was originally reported by Barbara Rodriguez of .Ìę

A new health report by the Trump administration claims it wants more people in the United States to breastfeed their babies. Experts on the topic and caregiving advocates have a few suggestions — including a federal paid parental leave policy that the nation currently lacks.

The recommendation on breastfeeding is one of dozens in the released this week that aims to address childhood chronic disease. The details are scarce for now, but it commits that two federal agencies — the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services — will work to increase breastfeeding rates through and “other policies” that support breastfeeding parents. The agencies will also work with federal partners to develop policies to promote and ensure a safe supply of donor human milk.

The MAHA report does not reference support for a federal paid parental leave program.

Experts agree that more breastfeeding is possible in the United States, but it will require the government to enact structural reform and to make financial investments — at a time when the president and his cabinet have proposed that could help.

“If we really want to tackle this issue, we know the solutions. We know the structural policies and investments it requires,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, founding director of the organization Paid Leave for All. “But instead of investing in working families they are slashing these investments and coming up with everything but the real fixes.”

About 84 percent of the 3.5 million parents who give birth each year in the United States initiate breastfeeding. But there is a major drop-off during the first months after birth, and fewer than 40 percent of U.S. infants are still receiving human milk when they turn a year old. Sixty percent of parents who begin breastfeeding report that they stopped sooner than they planned.

Rafael PĂ©rez-Escamilla, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health who has extensively researched breastfeeding, said the high initiation rate shows that new parents are highly motivated. breastfeeding or pumping has health benefits to the nursing parent — it can reduce cardiovascular disease and rates of cancer — and the baby, whose immune system can be strengthened.

“So it’s not an issue that women don’t want to breastfeed. The issue is that the great majority, or half of the women who choose to breastfeed, cannot breastfeed for as long as they want. It’s not even as long as recommended, as long as they want. And it is because of these major structural barriers,” he said.

PĂ©rez-Escamilla is one of several authors of a . That report, commissioned by Congress in 2023, offers evidence-based recommendations to improve and expand breastfeeding services and rates. Among its suggestions:

• A federal paid parental leave program
• More maternity services at designated that encourage breastfeeding
• More coordinated postpartum breastfeeding services between the federal government and states, since WIC is a federal program but is often administered by state and local health agencies
• Breastfeeding training in medical schools, nursing schools and other allied health professions
• Medicaid and private insurances need to cover more breastfeeding services and educate parents about the benefits available to them

The report was supported by a contract between the National Academy of Sciences and the health department that’s now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A spokesperson for Kennedy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new MAHA report.

The United States is the only high-income country in the world that doesn’t have a federal mandate for paid maternity leave — to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months and then to continue for at least two years. That’s , and it has been .

Among parents of color, breastfeeding rates are lower for Black women, Native American and Alaska Native women. It also impacts women with lower socioeconomic status, unmarried women, women living in rural areas and younger mothers. Many are more likely to work in jobs that do not provide paid parental leave. The United States currently only allows some workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off after the birth or adoption of a child — but the protections of are not available to all employees, and even with that in place many are unable to afford it.

“We know that a very high proportion, especially of very low-income women, many of whom are women of color, end up having to go back to work very, very soon after birth,” added PĂ©rez-Escamilla. “So they just don’t even have a chance to get their milk properly established. They don’t have that social support that they need.”

A federal paid parental leave policy in particular could be a game changer. that parents who received 12 or more weeks of paid leave were more likely to initiate breastfeeding when compared to parents with no paid leave. Those with paid leave are also more likely to be breastfeeding when their child is six months old.

In California, a paid family leave law enacted in 2004 that ensured mothers up to six weeks of some paid leave to have increased the overall duration of breastfeeding by nearly 18 days, and the likelihood of breastfeeding for at least six months by 5 percentage points.

