Invisible Citizens.

The Children of Working Parents

Except for the United States and the United Kingdom, paid parental leave legislation is well established among developed nations, including Canada and most European countries. Infant day care, unless it is conveniently available at the mother s place of work, is not an adequate substitute for a mother s presence and care of newborns and infants in the early months. For working women from middle- and low-income households, paid maternal and family leave legislation is essential. At stake is an effective promotion of mental health and emotional well-being in the population and the prevention of child behavior disasters, anxious hyperactivity, delinquency, and crime. The United States is behind the curve.

The United States has had its current unpaid for three months legislation only since February 5, 1993 (after eight years of debate), and the United Kingdom only since December 15, 1999. Canada, on the other hand, has bad a nationally mandated and paid leave for six months program since 1971. And beginning January 2001, Canadian benefits are available to the mother for fifteen weeks and to the father or the mother for an additional thirty-five weeks, which, with available individual adjustments, will provide paid benefits for one full year.

The Canadian program is funded as part of the federal unemployment insurance program at 55 percent of insured earnings. In 2001, any mother who has been employed for at least twelve hours a week or 600 hours in the previous year will be eligible for benefits. Fringe benefits accumulate and a return to the previous job or equivalent is guaranteed. Part-time work while on leave is permitted. The father or the mother can then spend all or part of the day at home during the child's first year. Part-time earnings are permitted and reduce the maximum $413 a week Employment Insurance (EI) benefit on a formula basis. If such earnings exceed 125 percent of a particular individual's benefit rate, no EI benefit is paid at all.

A 1999 Council of Europe report affirms that two countries--Germany and Hungary--have legislation providing paid pregnancy and parental leave care for up to three years. Paid leave for up to two years is available in Austria and Rumania. Other European Community states--including Spain, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden--provide paid leave, but for less than two years.

The purpose of earlier unpaid maternity leave legislation was to guarantee a working mother the right to return to the same job. In contrast, the purpose of the newer paid leave legislation has been to enable both parents to make their unique contributions to the growth and development of their children in the first months and years.

Infant day care is not an adequate substitute for a reasonable period of bonding between the child and the mother or father for several months at home. The foundations of mental health and a contented rather than hyperactive child are at stake. Dr. Steve Wisensale, a professor of public policy and family studies at the University of Connecticut, reported in the April 17, 2000, Baltimore Sun that, in the U.S. population, nearly 50 percent of all mothers with children under the age of one are working.

Dad can give emotional and home support to Mom by being a good husband, sharing nurturing responsibilities such as feeding and changing, and by demonstrating healthy social attributes and a capacity for shared decision-making. The more recent development in family leave legislation to include the father as well as the mother (hence the term parental leave) is, therefore, highly relevant. For millions of couples these days, relatives live too far away to help out on a day-to-day basis.

The fact that current national leave legislation in the United States is unpaid, little used, and only for three months may have other implications as well. According to a study reported by Jane Brody in the August 3, 1999, New York Times, in 1957, 92 percent of all children were toilet trained by eighteen months (1.5 years). In 1999, only 2 percent were toilet trained even by twenty-four months (two years). Indeed, she reports that at this point it isn't until forty-eight months (age four) that as many as 98 percent of all preschoolers are out of diapers. Since toilet training and vocabulary development are closely associated, the relationship of all this to growing literacy problems and remedial reading budgets in the United States deserves to be further researched.

Brody further reports that the preferred explanation among many experts for the late toilet training dilemma is that working parents may be pushing their toddlers too early and too hard (many day care and most preschool settings insist that children be toilet trained), resulting in parent-child power struggles, conflict, and anxiety which in turn delay the child's capacity to perform. In addition, Brody writes: "Parents may be unable to devote the six or seven months it usually takes to complete toilet training. And toddlers cared for during the day by baby sitters or in day care often lack consistency in training techniques."

The possible role of an uninterrupted maternal/paternal bonding period for each infant in the first year in reducing toddler anxiety and increasing readiness for toilet training in the second year isn't addressed in the Brody review of recent research and expert opinion. The possible contribution then of twelve-month paid parental leave legislation is therefore entirely ignored in the United States context at present.

When the Family and Medical Leave Act was passed in 1993, the United States was one of only four industrialized nations lacking any kind of national legislation on maternal leave options. The 1993 act mandated private companies with fifty or more employees to offer an unpaid maternal leave of up to twelve weeks, with a guarantee of the same or equivalent job and wages upon return. This policy excluded workers in smaller companies (40 percent of the workforce), as well as those who worked less than 1,250 hours for that specific company in the previous twelve months (14 percent of the workforce). Consequently, just 5 percent of U.S. business and 46 percent of the workforce were covered.

Individual states have always been free to set requirements and standards that exceed federal requirements, and a number have done so both before and since the 1993 law. Similarly, private employers are free to offer nonmandated leave or some kind of payment during the leave as a "fringe benefit," usually in the form of accumulated sick days leave or short-term disability provisions.

A 1999 Gerstel and McGonagle review in Work and Occupations (volume 26) reports that studies since 1993 confirm the overwhelming inadequacy of the job-protected-but-unpaid, three-month-maximum leave legislation in the United States. It has proven to be of little help to working mothers in low-income jobs who are without wider family supports.

Since late 1999--and for the first time in U.S. history--a significant debate developed around a presidential proposal to use surplus and state-managed unemployment insurance (UI) funds to subsidize parents who take time off from work to care for a new child. A new initiative is underway, powerfully supported by the National Partnership for Women and Families (www.nationalpartner.org), as well as a growing number of civil society organizations.

On November 30, 1999, President Bill Clinton announced that the Department of Labor had initiated a revision of regulations to make explicit its already long-existing interpretation of the original 1935 and 1939 UI laws, as confirmed by Supreme Court decisions, that state unemployment insurance coverage could be more but couldn't be less than that required by federal law and regulations. Each state has its own separate UI trust fund, financed by a payroll tax on employers which varies from state to state.

The federal revision of regulations was finalized on June 10, 2000. The October 4, 2000, NPWF newsletter reports that some eighteen states are now developing proposals for paid family leave benefits and that five states--California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, and New York--have recently passed legislation requiring the formulation of alternative program models and funding sources for final consideration. If a few states pioneer this step, a new nationwide attention to this issue will rapidly follow, despite the current opposition of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In more ways than one, the depiction of U.S. and British capitalism as a "demolition derby" by Charles Hampden-Turner and Alfons Trompenaars in their 1995 volume on The Seven Cultures of Capitalism is well illustrated by the continued agony and stalemate in the United States over such things as health insurance, prescription drug benefits, and paid parental leave legislation.

Sheldon L. Rahn, D.S.W., is founding dean and emeritus professor of social policy, Faculty of Social Work, at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and a former executive director in the Social Welfare Department of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States. Hobart A. Burch, Ph.D., is a professor and former director in the School of Social Work at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and the former executive director of the National Social Welfare Assembly in New York.