The case for national paid maternity leave | Hacker News Reader

The case for national paid maternity leave

scopeblog.stanford.edu

168 pointschmaynard252 comments

The study seems to confirm the economic benefits associated with paid parental leave.

> On the flip side, some studies have shown less positive effects, such as encouragement of employer bias against women of childbearing age in lower-paying or part-time jobs.

It makes 0 sense to not have paid parental leave by law. Government assistance in the form of medicare assistance etc. should be provided to lower income parents or those that don't have access to employer sponsored healthcare. Apart from the economic and ethical argument, if we want the next generation of Americans to have happy, healthy childhoods, it seems imperative to provide as much assistance as possible to enable that environment.

i live in a country with paid parental leave and have heard second-hand stories of employer bias against women in childbearing age precisely because women in childbearing age got employed and promptly got pregnant.

for the record i'm for this kind of social assistance because the alternative sounds downright barbaric.

Yes it happens. But why punish 100% of potential beneficiaries for what maybe 1-5% of them might do. Just include the cost of abuse in the projections and deal with it. That's how every system works. Every system gets abused.

One example: credit cards - there's plenty of fraud there, but we somehow manage to deal with it and make the system work regardless.

Exactly.. really hate the attitude of "oh well someone might abuse it so let's just screw everyone instead"

There is no abuse involved. You employ a young woman, and in a year she gives birth and is out for a year or two. Nothing wrong with that, and many businesses with large employee turnover won’t care, but other businesses, especially small ones, which require significant training for company-specific processes, or which have small pool of candidates, will be very unhappy about the fact that now they have to find and train a temporary replacement.

We already have a very similar situation with respect to hiring military reservists. It seems like we could use that data to see if there's really a big enough problem to worry about.

Anecdotally, I've never met someone in the reserves who had a hard time finding a job.

Do the military reservists have to disclose to potential employers that they are reservists? How often the reservists actually called for service? This is an interesting point, and I'm asking because I have no clue about the realities the military reservists face.

There's no requirement to disclose during an interview, but most people I know depended on their time in the reserves/active duty pretty heavily on their resume, so I'd guess it was pretty rare for an employer to not know or at least suspect.

Also they have have leave to train for 2 weeks per year, so the employer would need to know at some point.

As for chances of being deployed, in the last decade it was probably a good bit higher than the chance that a reproductive age woman gets pregnant for a given time period.

They can also end up deployed for longer than most countries paid maternity leave lasts.

And I take it that when they are deployed, their employers are in some way required to guarantee them employment when they return?

That is correct.

> But why punish 100% of potential beneficiaries for what maybe 1-5% of them might do.

Because employers, at least in the USA, believe they have a right to nearly of their employees' time on or off the clock, and a right to exert some control over their employees' personal lives and even political choices. Enjoyment of this control is part of why people become employers or managers.

A great example of why not just maternity leave (per the link) but parental leave broadly is a good idea. And why both parents need to take it. Otherwise it will be used by some as an excuse to discriminate against birth parents.

Of course there are many other benefits to both parents taking leave, including that studies have shown that non birth parents who take leave tend to be more involved in parenting long term. Also, it’s hugely rewarding emotionally!

> And why both parents need to take it

I think this is key to addressing discrimination (simply making discrimination illegal is insufficient because discrimination is so difficult to prove); however, getting both genders to take it in roughly equal proportion is probably nearly as difficult, at least apart from mandatory leave, which would be authoritarian and awful.

EDIT: Genuinely curious: why the downvotes? Do people not believe that taking leave in equal proportions is necessary to combat discrimination? Or do they think that it is easy to make people do this ethically? Surely no one thinks we should force people to take leave against their will?

You don’t support forcing men to take paternity leave. Many people do. That’s why you’re being downvoted.

People support _forcing_ parents to take {ma,pa}ternity leave? I am skeptical, as this is a position I have never ever heard of before.

As a parent, I can see why one could advocate for equal (+generous) paid parental leave (disclaimer: I support that idea), but I've never heard (nor would I understand) the idea that one should be forced to _take_ such leave.

If you’ve just given birth do you want women like Sheryl Sandberg to be allowed, who take three days or a week off and then are back at the office? Or do you want everyone to compete on a more level playing field, where everyone must take three months off? Because those for whom family comes second to work will get promoted faster anyway but if you let them work even more the advantages just compound.

For an example of the Harrison Bergeron attitude see

https://twitter.com/hoovergreen/status/1258070856745529344?s...

https://twitter.com/r_rusha/status/1258496895824957440?s=21

https://twitter.com/extendedhuckel/status/125806546195191808...

https://twitter.com/kmpjones/status/1258214473757794305?s=21

I want people to be free to make the tradeoffs that they prefer. If someone wants to choose family over work, they should be free to do so (that doesn't mean that they should get the same rewards as the person who prioritizes work over family). Similarly, those who prioritize family over work should be free to do so.

It is an awful injustice to restrict someone's individual freedoms on the basis of their gender (and no, it's no consolation that it's in service of some arbitrary desire to prevent differences in distributions for some trait between the genders).

this works both ways. if a couple is expecting a child but can't afford to take time off for childbirth, is it freedom or justice?

I don’t understand. Optional parental leave would allow both parents to take work off. We’re debating whether or not parents (specifically fathers) should be forced against their will to take time off in order to satisfy an arbitrary desire to unify the distributions of work experience between men and women. In this debate, there is no dichotomy between freedom and justice; taking away one’s individual rights in the basis of gender is injustice—it’s neither freedom nor justice.

if it's optional, employers can and will make the median worked not take it - again, i know people who were told that they better not take the optional leave or it'll make further business difficult.

This is false, and we know it's false because in every country with optional maternity leave, more than 50% of women take their leave. Even in the US which lacks legal requirements for employers to offer paid maternity leave, over 70% of women took maternity leave--presumably the remaining 30% is largely a subset of the 33% of women who were not offered paid maternity leave. That you know people who were pressured into foregoing their leave is anecdotal.

[0]: https://mchb.hrsa.gov/whusa11/hstat/hsrmh/downloads/pdf/233m...

Somewhat off topic, but yikes, is this what using Twitter is like? Letting anyone from a global audience see your posts seems optimized towards fight picking.

In Sweden, neither parent is forced to take paternal leave, but they both get 90 days of paid paternal leave each (at 80% of their usual salary) that they either use or lose. The remaining 210 days of paid parental leave can be split between them however they like.

That's 210 calender days, not "work" days, so the compensation comes to 80% if you use the leave 7 days per week. Since daycare don't normally accept children under the age of 1 here, it's pretty common to try to strech the leave by taking 5 days a week, so the compensation is more like 60% of normal pay if you do that.

what if this biases employers against hiring procreative couples?

Asking about plans to have a family or relationship status is already illegal in the US, isn't it?

The United States is also a country famous for its lax enforcement of labor laws.

Sure, but there are pretty reliable proxies, such as age.

The chance of employers stopping hiring from the 20-35 year old age group is... slim.

might bring about reverse ageism and balance things a bit

then I think we should ask them where they think their next batch of interns comes from

Visa's ofcourse

> And why both parents need to take it.

Sweden does that to a degree. Since 2016 both parents get 90 days each (it was 60 days each before then) that they either use or lose, and the remaining 210 days can be split between the parents however they like.

As of 2018, it seems like men used 29.3% of the of the parental leave days so it's not equal in terms of use yet.

I should note that the pay is 80% (up to a maximum) of your normal pay. So from a financial standpoint, it makes sense for the parent with the lower income to use the parental leave days.

Which is why maternity leave without similar paternity leave is a bad idea.

But apparently whoever wrote this article didn't think things through that far.

I'm all for paid paternity leave, but I've also heard that it does relatively little because men are much less likely to use it, and when they use it they use less of it.

Some countries have had good results from making it mandatory.

Are there countries that force people to take leave with their children?

I am not aware of any country that has mandatory paternity leave. Do you have an example of this?

I wonder if the grandparent meant "non-transferable" -- some countrirs have a shared pot (and then women often take all the pot), other countries enforce some amount of the pot to each parent. You do not have to take it as the man, but you lose it if you don't.