“Establishing the breastfeeding relationship and establishing the breastfeeding supply is the most important thing when it comes to be able to being able to breastfeed, and that needs to happen right after birth,” said Inimai Chettiar, president of A Better Balance, a nonprofit organization that has advocated for worker protections for pregnant and postpartum people.

Chettiar said that beyond support for paid family leave, enforcement of existing laws is also key. Her organization runs a free legal helpline where parents report workplace complaints that may be in violation of and , two federal laws that have protections for postpartum parents.

“There is a need for policies — and enforcement. Enforcement of those policies around giving women space and time, not just to pump but to establish breastfeeding,” she said.

Chettiar also pointed to a need for ongoing research into maternal health disparities. Complications from delivery — which can impact milk supply — happen more frequently to .

“Not addressing the racial disparities around this seems like a huge gap, and I don’t see how any kind of program that tries to increase breastfeeding can be in any way successful without addressing the underlying health disparities,” she said.

Huckelbridge said her organization is advocating for a federal paid leave law, because the state-level system that has emerged in recent years to provide paid leave to new parents — 13 states and the District of Columbia have laws that guarantee paid family leave programs, while other states have partnered with insurance companies to offer optional policies — are not enough for the people who don’t live in those states.

“That is increasing the divide between the haves and have nots,” she said. “Until we have a federal program that is truly universal, it’s going to be really hard to reach people who need it most.”

The fact that breastfeeding even got a mention in the MAHA report was welcome news to Cecilia Tomori, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who has studied what it takes to increase breastfeeding. She was among the co-authors of the , and worked with PĂ©rez-Escamilla on a series in that examines the impact of how infant formula is marketed to parents and its impact on breastfeeding. Kennedy has vowed and the MAHA report includes a blurb on developing new infant formulas.

“We welcome any opportunity to enhance support for breastfeeding, because it is indeed obviously crucial to maternal and child health, and really longer term outcomes,” she said. “In terms of how to implement changes that we need, there are many different ways to do that.”

PĂ©rez-Escamilla said the administration’s focus on WIC can be a positive avenue, since the USDA, through the program, serves nearly half of all infants born in the United States. It offers low-income families a range of services, including a tailored food package and a peer lactation support program.

“The WIC program is clearly one of the key settings through which strengthening policies or new policies could be implemented,” he said.

But Tomori worries about cuts to other programs that provide food and nutritional support to low-income parents. President Donald Trump’s tax and spending law that he signed over the summer would , a separate program that helps poor families pay for groceries. , the federal-state health insurance program, also raised questions about the future of some related coverage for pregnant and postpartum parents.

“Food assistance makes a difference prenatally and postnatally,” she said. “If you want to influence health in a nation and to actually improve health over time, investing in supporting mothers and infants is one of the most effective strategies and provides the greatest return on investment. So anything that threatens that is going to have impacts on health.”

The MAHA report also called for promoting and ensuring a safe supply of donor human milk, a detail that Lindsay Groff finds promising. She is executive director of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America, a nonprofit organization that helps screen the donation of breast milk that can then be pasteurized and used in hospitals and outpatient settings to feed medically fragile children who are often in neonatal care. While the federal government inspects milk banks as food manufacturing facilities, the system is run by outside groups.

The issue intersects with breastfeeding. When a baby is born premature, a parent who intends to breastfeed may not be producing milk yet. Donor milk, which Groff called a “bridge,” helps fill that gap and increases the likelihood that a parent will be able to breastfeed later because the child may not be introduced to formula. The access can be lifesaving: Scientific evidence shows that using donor human milk can reduce cases of necrotizing enterocolitis, an intestinal disease that primarily impacts premature or very low birth weight infants.

Groff’s organization has advocated for that would increase federal funding for nonprofit donor milk. The bill includes setting up a mechanism for letting more people know about the role of human milk in saving lives and increasing breastfeeding.

“Having funding from the federal government could make a huge difference in our reach, in our ability to raise awareness — so that more people can donate milk, and more milk means helping more babies,” she said.

