The United States is the only country in the world to not have federal parental leave. It takes 6-8 weeks for a mother to recovery from birth of any means and the 1st year of life is critical to a baby’s future health and success.
Lobbyists have stopped any attempts at making policies or laws to make this a reality – due to corporate greed. The reason why women often end up using formula even if they can breastfeed is because it’s too difficult to keep up a breast milk supply once the mother has to go back to work. Formula companies since the 1940-1950’s have capitalized on mothers who weren’t educated and were lied and falsely told that formula was more nutritious than breast milk.
Mothers should be allowed up to a year, comparable with the policy existing in Canada, to spend with their infants. Women must be paid equivalent to their weekly earnings or salary as to not affect the ability to provide for the family and her child. An option to extend to 18 months should be available just as it is in Canada.
Question, why only 1 year? Why not 4-5 years until the child starts going to school? Or 17-18 years until they graduate high school? And what stops someone from taking time off and finding another job, remote or otherwise, while still getting paid from the first job. I worked with a lady who talked it over with her husband and they figured out that with the cost of child care, the cost of a car (car, maintenance, taxes, gas, insurance, etc,), food (they ate out a lot because she worked), she was working 40 hours a week for about $120.00 a month. She was a great worker, I was sad to see her leave. I know 2 other families where both parents worked, had children and one of the parents quit working to take care of them. Yes, they had to cut back. They got together with a couple of other families, both mothers in this case, but it could have been the dads. and home schooled the children, I think there were 7 or 8 kids total. The 2 girls I know were straight A students and graduated Summa Cum Laude from college. Was it easy, heck no, but was it worth it, they will tell you absolutely yes.
This also would increasingly give companies reason to either
Find ways to ‘legally’ get away with not hiring women
actively encourage their women employees to not give birth (either not get pregnant in the first place or just get abortions if they do)
It is not economically viable for a person to spend a year getting paid to not only not work, but eat up space that could be occupied by someone who could be working.
First, this proposal - and you pointing out that yes, being a mother is a job - runs into the issue of wanting to focus on being a mother full time, but only for the first year, and then after that year is up the expectation is to make being a mother secondary to some other job.
And that’s kind of what @ffemt1 is getting into - you’re using “Being a mother is work” to defend this policy, but this policy also expect that after the first year the mother should just prioritize career over the child.
Second, yes, being a mother is work, but work is also work. That job you want a year off from? That’s not a vacation either, and you’re asking that companies should be required to pay their employees to just not show up for work for a year and just be fine with it, not taking into account that the more a company has to pay an employee to not do the thing the employee was hired for the more difficulty the company is going to have functioning.
So the more time you require a company to pay an employee to just not be there and not actually do any work that justifies the company paying that employee, the more companies are going to look at legal ways of getting around that problem.
And, again, getting back to Bob Wright’s point, why stop at one year? Based on the importance you’re placing on raising the child, then why is it so important to stop prioritizing the child after a year?
If you want to emphasize that being a mother is work, then why does it stop being work after a year?