A useful equalizer is to give paternal leave as well.

What is the barbaric alternative?

Personal Responsibility... That is barbaric these days

Not surprising that a woman of childbearing age turns up pregnant is it?

I live in a country with paid maternal leave and paid paternal leave up to an extent.

I've always been in favor of it but since I have joined the workforce I'm kinda on the fence if not against it.

The amount of people exploiting it is enormous (at least where I live). I have seen some time up precisely their pregnancies to maximize time off work, but still getting paid 100%. Others getting pregnancy leave while planning to resign the day they have to come back to work, sucking up all that their employer has to give and then leaving him.

Employer bias exists for a reason, and it is precisely the existence of this behavior.

The ways in which a system like this can be exploited, in my opinion, are countless and far outweigh the benefits. And since maternal leave is paid for with tax money, I as a taxpayer, am against use of public money to fund private activities.

If anyone, be a male or a female has no mean of having a family due to poor financial planning, it is not my problem to solve.

You are entitled to your opinion. Be aware that it’s only an opinion, though. The only way to objectively talk about benefits of policies is by using research and studies, not relying on anecdotal incidences of “waste”.

Despite people “exploiting” the system as you say, over the entire population it provides more benefits to society than it costs.

I noticed that usually Americans are in favor of family planning and family support policies like these. And I, as an European, have seen the dark side of it and am becoming a bit wary of flat out, all trust social policies like these. "who cares, in the long run the benefits will outweigh the costs". Not my opinion. I might be wrong, though.

I have seen Europeans spit on people in my country and treat them badly. I as an American have seen it and have become wary of trusting Europeans. I saw it with my own eyes so therefore all Europeans are bad. I might be wrong, but let's be honest I don't actually think I am, my anecdotes are better than your data.

That's you, that's how you think.

Well to be honest from my very first post I state mine to be a personal experience, not raw global scale data followed by any somewhat serious study; and secondly, if you look at this thread almost every other reply is a personal account of some sort.

I don't imply to be right, I'm just stating my opinion.

Well in an argument about Nationwide social policies your opinions and anecdotes are perfectly irrelevant and useless.

If Americans support policies like these then why don't we have them?

Marijuana legalization polls well but it’s still a controlled substance that can get you jailed in most parts of the US. Try to find out why.

There is a benefit to society replenishing its population and a benefit to the individual not to have to think about income loss or worry about their work status upon return.

Perhaps it would make sense to have policies like when your employer sends you off for schooling, you are expected to stay for x-months and if not you owe them.

So a guy goes on paternity leave, resigns after coming back, he owes the co. some amount discouraging this practice? If the move is worth it, then they would afford the penalty. Kind of like withdrawing from retirement before maturity.

I wish some policies like this would exist, but sadly in a country of heavy catholic descent, it all falls under the "life is sacred" umbrella.

I'd strongly argue you want to deplete reserves of foreign immigrants that want to come fill in any population deficit you have before you start subsidizing reproduction. Humanity as a whole is still growing, that population growth is largely limited to poorer nations, and as such it just doesn't make financial sense for nations to be paying people to have kids (and bear the associated stresses, complications, and expenses from having often full time laborers also burdened with trying to raise a family) when there are billions in poverty that immigration could uplift.

It also has historical context. Colonization around the world happened on the back of permissive immigration - when early America needed labor it didn't pay every family to have more kids, it brought the poor over from Europe with the promise of opportunity. And while the investments needed to make a worker productive are much higher today than back then it applies to both a natural born or immigrant citizen all the same.

A lot of it is cultural though. The unrealistic expectations heaped on most western working class peoples to both have a successful career and somehow produce a well adjusted functional progeny feels to me like the same kind of fantastical unrealism of the titular American Dream - where everyone could have two cars and a separated house anywhere, drive everywhere, and that scaling that up to hundreds of millions was both practical and optimal. In practice, no, very few members of the working poor are skilled in parenting enough to somehow magically balance 40 hours a week between two parents on subsistence income with raising children effectively. Perpetuating that lie causes real harm to everyone involved. Its the same kind of doublethink that keeps global warming off the agenda as a legitimate threat - the need to protect culturally established norms even if they cause real harm to perpetuate.

Most advanced economies are experiencing internal ZPG. Many are unused to lots of foreigners coming in. Many are relatively overpopulated. It would also dilute local culture and for small countries it would certainly overwhelm the local culture. On the other hand they need to remain a “going culture”, i.e. not dying out.

Korea’s pop nosedive should not be seen as the antidote for badly planned demographics elsewhere.

Sure, if they want to that’s okay but they certainly aren’t obliged to.

Let’s imagine what would happen to Bhutan if they opened their doors to their neighbors.

If you follow your logic through to completion, you will see it leads to multiple issues.

I'm not saying that immigration is bad.

However, having a country advocate zero childbirths - and trying to keep population up entirely foreign migration is a recipe for disaster.

Its not about advocating for. That would be paying people to not reproduce, which is another perverse incentive.

Presently a relatively small fraction of western populaces can afford children without assistance. Trying to artificially prop up birthrates is putting a bandaid on a gushing wound of wealth inequality. If productive gains weren't being realized by capital to such an absurd degree more people would be able to afford doing zero-revenue labor like raising children for longer periods of time.

What you described is a Ponzi scheme.

In Australia, we call it the population (or migration) Ponzi.

Another way to look at it is - you're essentially borrowing from your future generations, in order to fund your current lifestyle.

Those future generations are going to be the ones looking after you in your old age (through being taxpayers to provide services - or in some cultures maybe even literally being the ones to house/care for your), and also because that's how your culture/society continues. Society/culture is more than just a input/output machine that eats, s*hits and sleeps.

I don't particularly like the arts, but I understand that as a whole, our government funds things like that for the betterment of society.

I am fortunate I don't have any major disabilities - but if I did, I know my society looks after those less fortunate (or I hope they do).

> I have seen some time up precisely their pregnancies to maximize time off work, but still getting paid 100%

Your "exploit" is another's due compensation. You might examine where precisely your resentment comes from.

> If anyone, be a male or a female has no mean of having a family due to poor financial planning, it is not my problem to solve.

I have a lot of trouble believing that people would time their pregnancies specifically to screw over their employer. That's so outrageous to me that it casts a lot of doubt, in my mind, to your entire reply.

Of course: if any business has poor relationships with their employees, it is not my problem to solve.

thefz didn't say they timed pregnancies to screw over their employer but to maximize time off work.

> I have seen some time up precisely their pregnancies to maximize time off work, but still getting paid 100%. Others getting pregnancy leave while planning to resign the day they have to come back to work, sucking up all that their employer has to give and then leaving him.

I think you're being pedantic; the entire tone of @thefz's comment is that employees time their pregnancies to maximize time off work and effectively screw over their employer

> I think you're being pedantic

But I don't think it is pedantic to point out there is a difference between

1. Maximizing your time off work, even if it screws over your employer.

and

2. Timing your pregnancy in order to screw over your employer.

You're being disingenuous by making it sound like GP is arguing that they are doing it in order to intentionally screw over their employer, when clearly GP is saying they are doing it to maximize their paid leave, which also screws over their employer.

The premise of 'screwing over their employer' is what is broken here. This is the narcissistic viewpoint of a small business owner who sees dollars already counted as his own going into someone else's pocket. No well managed business is running at such a tight margin that it can't afford to meet its obligations to its employees. The employer is only getting screwed in the sense that the owner can't buy a new boat this year.

Precisely! Thanks.

People want free money. If the system allows them to get money and inconvenience their employer or do neither they will overwhelmingly do it. I can’t be the only person to note that teachers are much more likely to have children during the school year than over the summer.

I think it's less defensible that people want free money than it is than corporations want free money. Because fundamentally lots of people don't want to live off handouts.

It's kinda telling that economics treats trained workers as something that springs into existence unbidden. While raising children is mere 'leisure' and government funded education is dead weight loss.

> It's kinda telling that economics treats trained workers as something that springs into existence unbidden. While raising children is mere 'leisure' and government funded education is dead weight loss.