PĂ©rez-Escamilla said it’s important to note that the solutions to increasing breastfeeding rates are multifaceted, and they require the federal government to work with states to ensure implementation of existing maternal health programs and new ones.

“It’s very complex. It involves, can you imagine: health care systems, social protection systems. It involves the education sector. It involves the employment and labor sector as well,” he said. “And it requires systems thinking and really understanding how to coordinate better.”

Undeterred by the rain, a few kids play at an outdoor playground and soccer field, but most are exploring the indoor playroom, which has games, toys, art supplies and a staff that oversees these kids activities. At noon, free lunch will be served to any child who brings their own cup and spoon. Today it’s vegetarian pea soup. The city of Helsinki is footing the bill so kids and families have a reliable place to eat and play.Ìę

Finland, like other Nordic countries, boasts generous benefits for families with children: access to free, high-quality prenatal care; an option to take up to three years of paid parental leave; heavily subsidized child care programs, which can be free for families up to a certain income threshold; and spaces like that provide play areas and free meals for families. This is in sharp contrast to the United States, which lacks a national child care infrastructure and has no federal paid leave policy. America leaves individual families responsible for arranging maternal health care, navigating parental leave benefits and sorting out child care decisions — and most of child care subsidies and meal programs are means tested and subject to political whims.

The collective-minded Finland and the individualistic United States have taken wildly different approaches to supporting families, but both leave a key population of caregivers struggling: stay-at-home parents. As seek solutions to address a declining birth rate, they may need to consider developing more support for parents who choose to stay home and care for their children.

Limited Benefits for Stay-at-Home Parents

Six months after giving birth, Virtanen went back to work as a lab technician. The decision was purely financial. She wanted to stay at home and care for her daughter, but she was the breadwinner, so her husband, Roope Jokinen took a year off from university, where he studies violin, to be their daughter’s primary caregiver. Shortly after returning to work, Virtanen cut back to part time hours so she could spend a day at home with her daughter each week, but the pay cut has been difficult for their family, especially with Jokinen still in school. Their arrangement allowed the couple to wait until their daughter was 18 months old to enroll her in a child care program, but even then, Virtanen said, it felt too soon. “It might have been easier if she was older,” she said. “She may have understood why we were taking her there.”

In Finland, stay-at-home parent benefits are primarily connected to paid family leave, meaning the time a parent can take from work to care for the birth or adoption of a child. Finland provides via Kela, a government agency that administers benefits under national social security programs. Eligible working parents who decide to care for their own children can apply to receive an income-related parental allowance based on their annual earnings. It has a sliding scale based on income and it decreases significantly after the first year. After a child turns 2 years old, this allowance ends but parents who choose to forgo paid work and care for their child at home can receive a fixed monthly child home care allowance until the child turns 3. And at any point from birth through age 3, a parent can opt for their child to attend a child care program and the cost is generously subsidized by the Finnish government. 

But even with the robust ecosystem of family policies in Finland, the economics of caregiving can create stress, especially for parents who want to stay at home to care for their children. For high earners, like Virtanen, the allowance would have been too significant a pay cut, which is why she opted to return to work. And while Jokinen qualified for the minimum allowance because he’s a student, it barely made a dent in the cost of raising a family. 

Many American families face similar pressures. While some American workers are eligible to take unpaid family leave through the (FMLA), and some states and private employers do offer a paid family leave benefit, many parents find themselves calculating the cost of care against their leave benefits and making decisions they may not view as ideal for child care. 

In the U.S., non-working parents who care for their children at home are ineligible for benefits, largely because the handful of child care policies the U.S. has implemented have had an explicit goal of boosting workforce participation. , for example, was a federally supported program that subsidized child care for working mothers during World War II. The tax policies designed to offset the costs of child care, such as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, are only available to families in which both parents work. And even states like Vermont and New Mexico, which have generous and innovative child care policies, don’t provide benefits for parents who wish to care for their children.

