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[acumonk-blog]

The parental leave conundrum

There’s a sleep training boom currently. 

The industry has emerged as more and more parents start families later in life, already deep in their careers with fewer supports and with the expectation that they return to work in x number of weeks when their babies magically fell in-line and slept like babies (???)

Babies, who hardly need to be trained to sleep (it’s a biological need), don’t always sleep the way we want or need them to. They do not sleep through the night magically. They wake to feed (totally normal) until at least 3-4 months. Sometimes they wake for no reason other than they like being near their caregivers and sometimes tale a really long while to resettle. As a return to work looms, many desperate, bleary-eyed new parents seek out sleep training so they can get back to a semblance of normalcy rather than dragging themselves into work like zombies. Sleep training is for the parents, not the babes.

But where did this magic number of a 12-week parental leave thing come from? Who decided that at 12 weeks a baby was ready to be away from her mother or her mother away from the baby? 12 weeks is hardly “standard” either. The WHO recommends 16-weeks of leave (paid or unpaid) and the United States is one of the only countries in the developed world without a standard leave requirement (yes there is FMLA, but this only applies to companies over 50 AND let’s be honest, a loss of income for 12 weeks is hard on most families). Let’s tip our hats to our neighbors to the north, Canada!

32 weeks into my pregnancy I proposed a leave policy for my last company (we didn’t have a documented policy before then), and did a tremendous amount of research around it so I’d have some support for my proposal of 12 weeks. A leave of 16 weeks seems like an acceptable minimum for many larger tech companies, however there are standouts: Google, for example, has a 24-week policy and will lock new parents out of their work email for the duration of that time. Netflix is about as generous and forward-thinking as any large company: they allow a new parent to take as much time as he or she needs (up to a year). A year! Now that I’m a year into motherhood, I can attest that the first year is exhilarating and terrifying and so wonderful, but mostly all encompassing. 

My maternity leave was 10 weeks (fully paid - so I have a hard time complaining about it) however I still ran payroll and dealt with any critical HR issue while I was “out”. I returned to work midway through the pandemic, which means I was still working from home exclusively; not much changed except that I was feeling a tremendous amount of pressure to prove myself. I felt like no one trusted me to do what was expected of me. It was demeaning. 

As a culture we celebrate the hustle. We celebrate those who break themselves working. It’s time to do more in less time and celebrate people who focus on their lives as much as their work.

Companies need to do better. The US government needs to do better. We need to do better.