Kim Burnett
Hon Eng 10
Period 6
28 April 2018
The Fight for Family Leave Ali Phetteplace, “waited six years between having her two children in part to accrue enough time off for an adequate leave, but health issues left her on the negative side of the ledger… she will have only eight days of paid for when she delivers her baby” -The New York Times. Everyone needs to be relieved from work at some point to attend to family members in need, for personal health reasons, or to care for a newborn child. For decades, family leave has not been an option for several employees. Throughout the years, the fight for paid family leave has been a constant struggle for women, but nothing substantial has been done. Family leave promotes child bonding, improves …show more content…
Women who have the option of family leave and take it benefit themselves by becoming close with their baby and avoiding the risk of postpartum depression. Mothers spending time with their newborn through family leave have a more probable chance of easily breastfeeding their child. There’s an overwhelming amount of benefits women and their babies receive from taking leave, but fathers who participate in taking leave experience them as well. In an article promoting men’s benefits of family leave, the author claims, “Father’s who take time off work at and around childbirth are more likely to be involved in childcare later in the child’s life” (Krause 3). When fathers choose to take family leave available to them, they promote themselves by becoming closer to their newborn child and support the child’s mother by making themselves available to help out. Krause also adds, “Children whose fathers are more involved in their early years perform better than those with fathers who are less involved on a variety of measures, including improved language skills, cognitive test scores, and social development” (Krause 3). In the long run, mothers, fathers, and children benefit greatly from parents taking time off from work in their child’s early stage of life. Generally, when parents aren’t there for their child early on, their relationship turns out to …show more content…
However, several low-wage workers can’t afford taking 12 weeks of unpaid leave, and end up only taking a small fraction of that time just to give birth to their child to avoid losing pay. It’s no secret that a majority of people go into debt, lose their job, or have a deduction of their final pay due to becoming a parent or caring for family members in need. So far, the only federal leave protection offered to American workers with newborn children is the Family and Medical Leave Act, which only provides an employer twelve weeks of unpaid leave, if she or he has worked at their job for a minimum of one year (Traister 3). In a video included by an organization’s website, it stated, “Today, only one in seven American workers receives paid childbirth leave, that makes the United States unique in the world” (“Paid Family and Medical Leave” 1). Many low-wage employees, several of them teachers, are forced to use their accumulated sick leave days as a substitute for family leave days they wouldn’t get pay for. Paid leave, especially for women with newborn children, has become such an issue in recent years that it’s become a part of the national dialogue (Strauss 2). Single-parent women struggle more than women who have a father helping care for their child, and suffer in their careers whenever they have to take time off. Women of color have it even worse, because for every dollar a