An Evolving Policy, With Steps Toward Supporting Family Preferences for Child Care

In 2022, Finland took a step toward supporting family preferences. The , allowing them to to take up to six months of paid leave. Before that, the policy only applied to mothers. This change has challenged societal norms around gender and work, explained Miina Pakarinen. Pakarinen is currently on maternity leave with her second son, who won’t get his name until a non-religious naming ceremony in August. He goes by one of his many nicknames, including Paavo, which means pope, since he was born the day Pope Leo the XIV was elected. With her older son, who was born in 2021, Pakarinen spent 10 months at home, and had her mother care for him until he started a child care program at age 1. But with Paavo, Pakarinen is planning to return to work at an employment agency when he turns 6 months old, and then her husband will stay home for six months. 

“It’s making our society more equal,” she said of the paid leave split. “Both at home and at work, with who gets to take the time off.” Pakarinen is not interested in being a stay-at-home parent, but acknowledges that creating more choices for families is beneficial, and she’s looking forward to her husband being the caregiver when she returns to work. 

This step has helped Finland better support family choice, but the reality remains that even in a country with generous family policies and a strong child care infrastructure, the economics of child care is fraught. Heavily subsidized, high-quality child care may be a solution that works for most families, but there’s not a one-size-fits-all policy for families. And like the handful of child care policies in the U.S., most of the support requires outsourcing the care provided, with little support for families who opt to do it on their own. 

Addressing declining birth rates — a challenge Finland and the U.S. share — requires building a more robust, supportive child care system that takes into account family preferences for care. Both countries may need to consider developing family policies, tax credits and incentives that extend to parents who opt to stay home to bond and care for their babies and young children.

For Virtanen, staying at home isn’t in the cards for now. But she said she’d reconsider if she has another child, even if it comes with a financial cost. “I want to be the one caring for her,” she said. 

Louisiana lawmakers gave initial approval to a bill that would provide six weeks of paid parental leave to teachers, but its cost has made some lawmakers wary.

, authored by Sen. Samuel Jenkins, D-Shreveport, comes with a $15 million cost to the state. The proposal was approved without objection Wednesday in the Senate Education Committee, but several members voiced concerns about its fiscal impact. Although the schools will still be responsible for the employee’s leave pay, the state would reimburse the school for the expense of a substitute teacher.

Committee chairman Sen. Rick Edmonds, R-Baton Rouge, warned Jenkins he should work on the cost before his bill gets to the Senate Finance Committee, which must also approve the legislation before it’s considered on the Senate floor.

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Jenkins amended his bill in the education committee to cut down its cost, but the legislative fiscal staff has yet to update its calculations. Under the amendment, the state would reimburse local school systems for the cost of a substitute teacher to cover the on-leave employee. Before the change, Jenkins’ bill required the state to cover the cost of the teacher’s salary during the parental leave period.

Depending on how the Legislative Fiscal Office accounts for substitutes, the amendments could make the bill $11 million cheaper.

Substitute teachers make between $60 and $100 a day depending on the school system, the substitute’s background and the length of substitution. Teacher salaries in Louisiana average $56,175 a year for 182 days of work.

The daily rate of pay for a teacher for six weeks is just over $9,000. A substitute would cost on average $2,400 for six weeks.

Under Jenkins’ legislation, teachers and support staff will be eligible for paid parental leave, in addition to any sick leave or paid time off they have accrued, as long as they have worked for a public school system for at least 12 months.

The leave can be used for the birth of a child, a pregnancy loss, adopted and foster children. Both parents will be eligible for leave if they are qualified employees.

Parents can take the leave together or separately. Parents also have the option to use the six weeks as they please, meaning it can be used all at once or spread out. However, the six weeks must be used within 12 months of the qualifying event.

