The Parental Leave Playbook. Sue Campbell
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work. Even if you're not formally employed, you will still find value in thinking through how these touchpoints apply to your transition to parenthood. They are universal.
A Broken System: Parental Leave in the United States
At the time of this writing, most people in the United States do not have access to paid parental leave (in 2020, just 20% of US employees had access to paid family leave through their employer).1 It is a common misconception that the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides paid leave. FMLA only allows for unpaid job protection for a specific period of time, if an employee meets certain criteria. It is estimated only 56% of the workforce is eligible for FMLA, which means the other 44% receive neither job protection nor pay.2 Depending on your state, you may have paid leave through a state and/or local law. You also may be lucky enough to have an employer who voluntarily provides paid parental leave, which is a growing and welcome trend, especially among large companies. The companies I work with are forward-thinking and supportive of their employees, but for most parents in the US, welcoming a child has a serious financial impact.
This is not a policy book and I won't go deeply into policy, but I will cover a few basics in the next section so that you are not caught off guard by anything you run up against. I've been reading the tea leaves on this issue for many years. I believe we are very close to federal legislation that will finally address this grievous oversight in our social safety net and economic infrastructure and help us catch up to almost every other country in the world. However, even with such long-overdue legislation, many challenges will remain—most of them related to perceptions and practices, not policies.
Note: Now is not the time for you to feel responsible for fixing our enormously flawed system (or to feel overwhelmed by it). Now is the time for you to focus inward on what you and your family need and fill your cup. In nourishing yourself in this way, you will ensure you come to the other side of your transition in a position of strength and awareness. Along the way, your success will help make it better for those who come next as, one family at a time, we heal our broken system.
When We Get Parental Leave Wrong
When we fail to support working parents with good policies and practices, the detrimental ripple effect is vast, yet we often fail to realize how profound it is because this is simply the way we do things in this country. As depressing as it may be, it is important for you to have a high-level understanding of how this systemic failure to properly support the parental leave transition affects us all.
Working Families Suffer
As if it were not enough that most parents lose wages while staying home to bond with a new child, many families who welcome a child by giving birth face exorbitant health care costs and inadequate health insurance. Big hospital bills hit just when paychecks shrink or temporarily disappear.
New parents are also at risk for mental health challenges during this period, regardless of their path to parenthood (birth, adoption, surrogacy, etc.). Many parents suffer in silence without ever getting proper care, fearing stigma or even that their children will be taken from them if they confess to a serious struggle.
When it is time to go back to work, they often need to seek and pay for infant childcare (and in many cases, care for older children), the average costs of which range from $9,000 to $24,000 per child per year for in-center care, depending on where you live.3 The cost to hire a private nanny can run even higher.
High childcare expenses often drive one parent to leave the workforce—or quit a more formal career in favor of work in the gig economy, which provides more flexibility but fewer (if any) benefits and often lower wages. In two-parent heteronormative relationships, most of the time, it is the mothers who stay home and care for the children, both because of caregiving stereotypes and because they often earn less. As a result, our workplaces and society miss out on their talent, and these women lose out on advancement opportunities, benefits, retirement savings, and more. The coronavirus pandemic that began in 2020 put even more pressure on working families, particularly mothers. In fact, according to the National Women's Law Center, between February 2020 and January 2021, more than 2.3 million women, compared to nearly 1.8 million men, were pushed out of the labor force, meaning they were not working or looking for work.4 That's over a half million more women than men.
These are tough circumstances by any measure, and many families face additional challenges if fertility, pregnancy, or birth are complicated and if mom or baby end up having medical issues. Some parents who have waited until their late thirties or early forties to have children may also join the “sandwich generation,” caring for their aging parents while also caring for young children and trying to work.
In Chapter 16 we will cover additional challenges such as those faced by single parents, those who belong to underrepresented and marginalized communities, LGBTQ+ parents, and more.
Managers Are Left to Fend for Themselves
Parents aren't the only ones affected by the policy and practice vacuum concerning parental leave. Managers and supervisors face serious challenges when one of their team members is planning to welcome a new child. Most companies lack a transparent process to let employees know what benefits are available to them, much less a standardized procedure to help them prepare to hand off their duties and pick them back up when they return. Managers are often left without resources to figure out how to juggle the workload and the tools needed to provide support to the new parent and cover team.
Furthermore, managers are not trained in what to say and how to say it. Many are afraid to say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing and sparking hurt feelings—or worse, a gender or pregnancy discrimination lawsuit. This moment could be a powerful opportunity to increase team trust and communication, provide support to new parents (thus boosting employee loyalty and retention), and grow junior staff members' skills during the coverage period. Instead, it is often handled so badly that it has all the opposite effects: communication fails, morale dips, and people quit.
Companies Are Expected to Do the Work of Society
When I decided to dedicate my career to helping parents through this transition, I was very thoughtful about the most efficient way to do it. The truth is that this is not parents' problem to solve. It's a systemic problem. One which today's companies are in a unique position to fix—and benefit from its solution. In part because the effort for a paid leave law was already well established and given my area of expertise in organizational development and executive coaching, I decided to focus the bulk of my efforts on companies, managers, and working parents. For many of us, financial stability and even self-esteem depend on gainful employment. A good boss can make or break the parental leave experience. (If you haven't yet heard someone say you've won or lost “the boss lottery,” you will.)
I wanted to help companies understand the advantages for them in being supportive during this major life transition: an edge over their competitors when it comes to recruitment, better retention, increased growth of their female leadership pipeline, improved morale and productivity for working parents, and improved risk management, to name a few. Too many companies mistakenly categorize parental leave as a one-way “benefit,” when in reality it needs to be seen as a strategic opportunity not to be missed for the whole organization.
Increasingly, leaders within organizations are coming around to this perspective. Starting in 2015 we began to see a spate of major US companies announcing