What Are The Benefits of Paid Family Leave?

Paid family leave can also help reduce racial disparities in wage loss for minority populations.

What Are The Benefits of Paid Family Leave?

It is time for all of us parents to GET LOUD and advocate for PAID FAMILY LEAVE for all!!! 🚨

Research finds that paid family leave provides many benefits to children and parents.

Specifically, paid family leave is associated with the following benefits:

• Decreased rates of child abuse and maltreatment (Klevens, Luo, Xu, Peterson, & Latzman, 2016)
• Increased time that parents spend with their children (even after returning to work), including mothers spending increased time reading to, talking to, and helping with homework and fathers playing with children for more hours per week (Trajkovski, 2019)
• Infants are more likely to be vaccinated (Choudhury & Polachek, 2021) and less likely to be hospitalized (Pihl & Basso, 2018)
• Children showed a lower risk for ADHD, recurrent ear infections, hearing problems, and obesity (Lichtman-Sadot, & Bell 2017)
• Increased likelihood and duration of breastfeeding (Hamad, Modrek, & White, 2019; Huang & Yang, 2015)
• Improved relationships among parents and infants and improved mental health of mothers (Bullinger, 2019
• Reduced risk for premature and low birthweight infants (Stearns, 2015)
• Children are more likely to graduate high school, attend college and even earn more like adults (Carneiro, Løken, & Salvanes, 2015)
• Decreased risk of a family dipping below the poverty threshold after the birth of a baby (Stanczyk, 2019)
• 12% reduced risk for infant death (Montoya‐Williams, Passarella,& Lorch, 2020).
• Women with paid leave are less likely to leave the workforce (Baum & Ruhm, 2016)
• Employers report that paid leave did not impact employees’ productivity, cooperation, or attendance. Employers also reported that paid leave increased their ease of dealing with extended employee absences (Bartel, Rossin-Slater, Ruhm, Slopen & Waldfogel, 2021).

Contact your local congressmen and representatives and ask them to support paid leave for all.

Originally published at https://theparentinggoals.com on December 8, 2021.