Employers cannot require an employee to use sick leave or paid time off before using parental leave. Teachers and support staff will be paid 100% of their salary or base pay.

State money for parental school employee leave will be put into a fund for this specific purpose. Any dollars left in the fund at the end of the fiscal year will be invested, and interest earned from this investment would be credited to the fund.

In 2023, then-Gov. John Bel Edwards established six weeks paid parental leave for most . Three of the four state’s higher education systems have since adopted the same for their employees.

While she could take 12 weeks off through the federal , this only guaranteed her job security — not pay — and her family couldn’t afford to miss out on months of her salary.

“Obviously if I didn’t have those paychecks, I wouldn’t have been able to pay my mortgage or pay for groceries or anything like that. Put gas in my car to go to doctors’ appointments,” the music teacher said on a recent phone call, baby Margot cooing and spilling Cheerios in the background.

Teachers in her district can get paid for those 12 weeks if they’ve accrued enough sick days, but as a career changer, Papa only had four weeks banked. Even before her unexpected C-section and health complications related to an autoimmune disorder, she knew that wouldn’t be enough time.

There was one workaround, though: In Papa’s district, teachers are allowed to donate up to five of their sick days to colleagues in need. A teacher at her school distributed a link — much like a GoFundMe page — and was ultimately able to raise the remaining 30-or-so days. 

Without clear confirmation from HR on just how many paid days she had, she gave birth trusting that her colleagues’ donated ones would come through.

Papa is one of many public school teachers forced to scrimp and save sick days, pay for their own substitute teachers, go without pay or perfectly time their pregnancies to align with summer break in order to care for their babies and recover. Many end up returning to the classroom , sometimes as early as after giving birth. 

While it is difficult to pin down an exact figure, as of 2022, 18% of the largest school districts in the country provided paid parental leave beyond sick days to public school teachers, according to a National Council on Teacher Quality For those that do, the amount of leave offered varies widely, ranging from one day to five months, with most districts offering less than 31 days— all at varying levels of pay and with differing eligibility.

Most teachers receive an average of 10-14 sick days a year, according to NCTQ, and many districts require that they exhaust all their accumulated sick time before they can access paid leave. And some go even further: seven of the districts subtract the cost of a substitute from the teachers’ paychecks during their time on leave, effectively getting them to pay for their own coverage.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of state and local government workers that have access to paid family leave is 28% — significantly higher than NCTQ’s figure — though this includes all school-based occupations, including superintendents and principals. An internal 2019 survey conducted by the American Federation of Teachers of about 50 district contracts found that only about 10% offered dedicated paid parental leave. Most districts relied on a sick day accrual system that disadvantages younger teachers, who likely have the least banked time and the greatest need for parental leave, according to an AFT spokesperson. 

“Teachers, for the most part, are women and mothers,” said Ashley Jochim, a freelance education researcher and consulting principal at Arizona State University’s Center on Reinventing Public Education. “And so the fact that there is sort of an inattention to these issues around parent leave is startling.”

In the 2020-21 school year, there were full- and part-time public school teachers, 77% of whom were women and a majority of whom were of childbearing age. About half — 48% — of all public school teachers have children living at home, according to an analysis of data spanning 2012-16 by the Brookings Institution’s Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero. 

The National Council on Teacher Quality analyzed in the U.S., including the 100 largest as well as the largest in each state, and found that 18% offered paid parental leave beyond sick days. Though a few of these districts fall in states that offer paid leave, the organization said it’s not confident that schools are necessarily following state policy. 

Of the analyzed districts, 27 offer paid leave for a birthing parent and 18 offer some amount to fathers or non-birthing parents. Eleven districts offer all days at full pay, while 15 offer partial pay. Thirteen districts provide some leave for adoption. 

Teachers across the country, like Papa, know the struggles associated with these patchwork policies. But those outside the classroom are often surprised to learn the lengths to which teachers must go, according to various experts. There’s a general understanding that though teacher pay may lag, the fringe benefits are often much more robust than what you’d see in the private sector, leading to a misperception that paid parental leave is included, said Jochim. 

