Parental leaves are employment-related policies that were first enacted as maternity policies more than a century ago to protect the physical health of working women at the time of childbirth. Child rearing, parental, and paternity leaves were developed more recently, in response to the needs of working women (and parents), but also out of concern for child well-being. A European Union (EU) directive mandating a paid 14 week maternity leave was adopted as a health and safety measure in 1992 and a directive mandating a three-month parental leave was enacted in 1998.• The major trend in the 1980s and 1990s has been to extend the leave policy to create a real alternative to out-of home-infant care and to make it a stronger instrument of gender equity.• Job-protected leaves for childbirth have become the policy norm in almost all industrialized countries, paid for through sickness (temporary disability) benefits, unemployment or family allowance systems, or as a separate social insurance benefit.• Cross-nationally these policies vary in eligibility criteria, leave duration, benefit level, and take-up. Europe is creating a new standard, with parental leaves becoming increasingly normative and the leave increasingly able to substitute for out-of-home care if the parents wish.• The United States is alone among the advanced industrialized countries in the briefness of its statutory leave and among the very few countries with an unpaid leave.• The critical policy difference cross-nationally is philosophical, and has to do with the extent to which the policy is designed to • support family work and child rearing and to create an incentive for women to leave the labor force when children are very young; or • facilitate women's work outside the home and help reconcile work and family life, by protecting and promoting the well-being of children while their parent(s) are in the labor force.• Policies covering about a year of fully job-protected leave and targeted on parents with strong prior labor force attachment, with benefits covering close to full wage replacements, and with a guaranteed place for a child in good quality, affordable, out-of-home care appear to be achieving both support for "parental choice" and support for child well-being.• Policies providing more extensive leaves, with low level benefits, limited job protection, and with insufficient places for toddlers in care, seem to be creating an incentive for women (in particular, wives) to leave the workforce and remain at home. A key issue is the duration of the leave and the level of the benefit.• Research suggests that there have been no negative consequences of the policies for women or for employers where short and intermediate term leaves are concerned; but there may be negative consequences for women who take extended leaves (e.g. three years) in particular, if they take multiple sequential leaves.• The research on consequences for children is much more limited but there do appear to have been some positive impacts. As a result, child well-being is increasi...
1 Increased attention to early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been observed in all the industrialized countries but our focus here is on a current picture of ECEC in the United States (U.S.). Early childhood education and care (ECEC) in the U.S. includes a wide range of part-day, full-school-day, and full-workday programs, under educational, social welfare, and commercial auspices, funded and delivered
European countries have a long history of providing home health visiting services. These services contrast in many ways with the services of those programs in the United States described by Douglas Powell in this journal issue. Most notably, the European programs are typically universal in that they are offered to all families. In describing the European programs, Sheila Kamerman and Alfred Kahn give special focus to programs in Denmark and Great Britain. Universal home health visiting has been in place in these countries for decades and is widely accepted as a valuable and effective service, although formal research on its effectiveness has been limited. The authors conclude that home health visiting programs have been successful, in part, because these countries have a comprehensive maternal and child health system (both to finance and to deliver services), and home visiting is well integrated into this broader system of care and support for all families.
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