a baby develop immunity to dangerous and potentially deadly infections. Babies that receive breast milk from a bottle also get immunity, though if a mother can't pump at work, her supply will drop and she won't be able to breastfeed any longer.

In California, the average length of leave doubled to nearly seven weeks following the introduction of a state-based paid leave program, and the median duration of breastfeeding doubled for mothers who participated.

Longer leaves may also be good for a mother's mental health. A 2013 study of more than 800 mothers found that a longer leave of up to six months lowered the risk of postpartum depression.

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Mashable composite, Christina Ascani

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Despite the evidence that the length of leave is important for newborn and maternal health, the 12-week timeline remains unimpeachable. The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, a bill sponsored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y), would create a federal insurance program partly for parents caring for a new child. It would provide up to 12 weeks of leave. When President Obama recently issued an administrative memorandum requiring that federal workers have the option to use six weeks of paid sick days for compensated parental leave, he cast the move as an attempt to make the federal government a model employer.

"The FMLA is a great example of where public policy does in fact influence business practice," said Lisa Horn, director of Congressional affairs for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). "Twelve weeks has been around as long as FMLA. That has become the standard."

Companies like Facebook, Google and YouTube, which offer paid leave of four months or more, are exceptions, Horn said. The average maximum job-guaranteed leave for new mothers, according to a recent SHRM and Families and Work Institute survey of more than 1,000 companies, was 13.8 weeks in 2014, a one-week decrease since 2008.

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SHRM, which opposed the FMLA legislation in the 1980s, remains opposed to "rigid, federal mandates," Horn said. The government, she said, should instead encourage employers to offer such benefits. Horn added that the 12-week requirement may actually lead companies to scale back more generous benefits.

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The bottom line is that in the U.S. we have this weird attitude that having a baby is some private frolic like deciding to hang glide.

Joan Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law

Skeptics of longer leaves argue that they harm women economically when employers pass over female candidates for jobs, fearing that they'll drop out of the workforce upon becoming a mother. This is a real unintended consequence, but Joan C. Williams, founding director of the Center for WorkLife Law at University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said that there must be a "sweet spot" between 12 weeks and more than a year.

Yet, she also thinks changing the length of leave in the current political and cultural climate is not feasible: "The bottom line is that in the U.S. we have this weird attitude that having a baby is some private frolic like deciding to hang glide. And if you make that choice, you shouldn't impose the cost on others. Other countries think of this differently and see it as raising the next generation rather than just another consumer choice."

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As the end of my maternity leave neared, I felt heartbroken and lucky. I couldn't fathom missing my daughter's wide smiles and efforts to grasp her plush monkey. She was just beginning to blossom and I wouldn't be there to watch it unfold. But I was also fortunate: She would be with her father for six weeks while he took vacation and paternity leave. After that she would be with a caregiver I trusted. This scenario is a profound privilege in American motherhood. As Patricia Schroeder told me, paid maternity leave is really an upper-middle class benefit.

Still, when I returned to work, I quickly understood the challenges of a 12-week leave. I want to breastfeed my daughter exclusively for the recommended minimum of six months, but in order to maintain my supply for her, I must pump four times a day. It's a disrupting and exhausting task.

I leave the office early so that I can nurse her at night, and I work on my commute, and again after she falls asleep. She still wakes a few times at night, so when I rise in the morning, the longest stretch of sleep I've had is about three hours. At six months she'll be ready to sleep overnight without needing additional calories.

The sacrifices I make for my daughter are in many ways a gift of parenthood. I am doing what is necessary to ensure that she thrives. Yet, I imagine similar and harder sacrifices multiplied across millions of households where new mothers may not have had any leave at all—much less 12 weeks. I think about the mother not protected by FMLA who returns to work at six weeks and comes home to a red-faced, screaming baby who will carry on like that until well into the night. Or the mother who has a cesarean section and must report back before the incision heals. Or even the mother who desperately wants to spend more time with her child, but cannot without losing her job.

American women are meant to be grateful for what we do have — even if it's a pittance by international standards.

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American women are meant to be grateful for what we do have—even if it's a pittance by international standards. Of course, I am grateful, but I also wonder how politics poisoned this country's leave policy long ago and turned an arbitrary number into a force that rules our lives and families.

Vicki Shabo, vice president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, the nonprofit organization that originally drafted the FMLA, is hopeful that the national attention to paid leave will pressure elected officials to address the issue.

"For a nation whose leaders so often talk about valuing families, we do so little to reflect quote-unquote family values in our policies," she said. "Part of it is the sense that these are individual struggles that families need to deal with on their own. That's really a myth. Everybody is struggling with these challenges."

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http://ift.tt/1GUOzS2 The United States is the only industrialized country without a law guaranteeing paid maternity leave to new mothers: Only 12% of workers have access to paid leave through their employer via top scoring links : news http://ift.tt/1yVexQh