As so many of us working moms realize, juggling career and family can seem like an Olympic endeavor. It takes Herculean strength and endurance—as we all know—and a lot of money. In other countries, working moms get more help. Can you imagine having the ability to take six months off with paid maternity leave? How dreamy would it be if your partner took a month of paternity leave with his job intact upon return? In America, these scenarios seem like pipe dreams. In fact, America ranks with developing world countries in its lack of family-friendly policies. For instance, the US is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t provide paid leave to mothers (163 others do). Australia is the only other industrialized country that doesn’t give paid leave, but it actually guarantees a year of unpaid leave—compare that to our meager twelve weeks. And surprisingly, forty-five other countries offer paid paternity leave to fathers.
Because families aren’t supported, new mothers are often forced to make compromises and hard decisions. Just ask my sister. She gave birth to a premature boy last August—eight weeks too soon. Sadly, as a social worker for her state government, she received no paid leave and could only take the twelve weeks of unpaid maternity leave as guaranteed by our Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA). This was quite hard for her to do financially. She had many medical bills and had used all her vacation time, so extending the maternity leave just wasn’t an option.
As the time to return to work approached, her physician actually told her that she couldn’t put her son into day care. He said flatly “putting your premature baby into daycare is tantamount to child abuse.” Can you imagine how a social worker must feel hearing that? He explained that placing a child into day care when its age is the equivalent to a newborn’s, with a weakened immune system and special needs to boot, would put him at risk.
The sad thing is that my sister graduated top of her class when receiving her master’s degree in social work. She was the one, out of my four siblings, who aced her SATs without trying and is an amazing pianist. She could have chosen a field that paid more, clearly, but she wanted to give back to our society as a social worker. Well, it’s not giving much back to her in return.
Luckily she found a friend, a music teacher, to agree to be a part-time nanny and she cut back her hours at work. A part-time social worker who is a single mom doesn’t necessarily earn enough and I worry about what it will mean when it’s time for my nephew to enter preschool—as the costs can be astronomical. (For more information, see “American Child Care: Poor Quality at a Sky-High Price”)
Enter MomsRising.org
Stories like this don’t surprise Joan Blades. In fact, they are the reason why she felt compelled to do something. As the former co-founder of MoveOn.org, Joan is a veteran in motivating people and giving them the technical tools to impact change. She’s now giving those tools to families with her latest endeavor: MomsRising.org. Like MoveOn, MomsRising pushes for policy change by galvanizing it’s now 80,000 members to begin demanding family-friendly policies, often through email campaigns that require only a digital signature from its members to participate. Some of the policies the organization supports include paid maternity leave, paternity leave, equal pay for mothers, and higher pay and standards for day care workers and facilities. Last week, I chatted by phone with Joan, a working mom of two in northern California. She outlined her goals for MomsRising and her hopes for a future that provides more support to America’s working families.
Laura: Is it realistic to expect the government to pass legislation mandating paid maternity leave of some length in the next ten years?