Every word above is false. Gary Becker’s economics of the family has many, many flaws but assuming children happen by accident is not among them. Leisure is not “mere” in economics. It’s everything that’s not work. It’s what work is for. The point is not the production; it's the consumption. If we could do the latter without the former sustainably that would be paradise. There are none, zero, no economists who think government education is dead weight loss. Even Bryan Caplan of The Case Against Education thinks it’s at least 30% human capital building and it’s glaringly obvious after the past few weeks that the child minding function of school is enormously valuable.

I work off the following. What drives policy is the core. Everything else is mere words.

In practice economists assign a value of zero to child rearing. Because simply economists hate reasoning about externalities.

I'd be interested in seeing the data on this. My wife's a teacher, and in her school district there is no maturnity leave, you need to use sick time. So we were trying for the opposite - to make sure our child is born during the summer.

365.25 days in a year, roughly 80 days of summer, seems like a solid bet that they'll likely give birth during the school year just by chance alone, no?

Believe it or not, when after a certain period of time one gets only 70% pay but if they fall pregnant again the system resets and they get to be home with 100% pay for a year or so, someone is going to get out the calculator.

Witnessed this with my eyes many times.

Let's get out the calculator and see what it costs in time and money to raise a child for 18 years and then reconsider whether someone would take on the debt of having a kid that they didn't already plan on having to get some paid time off.

I'm going to guess that you:

1. Don't have kids 2. Are a male (I'm male as well)

Having kids is a big decision. (I'm lucky enough to have two so far).

We (wife and I) have had to make a lot of sacrifices, both financially and at a family/career/personal level. We are lucky that we both have reasonably good jobs.

However, being pregnant is an absolute b*tch, and seeing what my wife went through, and what some of the other mums in our parents group went through - I am very dubious anybody intentionally gets pregnant only to get a few extra weeks/months of leave.

If you're a guy I suspect we probably can't know how bad it is. Let's just say that tearing or being cut down there isn't fun, and for many women it can have lasting impact on your body.

For both of you it upends your entire life - and you're on the hook for the next 18 years (at least). And not just financially, but you need to actually spend time with them - feeding them, changing nappies, reading books, playing games, looking after them when they're sick, taking then to school every day, teaching them, ferrying them to activities etc.

I have zero regrets - but it really irks me when immature people start commenting about how providing things like parental leave will encourage people to "abuse the system".

Those people were likely already going to have kids anyway, so I don't see why we as a society shouldn't support them - unless we want to deal with the demographic and sociological implications that comes with a rapidly aging population and no young people.

Just so you know, I was motivated to have an articulated discussion with you until you implied that having two kids made you mature, and called me immature.

It does exist. I personally know a person who did that, on purpose, and got away with close to 3 years of contigus maternity leave before quitting their job.

That being said, this is ONE person I know, I have no hard data or anything, but I'm pretty sure it's a minority.

They absolutely will time them to maximize benefits. I commented on how teachers time pregnancies so their leave is adjacent to summer break.

Also pregnancies are delayed until after a pay increase, so leave pay is higher.

So because you don’t know who’s done it, you don’t believe it? I know several who have openly admitted to it.

>If anyone, be a male or a female has no mean of having a family due to poor financial planning, it is not my problem to solve.

But the child's future problem will become yours, then, unless you somehow manage to escape society.

I agree, instead of targeted support for parents we should just give everyone the same basic standard of living so they can choose to support themselves independently if they choose to procreate.

Edit: I can understand the notion that some want to maximise their time away from their employer, but the idea that birthing and caring for a baby is time off work is somewhat naive :)

>If anyone, be a male or a female has no mean of having a family due to poor financial planning

I think this is pretty telling of your attitude to the whole thing. In a time where virtually all developed countries face a demographic crisis in the coming decades, where record numbers of young people cite "financial reasons" for not starting a family, you still think that if somebody is poor then the cause is "poor financial planning".

Maybe the time has come to flatten the growth curve. Infinite growth in a system of finite resources is unfeasible.

Let's face the fact that pronatalist agendas have been pushed by the major religions for centuries in order to better control the population.

Ah, eugenics by wealth. We've seen it before, here it is again.

The curve has beyond been flattened already. It's nosediving. We're below replacement fertility and falling. I don't think incenctivising >2.1 fertility is being "protonatalist". And mind, this is coming from someone very much opposed to unrestrained growth capitalism. A proponent of "degrowth" if you will.

I'm not sure why you have negative points. Maybe because you meant in first world countries[0][1] and didn't state it explicitly? The world is barely above replacement rate (i.e. there is population growth) and OECD members are below (population decline).

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?end=2018&lo...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?end=2018&lo...

These are the best graphs I saw all day. Thank you.

Pro-natalist, as in promoting births just for the sake of it.

> . I don't think incenctivising >2.1 fertility is being "protonatalist".

Yes it is, because you are incentivising births just to float above an arbitrary level.

> In a time where virtually all developed countries face a demographic crisis in the coming decades

I don't see how this is a problem if we have immigration. We should support immigration from high population growth areas of the planet to low population growth not add more population to the planet.

Adding more people to planet and causing climate for next generation is way worse than not providing paid leave.

can someone address this instead of downvoting. It makes sense in my head, lol.

Some first world people don't like third world people.

> I have seen some time up precisely their pregnancies to maximize time off work,

How on earth can you know that?

'I have seen' - excuse me, but what? Are you going to tell us that you work at a company where people's reproductive plans are common water cooler discussion? Do you work a tech company? I'd find that mind-boggling.

'timing a pregnancy'? Only someone who's never tried to get pregnant could take that seriously.

My wife and I tried (and succeeded) to get my leave period to overlap with the winter holiday (during which my office is closed). I've had conversations with friends on academic schedules attempting similar things.

Obviously, plans often don't survive first contact with reproductive biology, but sometimes they do, like in my case.

> 'I have seen' - excuse me, but what? Are you going to tell us that you work at a company where people's reproductive plans are common water cooler discussion?

No, but sort of, yes. I have witnessed many cases in which some employees practically disappeared, to the point of having to hire others to substitute them, for years.

Timing a pregnancy is not as uncommon as you'd think.

> Timing a pregnancy is not as uncommon as you'd think.

I'll take a chance and guess your gender. Timing a pregnancy is not as easy as you think.

We had no trouble choosing the month of our three boy's birthdays. Your mileage may vary of course.

Oh my god. Are. You. Assuming. My. Gender.

Being a former teacher, absolutely yes. Reproductive plans, and how to fit them into school year, are topics of conversation and informal “coaching.”

> I have seen some time up precisely their pregnancies to maximize time off work, but still getting paid 100%.

I don't get it. This is exactly the kind of thing companies do to optimize their own profits. So what's good for the goose is good for the gander, no? Unless you're saying that the kind of ethical framing laissez-faire capitalism encourages is bad for society.

Wait - the whole point of the government program was to assist families. Some families take them up, and suddenly its a problem?

"Exploited" and "used for the intended purpose" are not interchangeable phrases.

Having children is not some accident nor disease that must be insured against. The purpose of such government programs is not to alleviate misfortune. There seems to be some deep misunderstanding of the issue here.

> "Exploited" and "used for the intended purpose" are not interchangeable phrases.

Which is, precisely, the issue at hand here.

I think when mentioning exploitation, this was in relation to the precisely timed pregnancy to gain full benefits, or leaving directly after the benefits period ended. Not necessarily the use of the program, but the “playing the system” aspect.

...and you would recommend they choose a worse setup? Don't we all use programs (e.g. buy insurance then go see the dentist) routinely like this?

There are numerous differences from a tax-funded maternity program and insurance. (the hope of) free markets determining insurance prices, ability to opt in or out of specific coverage, the source of funding to name a few.

The point isn't to trust people not to scam the system (because just like banks have found another way to abuse (now commercial) mortgage backed securities (CMBS)[0], market dynamics can be applied to people finding a way to abuse the system), but to design such a system best we can that gives the benefits to those the program is intended for, and to prevent abuse from malicious actors.

[0]: https://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-wall-street...

A better example is a 401(k) match. I make contributions that maximize the amount my company matches. My benefits agreement says if I contribute up to $X I’ll get $Y. If I precisely contribute $X am I screwing my employer? It feels almost like I am gaming the system!

