👋Welcome to Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, engaging interviews with people doing important work, and interesting takes on maternal health and early childhood development issues.
Paid family leave enables parents time to develop the nurturing relationships that are crucial to their children’s healthy brain development. It works by providing wage replacement for people who take time away from work to bond with a newborn, newly adopted, or newly fostered child — or to care for a loved one who is ill or injured, or recover from a long-term personal health issue.
Unfortunately, unlike other countries around the world, the US has no national paid family leave policy. It’s up to local governments, states, and individual employers to establish their own programs. The result is a patchwork of policies with benefits less accessible to people of color and low-wage workers.
Read on and click the links to go deeper.
1. Paid family leave sets up families for success
The first 2 years of life are a crucial developmental period with lasting impact on children’s physical, emotional, and social wellbeing. It’s a time when infants form their first bonds with parents or caregivers. Paid family leave enables families to get the time and space to adjust to life with a newborn baby and build strong connections  — without having to juggle work and family. Paid family leave is associated with such positive results as:
- Financial stability for families
- Lower infant mortality rates
- Increased well-child visits and immunization rates
- Lower levels of postpartum depression and improved infant attachment
- Increased breastfeeding rate and duration
Paid family leave also helps mothers physically recover from childbirth and is associated with improved mental health outcomes for mothers and fathers.
It’s good for employers too: Workers with access to paid leave are less likely to quit their jobs and more likely to return to work for the same employer.
But access remains limited and disparities exist: Workers not covered by state or local policies must rely on employers for paid leave. But only 23% of private sector workers have access to employer-supplied paid family leave. So, many face the no-win choice of time off vs. continuing to work. For those in low-wage or part-time jobs, paid family leave is even less available.
- Among those in the bottom 25% of wages, only 12% had access to paid family leave benefits in 2021.
- Only 11% of part-time workers had access to paid family leave.
A growing interest: To date, 10 states and the District of Columbia have enacted paid family leave, with 11 states planning to join the ranks. Almost 82% of Americans support a national paid leave policy.
- Following California, New Jersey became the second state in the nation to implement a state paid family leave policy in 2009. Through New Jersey’s Family Leave Insurance program, workers contribute a small amount into a fund that provides a portion of pay for up 12 weeks’ leave.
“Dadvocate” on the frontlines: Among his many ventures, Alexis Ohanian, Reddit cofounder and husband of tennis superstar Serena Williams, is a strong advocate for paid family leave. Reflecting on his experience with fatherhood, Alexis shared, “Paternity leave is how I got confident being around kids because I got to spend that time learning and making mistakes and figuring it out.” ❤️
2. How to improve family leave
We spoke with Debra Lancaster, executive director of the Rutgers University Center for Women and Work (CWW), about the need to increase awareness about the availability of paid family leave. In 2021, CWW released a report that discovered issues that need to be addressed, such as:
- Employers — especially small businesses — inadequately explaining family leave to their employees
- An overly complex application process for users of family leave
- Long delays in receiving payments
While family leave policies offer many benefits to children and families, implementing those policies is a challenge.
“It’s important for states to design policy that’s user-centered and easily understood,” Debra says. “We need to make sure there’s no administrative burden for the leave taker and no difficultly receiving their benefits. We need to make sure information about family leave is written in various languages and that workers with questions can get answers. We also need the wage replacement level to be high enough so all workers can benefit.”
Increasing access through public policies: “It’s important to have statewide family leave policies because leaving it up to individual employers can mean small and midsize businesses opt out,” Debra says. “In New Jersey, family leave is funded through small deductions from employees’ pay. So, there’s no obligation for employers to foot the bill. This way everyone has baseline access to paid family leave.”
The universal need for paid family leave: “If you’re an employer and you have employees, then you have caregivers,” Debra shares. “Employees have children. They have aging parents. Spouses get sick. Employees have aunts and sisters and brothers and people in their lives who are like family and who may one day require care while recovering from an illness, a mental health crisis, or an abusive relationship. People are not just employees. They have lives outside the workplace, and care is a part of that. It’s a forward way of thinking for employers to embrace this and make it work in their workplaces.”
For more information on how New Jersey can strengthen its paid family leave program, read Debra’s op-ed.
3. What we’re reading 📖
Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and author of New York Times bestseller Brave, Not Perfect, tackles the unequal burdens working mothers face in her new book, Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It’s Different Than You Think).
As Reshma shares in a Good Morning America interview, “I realized the hard way that having it all was really a euphemism for doing it all, that we can’t just color code our calendar and get a mentor and take another leadership course. We have to stop trying to fix the woman and fix the system.”
In her book, Reshma urges policymakers and businesses to adopt key strategies to meet the needs of working mothers, including:
- Affordable childcare
- Paid family leave
- Flexible work schedules
Combining powerful data and her own struggles trying to balance work life and motherhood, Pay Up challenges the status quo — demanding a more equitable and manageable future for working mothers.
4. The roundup
Learn about upcoming events, new funding opportunities, and jobs in maternal and infant health and early childhood:
- Decreasing C-section rates in New Jersey: As a state with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country, New Jersey has made a large commitment to improving maternal and child health outcomes and addressing health equity. According to a recent NJ Spotlight article, these investments are starting to pay off. Preliminary 2021 data shows an outstanding 27.8% decrease in C-sections in New Jersey. 🎉
- Early relationships and healthy childhood development: Join the Burke Foundation and our partners for the 2022 Early Relational Health Summit on May 11. Register to hear the latest research and initiatives promoting positive child-caregiver relationships.
- A new initiative to support infants and their families: The recently launched Equity Initiative from the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center will provide guidance to states on how to best implement state-level policies that promote equity and address racial disparities.
Join a team dedicated to serving the needs of communities: The GreenLight Fund Greater Newark team is looking for a program associate. Apply now to open up opportunities for inclusive prosperity in Newark.