Parental Leave Policies: An Essential Ingredient in Early Childhood Education and Care Policies

Abstract

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...

The role of length of maternity leave in supporting mother–child interactions and attachment security among American mothers and their infants

“…In contrast, the U.S. maternity leave policy provided under the Family Leave and Medical Act (FMLA) of 1993 is not universal, applying, for example, only to employers with more than 50 employees (Waldfogel 1999). Nearly half of the workforce is not covered by the act, women are less likely than men to be covered, and single mothers and mothers of low socio-economic status (SES) are even less likely to be covered than married or middleclass mothers (Kamerman 2000). The FMLA policy is for unpaid leave, contrasting with the overwhelming provision of paid maternity leaves policies, not just among OECD countries, but worldwide.…”

“…First, SES is closely related to whether or not a mother is eligible to any leave as covered by the FMLA, as lower SES women are the least likely to be included in the policy because of the FMLA's restrictions (Kamerman 2000). Second, for mothers who are covered, the ability to take advantage of this unpaid leave is highly related to SES and her ability to afford time away from work.…”

“…Hypothesis 3 predicted that longer maternity leaves would be associated with higher levels of quality mother-child interactions, which in turn would be associated with higher levels of attachment security and lower levels of attachment dependency. Since SES is related to the length of maternity leave (Human Rights Watch 2011;Kamerman 2000), this study included maternal SES as a variable in the models.…”

Social Policies, Family Types and Child Outcomes in Selected OECD Countries

“…As is generally recognised, parental leave policies play an important role in attracting women into the labour force and maintaining their attachment to the labour force (Kamerman, 2000). The consequences for children are less well documented.…”

“…Parental leaves also lead to longer periods of breast feeding and less maternal stress (Galtry, 2000). Parental leaves also provide an alternative to expensive (and/or inadequate quality) out-of-home care for infants (Kamerman, 2000). There is also some evidence that generous parental leaves lead to increased father time investment in their children and involvement with their children generally (Gauthier and Jatzius, 1997;Carlsen, 1998;Kamerman and Kahn, 1995).…”