I take all the vacation days I’m promised, too. I precisely time it so I use every last day. Screwing my employer again!

Ya, but drawing maternity leave and forcing your employer to keep your position available to you upon the end of the leave and then telling them at the last minute that you don't plan on coming back is a little bit different. More akin to using sick days when you aren't sick, imo.

But government programs could fix this by paying maternity leave whether or not the mother plans to go back to work. Then they could be open with their employer that they don't plan on coming back.

It can take a year of trying to conceive to end up pregnant even for couples without any issues. There's no way anyone can time it that accurately.

Planning on not returning, but not telling your employer so they keep paying you on maternity leave is shady as fuck.

A good reason the leave pay should be provided by the state.

Like any group-coverage program I agree, it should be a state or federal promise. As the OP says in the title and the article.

Not sure what country you live in, but’s it pretty hard to game this. You have a fixed number of weeks. And it’s pretty hard to fake having a baby.

People should get the same benefits even if they plan to quit after, which would address the issue of people quitting after.

If you’re against social insurance as a whole though, then opposition to maternity leave makes sense.

At least where I live, the employer only has to send in tax forms during the parental leave. They don't pay the salary - the state does.

So, if your employee quits at the end of their leave, that's probably not a huge issue. They will likely give you plenty of warning, and you can offer the position to the substitute that you had to hire anyway.

Of course people are counting months and planning when to have children. That's the whole point! We decided that it should be easier for an average two-income family to have children. That's the reason for the rules.

Your two examples are just showing parental leave being used, not abused.

The amount of days allotted are still the same. Same goes for people quitting right after: the allotted days are the same, independently of quitting or not. What's your expectation, that a new mom leaves work and stay unemployed the day her newborn comes, setting a lot of uncertainty for the future, instead of an employer paying for it? Even socially wise, i would always say the mom should be taking that parental leave.

And that overlooks the other side of things too: In the first case, the person might have had some issues with the newborn. My daughter had problems breastfeeding for basically 3 months, is this possibility accounted in the "maximizing time off"? Yeah the parent's priority now is the newborn, I'd argue that a company should promote that at all time, to have better human beings.

The last case: what if the person had a change of mind when the newborn and decided it wanted to be a stay-home mom or dad to be fully dedicated? Or maybe they want a part time remote job, so they could afford having kids with them at all time, without resorting to child care.

Granted that you could make points for parental leave being too long (sure!), that can be balanced by law, but the simple fact that it's used it's not abuse.

Yea makes sense to use whatever free time to look for a better paying job, train for interviews ect.

Not sure why someone wouldn't do this. I would definitely do that.

The worldview described in the comment and by people who upvote is something that I'm not jealous of. But as this is not a moral lecture about gender equality, how important decent childhood is or whether the society would be better without reproducing, I'd just like to point out one immediate bias/flaw you express:

The parents who can abuse parental leave are quite privileged. -Have a reliable partner who wants to have children with you -Have required fertiliry to "time" pregnancy -Work for a stable company (rules out small business owners, self employment...) -Be employed in the first place

How many % you think this would represent of the women aged 20-35 in your country? Do you believe that these women will contribute less taxes to the society than society uses on them? Are these tax payers net-negative part of society?

Children are a literal economic investment in the future. The taxpayers pay for them so they reap the benefits of their future productive tax revenue when they are old and can't make any more tax revenue themselves anymore. It's the entire cycle of life, or the original retirement plan.

A job is a contract. If you don’t want the contract to be used that way, don’t write it that way. I don’t feel bad towards my employees or coworkers who wait to give notice until shortly after annual bonuses are given out. My previous boss encouraged me to stick out my job another couple weeks until the next stock vesting date.

As long as both sides sign the job contract willingly, without a severe imbalance of power, it’s not abuse. It’s business.

I can tell you that discrimination against women of common child-bearing ages for lower-income jobs is still common in countries where full benefits exist.

In Canada, companies refuse to hire women in certain positions because the maternity leave is 1-2 years, and the disruption of having to train and then replace someone can be painful.

As an anecdote, my last company had 3 accountants in 3 years because each one would come in, work for a year, and then take 2 year maternity. It became impossible to handle the stability for a complex position like that. They ultimately refused to hire women, and the man in that job has now been there 5 years.

Wouldn't the first ones maternity be over by the time the second one took maternity?

Yes, but often they simply decide not to return to work at all.

Why not?

It's pretty common for women to decide to become a full time stay at home mom after having a kid. But naturally, you would use up all of your maternity leave before making that final decision.

That sounds like an additional variable that's part of a coupled system.

On the flip side, it’s common for teachers to time pregnancy so the due date will be (end_of_school_year - maternity_leave_duration) so that they’ll get an “extra” three months leave.

In Canada, or in the US? My sister's a professor about to have a child in a midwestern US state, and you effectively cannot get maternity leave during the school year.

US.

I was thinking high school. I taught high school and got paternity leave of a month. Private school though.

It would be state by state but in a lot of states, teachers are able to build up a lot of paid sick days which could be used for maternity leave if needed.

Well, the leave should be distributed exactly in the same amount by the persons responsible for the child and should be of compulsory execution by both, exactly as if you have an accident requiring hospitalisation that prevents you from doing any work. That is, taking care of a dependent until a reasonable age for daycare (which, in my opinion should be around at least 8 months) should be an obligation of the society on the well-being of an innocent dependent human being. And if people worry on the economoc side, think that people taking the responsibility of bringing up minors contribute to economic flourishing in additional spending on goods and services and in providing the payers of the debt we are putting on them to pay to sustain our current and future well-being.

>discrimination against women of common child-bearing ages [..] is still common in countries where full benefits exist.

What you just provided is an argument for parental leave.

Arguably, the benefits are not full if male parents aren't eligible.

This benefit shouldn't be defined by gender:

- pregnancy-related benefits should be given to people who can get pregnant

- parenthood-related benefits should be given to people who have just become parents (guardians of a newborn, etc).

Anything other than this is a stop-gap non-solution, with aforementioned negative side effects.

Even with equal paternity leave, I think we all know that it will be used at a much lower rate than maternity leave. And so will employers. It will still be much riskier to hire young women than men if turnover is costly.

> I think we all know that it will be used at a much lower rate

It's a circular argument, since the main reason men aren't taking time off work to devote to parenting is the absence of such a leave.

The reality is that if you provide the leave, everyone will use it. (I work for a company that provides one, though a rather short one).

Ideally, the law will be written such that it's not an either-or scenario, and both parents could take the leave consecutively should they choose to (e.g. eligibility for a 6-month leave starting within 6 months of becoming a new parent).

And this will make it much harder for companies to discriminate, as it spreads the risks out. Old men can (and do) father children too.

> It's a circular argument, since the main reason men aren't taking time off work to devote to parenting is the absence of such a leave.

This is not true. Germany introduced paid paternity leave, and the rates that men use it is still far lower than the rates of maternity leave usage. [1] Other countries might differ, Google wasn't providing me very good results for paternity vs maternity leave usage.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/43488388?seq=1

Uh, no, men on average just prefer to work rather than stay home with children. It's not a good thing, imo, but it is just the nature of man.

> if we want the next generation of Americans to have happy, healthy childhoods,

Then we should stop having children and let people from high growth countries immigrate here.

I don't see adding more carbon by increasing the planet's population is providing the next generation "healthy childhoods"

If your goal is carbon reduction, then allowing people to immigrate is almost as bad as people reproducing. Someone coming from Mexico or Vietnam or Nigeria coming here will likely produce way more CO2 than if they remain in their country of origin. Reducing the total western world population should be the goal.

> we should stop having children and let people from high growth countries immigrate here.

Your comment doesn't make any sense to me. Why did you ignore first part of the sentence and just address the second part.

I didn't ignore it at all. The point is that allowing people to immigrate in place of having children would do very little to reduce carbon output of Western countries. Stopping both would be required.

> it seems imperative to provide as much assistance as possible to enable that environment.

While I agree with this in the short term. In the long term it's actually imperative to make sure that every adult has the potential to provide this environment based on their own earnings, not to focus solely on providing assistance, which -- while a reasonable and indeed morally imperative short-term arrangement -- does not make society grow.

