Should Businesses Offer Paid Maternity Leave

The Benefits of Paid Maternity Leave

Introduction

While women have earned their way into the workplace to be treated as equals alongside men, part of what still makes women unique is their ability to be mothers and to carry a child. Mothers play an integral role in society, especially in the early days of when a child is born: the mother is the nurturer, the consoler, the shelter, and the provider. The mother’s bond with the newborn is effected over the first few weeks that the child is alive and this bond plays a significant role in the development of the child over the course of time. As society is always dependent upon well developed persons for the sake of its own future, the benefits of maternity leave can easily be premised upon this point. Paid maternity leave allows the mother to take care of the newborn child for a critical amount of time while maintaining an income, which should only be viewed as fair and well-deserved since the mother is caring for the future of society in this respect. This paper will show how paid maternity leave has a variety of economic, social and health benefits for all.

Economic Benefits

One of the economic benefits of paid maternity leave has been identified by former President Barack Obama, who stated that paid maternity leave “could help increase the percentage of women in the work force, and help middle-class families earn stable incomes” (Miller, 2015). This economic benefit is truly helpful as Americans like Ms. Casillas notes: “Honestly, without that income support, I wouldn’t have made it”—an admission that indicates just now necessary the paid maternity leave benefit really is, especially for single mothers who have no other income stream to rely upon (Miller, 2015). Helping new mothers to be able to stay afloat financially while they oversee one of the most important jobs they could ever possibly have—the raising of a new child for society—is a serious economic benefit. But it is not the only one.

Another economic benefit of paid maternity leave is that “paid leave raises the probability that mothers return to employment later, and then work more hours and earn higher wages”—a point which is actually beneficial for the whole economy (Miller, 2015). The more workers there are to contribute to the overall strength of the economy, the better off the nation is as a whole. Women who are given paid time off for maternity leave are women who are more likely to return to work satisfied that they have achieved one objective thanks to their employer’s support and now will be willing to come back to that same employer in gratitude and work harder than before. While paid maternity leave may be a minor burden on businesses for a short time, the long-term effect is that it makes mothers more loyal to the workplace and more likely to be a long-term, devoted employee. In short, it helps to build good will between employers and employees, which in turn ensures that work will continue over the long run and keep the economy firing on all cylinders.

For that reason, House and Vartanian (2012) highlight three important ways that paid maternity leave has an economic benefit:

· Women who report taking paid leave are more likely to be working 9 to 12 months after a child’s birth than are those who report taking no leave at all (“non?leave takers”).

· Paid family leave increases wages for women with children. Women who report leaves of 30 or more days are 54% more likely to report wage increases in the year following the child’s birth than are women who take no leave at all.

· Women who return to work after a paid leave have a 39% lower likelihood of receiving public assistance and a 40% lower likelihood of food stamp receipt in the year following the child’s birth, when compared to those who return to work and take no leave at all.

By continuing to pay new mothers a salary while they take a leave from their jobs, employers are essentially investing in their workers’ and in their own futures. They ensure a stronger loyalty from their workers, and that helps to reduce costly turnover rates; they ensure that their workers will be more likely to earn higher wages in the future, which helps to grow the overall economy; and they ensure that their workers will not have to rely upon welfare, such as food stamps, which would otherwise be a burden on taxpayers. By shouldering the responsibility of supporting new mothers with paid maternity leave, businesses demonstrate corporate social responsibility that promises positive economic outcomes for all stakeholders.

Social Benefits

The social benefits of paid maternity leave are equally as important. One of them is the fact that with paid maternity leave comes the opportunity for new mothers to bond with their new child, spend time with other mothers so that they can communicate and share experiences that can be supportive and helpful in adjusting to this new, important role, and engage in self-care and maintenance in order to reduce the risk of postpartum depression (Miller, 2015).

Another social benefit of paid maternity leave can be found on the positive impact it has on children. Wallace and Christensen (2015) report that paid maternity leave is helpful for children because it can actually “reduce infant mortality by as much as 10%, according to a 2011 study of 141 countries with paid leave policies.” A reduction in the infant mortality rate is certainly a positive for children—but that it is not all: paid maternity leave also “increases the likelihood of infants getting well-baby care visits and vaccinations, with one study finding that children were 25.3% and 22.2% more likely to get their measles and polio vaccines, respectively, when their mother had access to paid maternity leave” (Wallace & Christensen, 2015). In other words, when new mothers have employers who are financially supportive of their decision to stay home with their new babies for a period of time, those babies are more likely to be healthy over the long run than are children of mothers who do not receive that same kind of support. The reason is simple: when a mother can focus on a child without having to worry about where the next check is coming from, the needs of the child receive the attention they deserve.  

