The United States ranks dead last in the world in terms of the support that it gives new
parents after having a baby.
It’s just fact.
Of the top 18 economies in the world, the United States is the only country that does
not allow for any paid leave at all.
So we do have unpaid leave, which is a little bit of a misnomer.
People think, “Oh, well you can get parental leave.
If you’re a dad or a mom you can take time.”
Well, you can if you can afford it.
First of all, only 56 percent of American workers qualify for FMLA because of the stipulations.
You have to be at a company that has 50 employees.
You have to have worked full time for a year.
You have to be working within a certain radius of your company’s home base.
So that automatically disqualifies a lot of people.
But then when you look at who can actually afford to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave per
child, the numbers go down even further.
And what you end up with is that 25 percent of new American mothers go back to work less
than two weeks after having had a baby, which is just so markedly different from how it
is in the rest of the world.
And I think a lot of people think, erroneously, that it would be really costly for our country
to have some sort of paid leave program, but when you look at the other top performing
economies in the world, these other countries that have—first of all, they have parity
between moms and dads.
They have the same leave for adoptive parents.
They have all kinds of things that just make this about actually helping produce the next
generation in a way that will make that generation go on to also support the economy.
So in Norway—Norway is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world.
Wonderful.
That makes sense.
They have almost a year of paid leave.
Moms and dads are allowed to share it.
It sounds great.
But when you look at the economy, they are also the top producing—their GDP is the
highest per capita of any top economic country in the world.
It’s kind of amazing.
And on top of that, they have more moms who work than any country in the world.
They also have more moms who work full time, which is a really important distinction.
It’s not just that they have, you know, mothers really involved in the workplace.
They have mothers who are REALLY involved in the workplace, are also incredibly happy,
have also taken this time away from their jobs.
And somehow the economy is still moving forward at a good clip.
This is so far away from what we have in the United States, it’s almost—it’s sad,
but it’s almost laughable
The women I interviewed told me that they felt better, kind of more back to normal physically
at about the 5.5-month mark after having a baby.
And I was careful to define that as not necessarily back in your pre-pregnancy jeans, that’s
not what I meant.
It’s really more about feeling comfortable in your skin.
So that’s the 5.5 month mark on average for all these women.
And these were women who had all approaches to career and motherhood.
There were single moms, adoptive moms, there were mothers who worked in hourly wage working
jobs and more professional jobs, really as broad a spectrum of approaches as I could
find.
These women reported feeling back to normal physically after 5.5 months.
Emotionally, it was actually a little longer, it was 5.8 months, which is really interesting
because when you look at the science of what a good parental leave looks like, it is six
months of paid leave because, according to the research that's been done, six months
is the point at which a mother is much less likely to suffer from a postpartum mood disorder
or anxiety disorder.
That is also: six months of paid leave is the protective amount for baby’s health.
And babies who have had mothers who have been able to take that amount of leave paid are
much more likely to be vaccinated on time, are actually less likely to have ear infections
and respiratory infections, it’s been shown—which sounds really specific, but it is actually
due to their mother’s ability to breastfeed longer which—and I’m very much of a “fed
is best” kind of person, however you feed your baby, great, I just want you to be able
to make the choices that are best for you.
So basically all of the science shows that it takes at least six months to start really
feeling normal again.
And that’s because you are hormonal.
Your body has been through the most enormous change any body could go through, and yet
you are expected to be back on the job just the way you were before.
So yes, unfortunately, we—the ‘we’ is not me, the ‘we’ is our greater society
and culture—undervalues parents in the workplace, particularly moms.