> to make sure that every adult has the potential to provide this environment based on their own earnings

The idea that the only value adults provide is by what they get paid in money is a deeply flawed idea; as is the desire to make everyone self-sufficient irrespective of their profession. We have the ability to provide healthcare to everyone and we should be doing so; healthcare and childcare benefits should be a right not a privilege. Some people are lucky enough to work in organizations that provide generous parental benefits; most are not that lucky. We can't leave them out in the dust just because of circumstance.

> healthcare and childcare benefits should be a right not a privilege.

Sure... when no human needs to be paid to provide these things, then they should certainly be a right. Fortunately, right now, you can't compel another human to take care of your health or your child without paying them.

> The idea that the only value adults provide is by what they get paid in money is a deeply flawed idea;

Money is a measure of how indebted someone is to you. That is all. To be 'paid in money' absolutely gives a good impression of the value you provide. When you do something for your neighbor without exchanging cash, you are still making money, because someone -- usually through social conditioning -- now owes someone to you. Woke people call this community building; accountants call it good will, and it absolutely has a monetary value, whether you determine it or not.

> if we want the next generation of Americans to have happy, healthy childhoods, it seems imperative to provide as much assistance as possible to enable that environment

Define happy

Also what does “as much assistance as possible” mean? This sounds like a feel-good vague statement

Ultimately you are asking people to provide more than what parents are willing to do for their kids

I live in a state that provides free lunch for school kids

There are people in my community that can’t even provide lunch for their kids school

Are those parents doing “as much as possible”?

It's a strong case, but it still feels like a band-aid on the wound that is normalized double income households. My wife is a novelist. She chose to do that so she could have flexibility to stay home with children. It helps that she's a fantastic writer. I chose my current job because of 6 weeks paternity leave, as we plan on having several more children. I recognize my immense privilege being able to make choices like these, but it was not without sacrifices. For the first few years of our marriage we could have easily doubled our income if we were both working.

All this to say, is a return to single income households wanted, reasonable or possible? I can't help but feel that "working" and "raising children" is having your cake and eating it too.

I think about this a lot too because my family could live off of my income alone. We might move to this at some point, but for now my wife prefers to work. That said, I'm genuinely curious if "single income households" were ever a norm, or if it was only a norm for the upper class (or perhaps for the middle class for a very short time, such as for a few decades in the 20th century).

I think "everyone in the family works" used to be the norm.

It’s always been true, but the answer to the question “for whom?” has changed a few times, like in the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

Single income households were only ever a norm for the upper classes, whether aristocracy or haute bourgeoisie. Almost as soon as that changed society did. Mass leisure society with many single income households were a post WWII US thing. The richest country in the history of the world sustained that from maybe 1945 to 1970, by which time feminism was in full swing. Capable women got bored and wanted meaningful non family work.

For married couples, the US has seen an increase in women working for pay from 30% participation to 60% participation from 1955 to present.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2017/08/Labor-Force-Parti...

So there was a while when most married women with kids stayed home.

No doubt, but I suspect that the mid 20th century is a historical anomaly. I'm also surprised that only 60% of women work for pay at present.

> we could have easily doubled our income if we were both working

How would the world work such that this was not the case? I suppose the government could pay one parent to stay at home with their children, but it seems like there will always be a sacrifice required if you want to be in a couple where only one person is working full time (particularly at a specialized career).

Send the children away to specialist child care facilities that can look after them at scale. By centralizing the raising of children we can maintain quality control from a young age and ensure that children grow up as model citizens with the best education/development possible.

A Brave New World indeed.

> I can't help but feel that "working" and "raising children" is having your cake and eating it too.

Just like the 'eternal September' there's the 'eternal desire to return to 1955'. I suppose I should be surprised.

It is, and parenting is in and of itself a job.

Imagine a society where its an actual career - parenting, as a job, apart from teaching. Professional parents paid to raise children. That is basically what nannies among the rich are now anyway.

It is totally just a culturally normalized incongruence that is just assumed for the sake of assumption. In the same way until a hundred years ago educating everyone was considered infeasible. The farm laborer of the 1850s would have looked at sending their kids to a public school as unbelievable and fantastical as someone today might look at having children raised professionally.

Its also worth considering that, in the age of two income households reproducing as regularly as they do, school does do that already. The raising of the kids thing. It just does it really badly, because its not structured or designed for that. The prevalence and use of after school activities in many cultures as a way to keep kids busy until their parents get off work or during the summer is indicative of an ill-fitting bandage that nobody wants to consider pulling off and reconciling culturally because that means "admitting" millions of people are not time wizards that can manage to do 80 hours of work a week in 60.

Parenting is a job, yes. For better or worse, though, there are huge numbers of people willing to do it for free. This is a serious problem if we expect market forces to just sort things out.

My parents were lower middle class and both worked, and my mom took a year off for each kid. They just seemed to accept the idea that kids cost money, not unlike pets.

Is this wrong? I don't really have an opinion. I don't run a business, though.

I'd imagine if you offered people hardhats and heavy machinery to fix the roads they complain about quite a few would line up to do it "for free". Before wrecking the equipment and destroying property.

And like I said, people are willing to do it for free because they have normalized a cultural expectation to do so. But it was the same normalization parents had that if their kids were going to learn to read in the 18th century they would have to teach it themselves because private tutors were well outside the reach of a majority of the working poor.

People were willing to farm for themselves for centuries but the tools and lack of expertise and specialization made it incredibly inefficient. People built their own houses, but they were rarely more than rough cut lumber piled together with thatch for a roof. Human history is the realization of the value of expertise and specialization to make general problems everyone faces inefficiently focused managed problems by experts that can be radically more productive at it than the uninformed.

I'm just trying to say just because its culturally normalized now does not mean its predestined to always be the way of social organization. And that economics is a really strong motivator to change behaviors - its why reproduction rates drop so radically in industrialized countries in the first place.

> I'd imagine if you offered people hardhats and heavy machinery to fix the roads they complain about quite a few would line up to do it "for free". Before wrecking the equipment and destroying property.

You're saying that people who reproduce "for free" are half-assed incompetents? I disagree.

As for "culturally normalized", that's a blade that cuts deeply and in many directions. Without cultural norms, civilization as we know it would not exist.

To reiterate my main point, I don't really have a preference on paid maternity. Maybe it would be better, though, to simply award each citizen two or three years "general leave" to be used as they wish. Those that wish to reproduce could spend it that way. Those that don't could do something else. There are too many births now--we hardly need to incentivize more of them.

> is a return to single income households

previously it was always men who were earning the income. So "return" is not desirable without the prereq of it not being gender segregated.

the case for national paid parental leave -- that's right, parental leave, not just maternity leave -- is that it's a standard feature of developed countries.

the US will start to see more and more brain drain to other developed countries until some basic aspects of the social contract here are corrected. we'll also see fewer highly-skilled immigrants wanting to join our workforce.

there's no reason for highly educated people to stay here or immigrate to here when their quality of life will be significantly worse than elsewhere because our basic suite of mandatory and ubiquitous social amenities are entirely absent.

The US has been "behind" many other developed countries in areas like paternal leave for quite some time and has not experienced the sort of brain drain you assert. In fact the drain has generally gone towards the US rather than away from it.

It's hard to see why this trend would reverse now.

The brain drain is heavy in the other direction (towards the US from elsewhere), and doesn't seem to be slowing down. As long as the US can pay far higher salaries than other countries, the social benefits are irrelevant for the high performers.

> we'll also see fewer highly-skilled immigrants wanting to join our workforce

The high skilled people would earn far more in the US than elsewhere, and get a lot of benefits as part of their high paying job. It's difficult to see the brain drain to the US stopping, let alone the reverse brain drain you forsee.

I will add to your point that high salaries + not losing it all to taxes is the kind of equation that matters. Some developed countries with strong social policy have reasonably high salaries, but much lower after taxes.

I’m not sure that’s true. The people who have agency to move don’t need to; Highly-skilled knowledge workers are already being showered in benefits and compensation in the USA. This is definitely true in tech, and increasingly true in conventionally “high-status” professions (ie finance, consulting, strategy, etc).

