Happy Mother’s Day! Contact your legislators about paid family leave! It’s good for everyone, and it lasts longer than brunch or roses. Ahem:
It’s good (or just neutral) for businesses.
Even small ones. (”Small employers, if anything, report fewer problems than large firms.”)
Most coworkers don’t actually mind. Per a study on New Jersey’s Family Leave Insurance program (FLI): “Several said they expected employees to begrudge their co-workers’ time off, but did not witness that sort of resentment... The impact of the FLI program on morale is ‘tremendous’... Several employers noted in particular that FLI helped reduce stress among their employees.”
Parenting skills can make for improved workers. This study shows that even though it’s stressful, moms (and to a lesser extent, dads) become better multi-taskers.*
On a national level, better (any!) leave policies would make America greater. Call me, Department of Labor! I want to work with the people who make pages like this one happen.
At the very least, paid family leave demonstrates employees’ value, and businesses’ savvy for hiring them in the first place. It upholds and promotes the truth that a woman is more than the encasing of a uterus. That no matter how noble motherhood may be, a mom is more than a mom. That we want workers to be good humans, not just good numbers.
Not that we are always good humans. I once openly confronted a professor and classmate about the agreement they made, in front of the annoyed class, that that student alone might take an exam under different, seemingly easier circumstances than the rest of us. I sought out the student after class to apologize, and was (duly) tersely informed of her circumstance. I will never question my colleagues’ unique needs again.
Fast Company offers a great little etiquette piece about how coworkers might treat non-parental varieties of family leave. Not every coworker will be altruistic. (We can’t all live in New Jersey!) The columnist says that if it assuages your own discomfort, let these particularly sour people know that you have worked with HR. That your envied work schedule accommodates unenviable personal circumstances.
I can’t help but imagine extending this further, when it comes to parental leave. Don’t hold back! Describe the diaper changes, unknowable whims, mystery fevers, and irregular intervals of shrieking in great detail. Throw in how it feels to be constantly judged.** Do your coworker a favor, and differentiate family leave from “meternity” leave - a bloviating and un-link-worthy concept that somehow degrades parenthood, partnership, singledom, and professionalism all at once.
So call your lawmakers and don’t stop talking about it. When all of this is cleared up, bring the little people to your workplace once in a while! Just... don’t let them press the buttons.
Happy Mother’s Day!
--C
*Sadly, the study summary also offers this:
Authors also believe that multitasking—particularly at home and in public—is a more negative experience for working mothers than for fathers because mothers’ activities are more susceptible to outside scrutiny.
And how.
**Not promoting JetBlue. I hate flying in general.
**
Afterthought: While we’re at it, let’s offer compensation for the work a person does at home that allows their partner, their child, their whoever, to do work outside of it. As Melinda Gates so succinctly puts it, within her and Bill’s longer annual letter this year:
Unpaid work is what it says it is: It’s work, not play, and you don’t get any money for doing it. But every society needs it to function.
Among other things, a basic income would relieve the more domestically inclined or assigned partner from the pressure to stay with a breadwinner who may be abusive or otherwise harmful.