Thirdly, paid maternity leave is essentially a universal policy among the industrialized world (Houser & Vartanian, 2012), and by having this same kind of policy in place in the U.S., American society can feel confident that it is not lagging behind in the social standards recognized universally among all other developed nations. For example, Burtle and Bezruchka (2016) point out that “all wealthy nations other than the US have some form of legal guarantee that new parents can take paid time off to be with their child” (p. 31).

Health Benefits

Paid maternity leave also has health benefits: it gives new mothers the opportunity to get the rest they need without having to deal with the stress of having to find an alternate source of income during their leave. As Jennie Pasquarella, who needed more than year off work when she delivered twins, stated: “I was not sleeping for most of that period, so if the circumstances were different and I would have had to go back earlier, I don’t know how I would be able to properly function at work” (Miller, 2015). Taking time to nurture the body and get back to health is something that even paid professional athletes do: one need only look at Kawhi Leonard of the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA—he has taken off almost the entire 2017-2018 year (and has continued to receive his pay—and he did not even deliver a baby: he just injured a muscle and still wants time to heal completely before coming back to work). It is not a question of “milking the system”—nursing one’s body back to health is a reality for men and women, and new mothers are all different; some recover quite quickly while others take more time because their minds and bodies require it to heal effectively. Paid maternity leave can allow women to let their bodies heal appropriately so that at the end of the healing process, the new mother can return to work like her old self and be just as important in her old job as she was before.

Additionally, the more generous that employers are with their paid maternity leave policies, the less likely women are to suffer from depression down the road (Wallace & Christensen, 2015). There is a considerable long-term mental health effect that paid maternity leave can have, which researchers have identified in longitudinal studies over long term periods (Wallace & Christensen, 2015). The more time women have to take time off from work to devout to the caring of a new life, the more satisfied and confident they are likely to be in their later years. Having to choose between caring for a child and working a job can add years of stress to women’s lives (National Partnership for Women and Families, 2009) and force them to second-guess themselves for decades as they watch their child grow from a distance wondering their development might have been different had they not had to make the difficult choice of child vs. job.

Conclusion

In conclusion, paid maternity leave offers a number of economic, social and health benefits for mothers as well as for society as a whole. Businesses and the wider economy benefit from policies of paid maternity leave, which ensures continuity in the workplace over the long run and helps to reduce the risk of financial instability for new families. It provides social benefits such as allowing new mothers to bond with their children without having to worry about getting back to work immediately following the delivery of their child. It has health benefits as well, such as the fact that new mothers require time to nurture their bodies back to health, and the less rushed they feel, the more inclined they will be to get the rest they need. Dealing with the stress of knowing they only have a few weeks to adjust to what amounts to a new life with new demands and duties can be overwhelming for some, and with paid maternity leave new mothers can take solace in the knowledge that they will have the time they require to adapt to these new challenges. As nearly every other wealthy country in the world recognizes the value and importance of paid maternity leave, it is high time that America do the same and make it a national privilege for new mothers. The more that this country realizes and appreciates the role that mothers play in the lives of their children and by extension in society, the more accepting the nation will be of paid maternity leave.

References

Burtle, A., & Bezruchka, S. (2016). Population health and paid parental leave: What the United States can learn from two decades of research. Healthcare, 4(2), 30-36.

Houser, L. & Vartanian, T. (2012). Pay matters: The positive economic impacts of paid
family leave for families, businesses and the public. Retrieved from http://www.nationalpartnership.org/research-library/work-family/other/pay-matters.pdf

Miller, C. (2015). The economic benefits of paid parental leave. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/01/upshot/the-economic-benefits-of-paid-parental-leave.html

National Partnership for Women and Families. (2009). Fact sheet: Children benefit when parents have access to paid leave. Retrieved from http://www.nationalpartnership.org/research-library/work-family/paid-leave/children-benefit-when-parents.pdf

Wallace, K. & Christensen, J. (2015). The benefits of paid leave for children are real, majority of research says. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/29/health/paid-leave-benefits-to-children-research/index.html