A lot of people talk about the 1%, but there’s a separate, massive quality of life divide (especially at work) between the top 10% and bottom 90% of workers. Working conditions have never been better for the top 10%, and are getting worse for the rest.

So while there are definitely other immediate negative consequences to the US not having these benefits unilaterally, the fact that they already exist for the richest/most-educated makes me skeptical we’ll see an exodus of that demographic.

Do you have any data you could share on the 10%/90% divide when it comes to working conditions? I assume you're talking primarily about compensation and benefits here.

One of the interesting things about the American work system to me is that even high-status, highly-paid careers are still built around 60+ hour work weeks for many. The system doesn't seem geared towards life balance at all, it seems geared toward giving outsized rewards to workaholics for whom there is little going on in life besides their jobs.

> even high-status, highly-paid careers are still built around 60+ hour work weeks for many.

An interesting article about that:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-w...

Also, anecdotally, my friends in the high powered law tracks all got there by spending their lives generating stuff for their resumes, so when they arrive, they compete the same way.

It's not on working conditions, but the phenomenon itself: "The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy", https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor, has a recent book, "The Meritocracy Trap" that goes into your last paragraph. I heard about it on an interview with Ezra Klein (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/vox/the-ezra-klein-show/e/6...), and Vox has a good summary of it (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/24/20919030/...), with a section that is very similar to what you wrote:

> In order to win this competition, elites are forced to exploit their own talents and abilities. They spend their lives acquiring the degrees, skills, attitudes, and habits (i.e. “human capital”) that makes them valuable to elite educational institutions and employers. In doing so, elites, Markovits writes, transform themselves into “asset manager[s] whose portfolio contains [their] own persons.” This process damages the very identity of its participants.

> > [Elites] become constituted by their achievements, so that eliteness goes from being something that a person enjoys to being everything that he is. In a mature meritocracy, schools and jobs dominate elite life so immersively that they leave no self apart from status.

> In short, elites are shuttled into a life-long, endless competition that not only consumes their life quantitatively but qualitatively as well, leaving no room for self-expression, actualization, or discovery — only self-exploitation, value extraction, and endless anxiety.

> the US will start to see more and more brain drain to other developed countries

Why? The social contract exists for skilled people through their employers as part of their benefits package.

Highly skilled people generally have compensation packages to match and that includes healthcare and parental leave.

>The social contract exists for skilled people through their employers

that's not what the social contract is. and unfortunately, the crux of that very misunderstanding is exactly why the US is being absolutely shredded by a plethora of different and seemingly intractable systemic problems.

the social contract is between citizens and the state, wherein citizens consent to to taxation and governance which curtails some of their freedoms such that the state can guarantee their freedom from certain maladies and undesirable conditions. employers have nothing to do with it because businessess operate within the confines of the social contract at large because they are goverened by the laws of society.

we're in the middle of a pandemic, and there are millions and millions of people who are uninsured and who cannot get medical care because they were separated from their employer-provided health insurance.

pretending that businesses are stand-ins for the services that the government's end of the social contract should guarantee simply doesn't work in practice.

> there are millions and millions of people who are uninsured and who cannot get medical care because they were separated from their employer-provided health insurance.

True, but they are overwhelmingly unskilled. We are discussing a brain drain of skilled workers.

> simply doesn't work in practice.

If you are a high skill employee with the compensation to match, it works perfectly well.

I am not saying this is a reasonable state of affairs, just that it doesn't cause any talent loss.

> there's no reason for highly educated people to stay here or immigrate to here when their quality of life will be significantly worse than elsewhere because our basic suite of mandatory and ubiquitous social amenities are entirely absent.

If you're wealthy enough, the United States is still an extremely attractive place to live.

> the case for national paid parental leave -- that's right, parental leave, not just maternity leave -- is that it's a standard feature of developed countries.

This argument by itself is somewhere between bogus and crazy. Everybody else is doing it, so we should do it shouldn't be a key metric for a policy like this. Instead, we should look at why they did, how they did, what the measurable effects were, etc.

Fully paid parental leave (typically 8 weeks) is becoming quite common at fortune 500 companies in the US.

Many comment that they're trying to get ahead of the legislation and lawsuits, and buy some goodwill in the process. I'm fully in support!

We’ll see more highly skilled workers who aren’t interested in having kids. That’s a common dynamic. The SF Bay Area has more dogs than children.

These are not new rules. If people looking to migrate to US and find situation increasingly worse due to lack employment / governmental support for raising family, they can decide to not come. But the fact is situation is increasingly getting worse across the world. And places where there are great benefits are not looking to have horde of immigrants.

Also those "highly educated people" if they are really worth they think they are then individual negotiations with employers are always an option. Default set of benefits help average folks who otherwise would not get a better deal from employers.

I work for a company that offers 6 months maternity and paternity at full pay to all employees from day 1 of employment. This covers adoption too. Parents can take additional unpaid or statutory paid leave as desired.

As you might imagine it is a company that people want to work for, that retains staff and that has a good work life balance. In most roles asking to work compressed or reduced hours is a possibility.

Even though I missed out on this perk personally, it makes me happy to work at a place that treats employees so well, and doesn't hold people back just because they want to have a family.

Compared to other companies I've seen, far more women here return to the workplace after having children.

I always used to be for paid parental leave, and I still am, on an emotional and possibly practical level.

I do wonder, though, if it’s really fair to households that choose to have one stay at home parent ... so they pay taxes to then fund the leave of another parent who is also staying at home, but used to work?

It seems confusing.

Edit: I guess I’m wondering, should we by this logic extend a salary, even if temporary, to all new parents?

> so they pay taxes to then fund the leave of another parent

> who is also staying at home, but used to work?

You can extend that argument to any benefit provided by a government. I'm sure there are (many) benefits you (and I) receive that are in part funded by those who receive no direct benefit from it. We are all interdependent and interconnected in many ways.

Paid maternity leave isn't supposed to be a "Congrats on your new baby" present, it is so women don't need to choose between their or their child's health and getting back to work ASAP.

So, it doesn't make sense for someone who is not working to get paid maternity leave.

I don't think that's what OP is asking/stating. It's like: couple A decides someone needs to stay home to support kids/whatever reason, and say they cut back on their spending to do this. Couple B doesn't do this and struggles by wrt home duties, but makes higher income. When both couples have someone go on paid child leave they have the same situation, but couple B gets to keep their higher income. Op is stating couple A pays income taxes which go to a different couple to subsidize their paid leave instead of keeping it for themselves. I think the difference from other govt taxes going to people is the decision to not work ends up with them in a worse situation.

The obvious counterpoint is that couple B paid higher taxes due to their dual income status (and contributed more to the economy) and so deserves to receive the benefit more, but this isn't entirely satisfactory to me since couple A did still play taxes, which some portion of went to this benefit. Perhaps it would make sense for there to be a tax deduction for couple A for the equivalent duration of their caretaking? Maybe equivalent to whatever the paid leave would otherwise have been? Or maybe half of that amount? I don't believe taxes need to be "benefit neutral" on an individual basis, but I do somewhat believe it makes sense for them to be free of weird incentives.

I(and pretty much anyone that pays taxes) pay into all sorts of programs the indivudual will never use, so I don't really see how fairness of payment comes into play.

one aspect would be that some households would collect 2 Parental leaves, others only 1.

Canada has a program to address this where it defines 18 months parental leave across both parents and allows them to choose how to allocate (ie one can transfer their leave to the other).

Keep in mind that developed world parental leaves are usually < 100% salary and upto a fixed maximum. Eg: Canada parents get 33 per cent for up to 61 weeks

https://archive.is/ymOa8

Doesn't this argument automatically void paternity leave though? And even non-birth parent leave in general?

To me the leave is, yes, in part a health thing, but also just a bit of support (we're talking a few weeks) for the family to adjust to the disruptive event.

I extend this same thinking to homeschooling. I know many bright, well educated, home schooled individuals that save the US tax payers $200k to teach their kids themselves.

I think the benefit of a stay-home parent is just too abstract or far off to ever get support in economic policy. We know that children with a stay at home parent do better in all areas of life. But if the "traditional values" party isn't talking about supporting stay at home parents now, I'm not sure why they would ever start.

