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Key points
- We need greater support for parents during the first year and beyond.
- Few companies provide parental leave after the first year; reliable statistics are unavailable.
- The U.S. needs broader paid leave policies.
As I watched my 3- and 15-year-old talk, I started thinking about Jean Piaget and paid parental leave. At first, this may seem odd, but hear me out.
According to Piaget, my 3-year-old is in the preoperational phase, characterized by egocentrism, and my 15-year-old is in the formal operational phase, characterized by abstract thinking and metacognition. Both of those phases require caregiving support and guidance.
My 3-year-old needs support in learning basic life skills as well as social-emotional skills, including perspective-taking, while my 15-year-old needs support in navigating challenges around identity development. Yet despite the theoretical and research evidence on the importance of parents across childhood, the issue of parental leave often solely focuses on the first year. Paid leave during the first year is essential for bonding and parental identity development, and in the U.S., we need to come a long way in our leave policies for new parents.
Yet parenting and transitions occur across a child and parent’s life. We need flexible paid caregiving leave policies in this country.
At each period and transition point in parenting and development, new joys and challenges arise for both parent and child. At each of these stages, there is vulnerability as we, as parents, reevaluate our roles and how to support our children best as they face new opportunities and challenges.
As the parent of an infant, one needs to provide for their child’s biological as well as psychological needs with little reciprocal feedback. This is also when one may be looking for child care and placing one’s child in another’s care. It may also be when one is deciding to focus on their work at home rather than past work outside the home. Such decisions have a huge impact on one’s identity and where one sees themselves.
Toddlerhood and early childhood, on the other hand, are often marked by periods of intense love and attention (while also boundary-pushing) from one’s child. It is also the beginning of formal schooling for many children for many children for many children. As children enter kindergarten, the majority of their awake time is often away from their parents and at school.
No matter whether working exclusively in the home or outside as well, the beginning of “mandatory” schooling marks a period when others (teachers, policies) play a crucial role in your child’s development. No longer does the somewhat romantic (yet stressful) notion of being the singular influence in your child’s life exist.
At this stage, knowing one’s children’s friends and their parents is important for showing interest and connection with one’s child and for connecting with other parents around caregiving practices. All of this takes time.
Middle childhood marks yet another turning point in one’s child and in oneself as a parent. It is characterized by a time of beginning separation from one’s parents. At this stage, peers become extremely important in a child’s life and identity development. To begin to find and identify themselves as their own person, children now feel like they must distance themselves from their parents.
At this stage, parental role often feels like putting up guardrails to protect one’s child in their explorations. One must know their child well and be present to know exactly what those guardrails must be.
The teen years are often marked by an even more intense need to distance themselves to form their identity. While teenagers often report having goals that map onto their parents’ attainments, they often do not acknowledge this, and when they do, fight against it. One’s role as a parent now becomes that of making sure one’s child is prepared for challenges and safe and protected.
But how do we as a society support families during these critical junctures? According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics poll, only 23% of companies provide paid parental leave during the transition to parenthood. So few companies provide parental leave after the first year that reliable statistics are not available.
The first year is critical for children’s neural development but so are the later years for neural, as well as psychological health. The statistics speak to these needs, with accidents being the leading cause of death for young children and suicide for teenagers. Our teens need us just as our infants do.
Yet, we don’t provide structural support for parents of not only young but also, and maybe especially, older children. The discussion over paid parental leave needs to include parents of children of all ages.
