Family time matters to new dads; update family policy
As the Golden State Warriors celebrated their NBA championship under a blizzard of golden confetti, Steph Curry took a victory lap around the court, hoisting not a game ball, but his little girl.
Draymond Green cradled his 6-month-old baby. The crowd went wild as JaVale McGee’s daughter napped on his shoulder. Zaza Pachulia greeted victory with his kids in tow.
A generation ago, fans scarcely knew whether pro athletes even had children. Now fatherhood is very hip, and not just in the NBA.
As paid work has become the norm for the vast majority of American mothers, fathers have increasingly discovered how much unpaid work goes into raising a family. More than 70 percent of women with children under age 18 work outside the home, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yet, women still do more child care. And they still don’t earn as much as men, even in the public sector, as Kate Karpilow has been reporting in a series for The Sacramento Bee. But last year, 50 percent of U.S. infants under a year old were in homes where both parents were working, and the average time their fathers spent caring for them was way, way up from their grandfathers’ day.
Since 1965, men spent about 2.5 hours a week on child care; that has more than doubled now to 6 hours. Some 2 million American dads were home full-time in 2014, twice the number in 1989.
As a result, there’s real pressure to update our nation’s business and public family leave policies. A Pew Research Center poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans – and 82 percent under age 30 – think fathers should have paid paternity leave. We think so, too.
Majorities of voters in both major parties support paid paternity leave. So do big corporate employers from Amazon to Zillow.
And so does at least one Trump, first daughter Ivanka. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump’s $25 billion federal paid leave program would steal money from unemployment insurance to let states offer paid leave for working parents. Not a good tradeoff.
California enacted the first statewide paid family leave plan in the nation in 2004, and now other states – including New York – are following. Still, only about 12 percent of U.S. non-government workers can get paid family leave.
The federal Family Medical Leave Act gives workers 12 weeks of job-protected leave to care for sick relatives and new babies, but doesn’t cover lost pay and doesn’t apply to anyone working at companies with fewer than 50 employees.
Even California’s pioneering program is a mingy patchwork; many new fathers who try to take paternity leave risk losing their jobs because the state lacks protections for workers employed by small businesses. Attempts to strengthen California’s program are routinely labeled “job killers” by business lobbyists, despite the fact that California’s plan is completely funded by workers through the disability insurance program. The problem appears to come down to political polarization.
It’s encouraging that economists at two think tanks – the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the liberal Brookings Institutions – have offered a compromise. Their plan would provide eight weeks of parental leave with job protection and 70 percent wage replacement. It would be funded by payroll taxes and savings, wouldn’t increase the deficit and wouldn’t harm low-income families.
Will Congress bite? Probably not. Congress can’t agree on anything. Still, each generation changes the game to suit its priorities and parental leave appears to be important to millennial parents.
“I think we have to realize that the ground has shifted,” New York Republican Rep. Peter T. King told The New York Times.
It has. If Congress shifts with it, America’s blossoming families would get a nice win.
This story was originally published June 17, 2017 at 4:46 PM with the headline "Family time matters to new dads; update family policy."