tend to go on to be more involved in their kids’ lives, and their partnerships tend to be more stable. “This sets up a developmental trajectory for both parents and children,” Kathleen Gerson, a sociologist at NYU, told me. Fathers “develop stronger, longer-term ties to their children, and parents see parenting as a more collaborative and shared endeavor.”Third, parental leave helps families financially.
Clearly, implementing a policy that captures some of these benefits is possible, even for countries with far less wealth than the United States has. When I asked several experts what they thought was behind America’s unique lack of paid leave, some brought up the country’s low rates of union membership and general deference to employers’ desires.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the four weeks of leave currently under consideration is, by global standards, paltry. In an interview, Vicki Shabo, a senior fellow at the left-leaning think tank New America, called it “a very American period of time”: Four weeks is less time than it typically takes to recover from birth, and is far less than, which are about seven months of paid leave for mothers and four months for fathers in the countries that provide it.
Despite America’s historically underwhelming family policies, some of the experts I spoke with looked back on the past few decades with some optimism. Shabo said that when she started focusing on these issues in 2010, only two states had paid-leave programs. Now nine states and the District of Columbia do, and she expects that even if family leave is cut from the congressional bill, more states will put their own policies in place.
Gerson, the NYU sociologist, has been researching families and work since she was a grad student in the 1970s. “One major shift that we now take for granted is that we are no longer arguing about whether or not mothers should work—that was the dominant debate in the late 20th century,” she said. Now the debate is over how to support working families. “I find that very heartening,” Gerson told me. “I’m optimistic about the long run, and that helps me deal with the short-run setbacks.
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