It seems like the same weirdness that comes with tying healthcare to employment. If the government paid for X days of parenting or something, regardless of employment, and just said that you have to have the job available when they come back within Y days, then it wouldn't be so different for the working parent versus the stay at home parent.

Took me several readings to get what you’re saying.

Yeah!

Why is the payment benefit tied to the return-to-work benefit?

That’s arbitrary!

Somehow, all the comments assumed that the article meant parental leave. The article said "maternity leave," and showed a stereotypical photo of mother with child. The PR piece was written by Patty, and the study by Amy. Amy's hobbies listed on her Stanford page include -- and I kid you not -- "learning how to cook." She's a member of several girl's-only clubs.

This would have been wonderfully progressive in 1960.

(As with most posters, I'm 100% in support of universal parental leave. However, something about this whole thing feels like a bizarre parody piece.)

I've always looked at it from the baby's perspective. It seems unjust that we would deprive our youngest citizens of time with their parents during such a critical stage in their life.

Replace citizens with children and you would be more on point

If you will be having kids why not save up to be away from work for a year and the take leave paid by your own family?

Because biology? It’s hard to save when you’re 20-24 and that’s the best time to have a child. It’s completely insane that 30 is considered early for a firstborn.

The problem some people have, like myself, is while I (sort of) agree with that sentiment I am confused why I should have to subsidize/support other peoples’ decision to breed. I have no children and have no plans to have children, so I will never be afforded this sabbatical, but currently I have a significantly increased workload because someone else just went out on 6 months of maternity leave. Kids can be great, but I truly struggle to grasp why my quality of life has to suffer so that someone I have never met can sit at home with a baby. It does not compute.

You're subsidizing the replenishing of the population of the country. You're subsidizing the creation of new people to be your friends, customers, colleagues. You're subsidizing the people who will become cops to protect you, or nurses to take care of you, or engineers who will create new tech and maybe keep you alive a little longer.

It is really astonishing to see this comment again and again on this thread. New human beings are necessary.

Yet you would probably agree giving every mother $100,000 for every child they have is a poor use of tax revenue? Or that it might produce some undesirably perverse incentives?

This isn't a black and white or moralistic "with or against me" topic. Every society basically independently has to evaluate how much it wants to divert capital to produce babies. Many nations - ie, China, India, etc - have or had programs in place to actively disincentivize reproduction.

I'd just as easily argue that subsiding reproduction when your country has foreigners wanting to immigrate as being unethical. If there are people out there right now that want to come and fill the holes in your society left by a replacement deficit, how is it just to instead pay your own people to replace them? Its largely why Japan is in its replacement crisis - the nations staunch ethonostatist view against immigration.

The long term societal benefits of supporting people who are raising children are obvious. If you don't care about the future of your city/country/species then you'll need to accept that you hold a relatively fringe viewpoint that is not going to be represented in government policy.

How about this position - being against paid family leave like this but being for tax-funded professional parents.

IE, train and treat parenting as much of a profession as it honestly rightly deserves, let people specialize and pursue a career in parenting, and then have them be parents as a full time job, paid the same way public schools are.

Because lets be honest - humans evolved to be carried around by their parents in communal groups while nomading around Africa. Its why babies cry when separated and are designed to be constantly attached to someone for most of their first year of life. They aren't even meant to sleep apart from their parents. There is enough sociological evidence that pretty much any form of the stereotypical family unit in any socioeconomic sphere causes trauma to infants because of how they are deprived of their biologically imperative socialization and physical interaction. It goes so far as there being evidence that babies become so anxious because they are stationary - they have a biological impetus to move, that a moving family is safe and to stop moving is dangerous. Its why most calm down if you walk them around in circles holding them.

I think there is also an argument that subsidizing reproduction when there is appreciable demand to immigrate to your country is at least racially biased if not wholly unethical, but thats another ramble.

Won’t the future tax revenue generated by that child (on average) easily cover that cost many times over?

(And maybe even help cover your own retirement?)

It's an extension of the reason we fund schools.

> Kids can be great, but I truly struggle to grasp why my quality of life has to suffer so that someone I have never met can sit at home with a baby. It does not compute.

It shouldn't, but if your quality of life is being diminished, that's not the kid's fault, nor the mother's.

That's management's fault.

you make it seem like raising a baby is like taking a vacation.

Let me tell you, it definitely is not.

So that the people wiping your ass when you're 90 are well-adjusted, and intellectually and social capable, and thus have empathy and care for you in your declining years. If nothing else.

We need more babies today so that there will be workers to pay taxes when we're of age to draw social security benefits. Millennials are having a huge baby bust right now. You will benefit from that, eventually.

Part of living in a civilized society is that we band together to support activities that we agree are necessary, even if we don't personally benefit from them. My taxes go to pay for many things that I don't benefit from, or even disagree with. However, the "price" of living in society is that that you don't sweat the small stuff because in the end it averages out enough that everyone sees sufficient benefit for it to be worth it.

What you can't justifiably do, however, is complain about the specific instances in which you pay for a benefit for someone else without acknowledging all the other ways in which things flow in the other direction.

My favorite example is road costs. Suppose I don't drive a car. Why should I pay for road infrastructure? Because I realize that even if I don't personally drive a car, I benefit from a society in which people and property can be efficiently transported without having to pay the owner of each and every road a toll.

What about schools? Should people without children not have to pay taxes that go toward schools, because they don't "benefit"? They should, because everyone should realize that even if they don't have children, a modern society needs educated citizens to persist. The same reason applies to supporting those that do the work of raising the citizens of tomorrow. (Which you, if you have no children, might mistake for leisure rather than a job.) Presumably you, when you're in your 80s and 90s, would like there to exist people of working age that can take care of you?

Remember, lots of systems that will benefit you are supported by the young workers. If you intend to draw social security, you should support paid parental leave.

Regardless of your plans to have kids, you once were a kid. Supporting you when you were young means supporting other people's kids too.

One problem with this article (and many others) is it confounds the benefits of taking leave with _paid leave_. I don't think there is a strong challenge against women taking a break after giving birth, but there is a moral/values argument about who pays for it.

Potential sources of funding include:

    1. Government (on various levels) 
    2. Employer
    3. Savings
    4. Debt (maternity loans?)
    5. Partner/Father, other family

We'd have to control for and examine interventions in the sources of funding to determine if governmental paid leave for all is a good policy.

Sadly the article also focuses, myopically, on just maternity leave instead of Parental leave. afaik it's proven that children do better with 2 parents present. (lets ignore gender arguments for a moment and see the obvious-- access to twice the parental figures will be more robust and have more resources)

Company I worked for a number of years ago publicly announced they had paid parental leave for all employees.

Then I applied for it and they said "no it is just for the people in California". So I had to take unpaid leave.

Whatever happens it needs to be on a national level.

If we're to successfully drive wage equality, we can't make mistakes like allowing employers to use maternity leave as an excuse to depress wages by gender. The only two ways to fix this are to eliminate (this option is untenable) parental leave or to make maternity leave apply to everybody.

Besides, give both parents the ability to support a family during those formative months and the next generation will be healthier for it.

First world nations have mind-boggling tax revenue, so they should fund programs like paid family leave and higher education (within reasonable limits).

(I feel like humanity is inexorably tending towards the attitude "everything should just be provided to us, no questions asked", so I really hope full-scale automation happens in my lifetime. I think it's the best way we can maximize happiness across the planet.)

I wonder what the difference would be between a national program vs state specific programs. Or maybe even a national system supplemented on a state by state basis.

I mean, right now, I live in a state that has no family leave, but I work in a state that does, for a company that does. I've got no idea what I'm really entitled to, and it's hard to get a hold of HR to get me a straight answer...

One could make a case that the nation was better off when not everyone was forced into being a two income household and more parents stayed home to raise their children. Closer knit families, better long term relationships, more skills and wisdom passed down from generation to generation.

Paid maternity leave doesn't fix time apart from your children over the first two decades of their life.

Having those that cannot or will not have children directly pay for other people's salary is unnecessary and arguably unjust. 2-6 months salary is not an insignificant amount of money.

