Back To Work

My parental leave is over. On Friday, I returned to work for the first time since Effie was born three months ago. "Returning to work" is a little misleading, I worked on Friday but from home, as is the white collar order of the day. I did what I normally do except see my children less and wear pants.

I have enjoyed two separate twelve-week paid parental leaves at two different companies. That is remarkable. Leave and millennial-friendly office space have been part of the arms race of high profile businesses for the last ten years or so which makes it easy to forget how rare policies like this still are. Only 12% of American workers have access to paid parental leave of any kind. The Federal Government only offered six weeks of paid leave in 2014. When I asked my dad how long he took off when I was born, he laughed. I was born on a Thursday, he was back at work on Monday, if not Friday. That may seem archaic but not only was it perfectly standard in 1984, consider that 25% of women return to work 10 days after giving birth today and you get a sense of how slowly these things move. One of the first pieces of federal legislation to grant specific categories of women and men up to twelve weeks of job-protected leave was passed in 1993—and that was unpaid leave. The idea of a baby not being a fireable offense in the United States is only about 25 years old.

How much should the government be involved in this? It gets bandied about that, by not offering mandatory leave, the United States is among a list of countries that include the Marshall Islands and Palau, which most Americans couldn't find on a map if federally mandated leave depended on it, but parental leave is a market question and the market can answer it. In places where leave is mandated by state governments—California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Rhode Island, with Oregon and Connecticut set to join that list in the next two years—businesses say that the policy has had a beneficial effect or no effect at all on their bottom line. In California, 91% of companies say the law has been neutral or better regarding profitability. Parental leave policies have been proven good for retention and for recruiting and as more companies adopt them, so will their competitors with or without government mandates. Personally, if I ever take a job with a company without one, my circumstances will have desperately changed.

Of course, statistically, parental leave for dads like me is a nothing but the crunch of the tiramisu. Not only do fathers benefit from staying at home in the early weeks of their children's lives, paid parental leave has little effect on a father's return to his employer or his potential earnings. Mothers find that a leave policy makes them slightly less likely to return to work in the short term and long term (2.8% and 5.4% respectively) compared to women who work at companies with no policies. It should be noted that that research is about 15 years old and that very little reliable data exists that breaks down the effect of leave on adoptive parents, foster parents and homosexual parents of any kind. It should also be noted that mothers that take leave suffer less from post partum depression.

Anecdotally, I can say that parental leave has been a godsend. Of course, I have no alternative with which to compare but I can hardly imagine not being with my children in those early days and weeks. A policy that allows for leave for mothers but not fathers cruelly highlights the unavoidable inequity of our biologies. It's true that I can't produce the literal life-sustaining material a newborn requires. And its true that washing bottles, changing diapers and soothing crying babies is pretty much table stakes for a parent and deserves no extra credit, especially compared with physical trauma of childbirth but for one person to do both—all the rearing while recovering from birth—feels overwhelming and my heartiest congratulations go out to those who have. Nor do I judge parents who forgo their leave, having worked out a situation with their partner or their circumstances that is most agreeable. My Catholic guilt, the same one that cripples me from asking for help even when I need it, would make me worthless at the office if I skipped my leave, knowing that my partner is at home struggling without me. Part of this is paternalistic vanity and it's just as likely that my partner is not struggling and may even enjoy the break from opera records and questions that are designed to have no answers. A set of helping hands is nice but if you turn to your partner while she's nursing to ask "If God is all-powerful, can he create something so heavy He can't lift it?" you must wonder if there's a limit. The point is, leave policies benefit families and employers whether they are taken or not.

And they benefit children. It's easy to say that America is lagging other nations on this but you first must recognize that the whole species is pretty late to the party. Despite having babies for some 200,000 years, the concept of human childhood, at least in the Western interpretation as a time of innocence and wonder, is only about 200 years old. In the Middle Ages, Europeans considered babies to be exceptionally endowed with original sin, which is what made them scream and defecate and keep their parents up in the middle of the night (such dismissals of children as sinners was also a practical response to an infant mortality rate of 20% to 30%). Dickens' tales of child workers were propagandistic, little different than Uncle Tom's Cabin (though much better written), designed to rally support for the abolishment of child labor during a time when a sizable portion of the population said "Well, their small hands are really useful for getting things around the machinery." The idea that we should stop industry at all to connect with an infant would seem bizarre not too many generations ago.

So it's good to be back at work. It's even better to have been able to take the time off, whatever "time off" means for a parent. Still, while 2020 has destroyed so many of our assumptions and norms but one I don't regret is that the only coworkers I see in person these days are the ones I'm related to. I like that.