It would make more sense to be paid entirely by additional income taxes on those who file taxes with dependents, or those who benefited from this program in the past.

For whatever reason, I had always thought that paid maternity leave was available universally in all countries. I hadn't even fathomed that the opposite could be true.

America continues to surprise me.

Instead of paying more in taxes to fund other people's wives to go on a maternity leave, I'd rather use that money for my wife.

I think the case for parental leave is pretty obvious: we want healthy children. Not only are babies difficult to take care of, but frequently want to be constantly held. If you want a healthy society and to ensure that your next generation: is healthy, has more opportunities to climb the ladder, lower crime rates (more healthy home environments), etc, then you want parental leave.

I don't think anyone on the left disagrees. But I don't understand why the right shouldn't. These things also make a lot of economic sense. It is like a mutual fund where we're investing in our next generation. Returns are even proportional to your investment. If you're wealthy you're likely to either own a business or stocks (or both!). You get a return by efficient workers who make businesses grow. This has a clear effect on GDP (I'd actually give similar arguments for education and health care, but I don't want to deviate too much from the topic (p.s. I don't identify as a socialist either)).

As to why I'm saying parental leave and not just maternity leave, I'm worried about consequences of just maternity leave. Having just maternity leave does generate bias towards women because... well women are the only ones that give birth. On the other hand, a parental leave should generate less bias because males will have to be given the same leave (I don't think it'll completely wash out the bias towards women, but I suspect it would decrease it). This should also have obvious consequences of reducing stress in relationships (again, leading to lower crime because better households) and especially less stress for women, who are (given social norms) the primary care givers of children.

TLDR: THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Happy to be in favor of this as long as there's an equivalent benefit for those who are childless.

For anyone downvoting: People should be incentivized to avoid having kids. It's without question the absolute best thing a random American can do to combat climate change.

What would an equivalent benefit be?

Do you feel slighted that your health insurance covers some for cancer treatment or broken legs without providing the others with some "equivalent benefit"?

Higher pay for non-parents. Guaranteed sabbatical at work that isn’t tied to having a kid.

Health insurance is a gamble. Everyone on my policy goes into it making the same gamble. Some come out ahead, some don’t. That’s what gambling is.

> It's without question the absolute best thing a random American can do to combat climate change

Climate change doesn't matter if there are no people left.

I don't think that's going to be a problem any time soon...

We are in zero danger of dying out as a species due to a low birth rate. The Earth is massively overpopulated and the only ethical way to combat that is to incentivize everyone, equally, to not have children.

> The Earth is massively overpopulated

Source?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

The combination of our global population and our resource consumptions per capita have devastated ecologies the world over and led to the deaths of innumerable species and biospheres.

You basically have the choice, then - massively reduce the resources consumed per-capita such that having billions of people doesn't negatively impact the planet or displace the last remnants of nature unsullied by human encroachment, or reduce the population so that the people you do have can consume resources without causing a mass extinction event.

When population reduction is as simple as "stop having kids" that is by far the least harmful mechanism to currently living humans to mitigate the ongoing disaster we are causing the planet. Trying to tell the current first world or developing countries to stop building roads, driving cars, building houses, using convenience products like plastics, stop building technologies that require scarce rare earth minerals that require extraction, stop using electric power in its myriad forms, etc is way more disruptive and harmful to those living today.

Did we get down to the last handful without me noticing?

The equivalent benefit of being childless is that you don't have a child. Congrats!

I really just don't understand this sentiment.

Your taxes pay for a lot of things that you don't necessarily benefit from directly at a precise point in time, but which you or your family will quite possibly will at some point in your life, and unquestionably benefit the society you live in - roads, bridges, libraries, schools, medical care...

Even if you don't want to have kids, you wouldn't even be here if your parent didn't!

What if I don't want to be here? Not like I got a say in the matter, I was dragged into this world completely without my consent.

Also, I'd argue society would benefit if everyone had fewer children. We'd all be much happier and better off if the world population was half what it was today, I'd wager. We should strive to stabilize the population, not grow it endlessly.

Do you have anything to back this up though? My understanding is that too many children is only really an issue in developing countries.

Also, not enough children can be problematic - just look at Japan, which has an aging population and not enough people to work.

Japan has a problem with a declining population. I'm suggesting that we strive to maintain a stable population, not grow it endlessly or allow it to shrink. Both present issues.

Ideally we would have done this when the word was at about 2B, but it's still better to start at 8B than 14B.

The point about Japan is not so much that it has a declining population, but that it has a decline population of working age people.

And my point about the US is the same[0]. Rather than aiming to keep the population size stable, I'd think goals should be around the size of the working age population, and around a level of growth that's required for the US economy to grow.

I do take your point about the number of people on the planet, but I don't think it's really an issue outside of developing nations.

[0] https://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Heartland-Visas-R...

Can't grow perpetually, can you? So why should we try to hit the max before we stabilize?

Basing an economy on an ever-growing population is foolish. We should plan better than that.

I didn't mean to grow in perpetuity; I meant firstly a growth rate that replenishes the working age population, and secondly that makes sense for the size, density and economic state of the country.

> Even if you don't want to have kids, you wouldn't even be here if your parent didn't!

I could be so lucky!

I would agree with you if more people having kids was a benefit to society. If anything, because of climate change, we should be incentivizing people to not have kids.

> I could be so lucky!

Heh, so, what I meant to say here was more like:

"Even if you don't have kids, you wouldn't even be here if your parents didn't!"

I knew what you meant. The "I could be so lucky!" was in reference to me not being here.

Now that we have same-sex marriage, making it only maternity leave is unjustifiably discriminatory against same-sex unions, not to mention against nonbinary parents. Making this leave completely gender-neutral is simply the simplest, most reasonable option.

Only in the US does such a case need to be made.

Fine if the government pays for it.

We all pay for it, one way or another. The article argues that paying for it on a systemic level has what would probably amount to significant cost savings.

There's precedent with unemployment for having employers pay an insurance premium to the state. That model seems like it might work here.

Why would that be more equitable/efficient than paying for it from general tax funds? It would have to be so to make up for the employment disincentive and business overhead.

It's an insurance model in Quebec, similar to employment insurance, where both employer and employee contribute. In theory that means that everything that is contributed by employers/employee gets into that pool and only get spent back on those programs. And if you contribute to it that means you can have access to it, just like insurance. Most tax payers are also workers so this is pretty much the same anyway.

Unemployment insurance only applies for full-time hires though doesn't it? Lots of companies will try to keep part-time employees from becoming full-time so that they don't have to pay for benefits like these. Same with gig-economy and contract-based workers.

Im 1000% in favor of mandatory parental leave, but that's the risk: it incentivizes companies to try shift their labor force into gigs and contract roles as much as they can get away with.

In 2012, I was canvassed by a McCain supporter who voted for Obama in 2008, but was disillusioned after his employer reduced his hours just below the threshold of the ACA requirement; he was forced to work two part-time jobs to make ends meet, neither of which provided healthcare. I suspect a non-trivial portion of the Tea Party / Trump backlash was in reaction to this sort of collateral damage: ACA helped many, but also left some worse off, even if employers and/or insurance companies should bear the primary blame.

There are some countries where mothers get their paycheck from their health insurance company while they are on maternity leave. It's heavily regulated and if they don't have private insurance, they can always opt for the state-run one.

I'm curious, what countries are you referring to?

I don't think it should be on my shoulders to pay for someone else deciding to breed, and I wouldn't expect them to pay for me. Over population is going to kill this planet and people are still breeding like rabbits.

> Over population is going to kill this planet

Source on this very big claim?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth

Except the population is not exponentially growing...

Except that overpopulation doesn't come from the US, or any first-world country really.

And don't twist my words, I'm not saying that Americans aren't largely participating in killing the planet. But that has nothing to do with overpopulation, it is a lifestyle thing.

> Over population is going to kill this planet and people are still breeding like rabbits.

If you're not leaving this planet with any progeny then I hardly see why you should care if that happens to be our planet's future.

First-world countries are usually below replacement birth rate. If we disincentivize people from having children, we're going to need a lot more immigration to avoid a population inversion. Is that your preferred alternative to ensure there are enough people of working age to support all the retirees?

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