“Parental leave shouldn’t feel like a miracle,”wrote AFT President Randi Weingarten in a statement to ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “It should be a basic benefit that school districts and states offer to all employees.”

This system exists against the backdrop of a , particularly stark for mothers of color and worsened by the pandemic. Amid record high , a shortage of   and for paid parental leave policies nationally, experts note that family leave could be an important recruitment and retention tool— especially for female teachers of color, who are underrepresented in the field. About 79% of public school teachers are white, 9% are Hispanic and 7% are Black, according to the most recent

There’s a clear cost to school communities— particularly students — anytime a teacher is gone for an extended period, said NCTQ President Heather Peske, but “I also think that we can’t ask teachers to sacrifice having children of their own in order to teach ours. It’s just not right and not fair.” And often teachers are asked to return to the classroom far earlier than the ’s 18-week recommendation. 

In August 2023, Papa, the music teacher, returned to work, grateful her coworkers’ donated time had allowed her to take a paid maternity leave, but anxious that she was beginning a new school year with a 6-month-old baby and a completely drained bank of sick days. 

She tried to schedule her baby’s doctor appointments before or after the school day, but that wasn’t always possible. She said she felt guilty anytime she had to leave early or take time away for her kid, putting more work on her colleagues in the throes of staffing shortages. On days she was sick or exhausted from being up all night with a newborn, she forced herself to push through, not wanting to burden others and not able to afford the unpaid time, a common refrain heard among teachers who are also parents. 

Because of the fragile nature of schools, it’s treated as shameful when a teacher needs to be absent, even when it’s to care for a sick child, said Jochim, the researcher who works with CRPE. But, she added, “Nobody’s really asking themselves 
 ‘Why did we design the system in a way that can’t be resilient in the face of caregiving responsibilities that women bear most of the burden of?’”

One day, Papa’s daughter had an allergic reaction and was rushed to the emergency room. Papa said she found herself sitting there, thinking, “‘Oh my God, am I not able to go to work tomorrow?’ And it’s so awful to think that. Here I am, rushing my child, my baby to the ER. She’s got hives on her face 
 and my thought is, ‘What am I going to do about work tomorrow if I can’t go in?’”

Not just teachers

The United States is the only country that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents, among the almost 40 nations included in The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development , according to compiled by the organization. The smallest amount of paid leave required in any of the other nations, including the United Kingdom and Canada, is about two months, marking the United States as a major outlier.

Despite of workers reporting that it’s either extremely or very important for them to have a job that offers paid parental, family or medical leave, currently only 13 states and Washington, D.C. mandate paid parental leave, according to the An additional eight have voluntary systems that rely on private insurance. But not all of these include public employees, such as teachers. For example, in the early 2000s, California became the first state to pass a paid family leave policy, but as state employees, teachers were not automatically included.

According to the on average teachers fare about the same as all civilian workers, 27% of whom have access to paid family leave. That number rapidly climbs, though, for public and private workers in management, professional, and related occupations — of whom receive the benefit — and private industry workers in finance and insurance — of whom do. Generally, there’s an inverse relationship between income and access to paid leave: among the only 6% had access.

The economic argument that paid parental leave is to fund — either through the government or private industry — doesn’t properly account for what it costs not to offer it, said Peske. “Given how much time it takes to recruit and hire a new teacher and inject that new teacher into the school, you really want to consider parental leave policies and figure out how you can afford [them],” she said. “Because it’s so much more costly to lose a really strong, good teacher than it would be to pay for the parental leave.”

Katherine Bishop, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, said educators in their family-building years are frequently in their first five years of teaching — when most leave the profession.

Oklahoma is one of at least — including Tennessee and South Carolina — to enact paid parental leave policies for teachers over the last year, along with the nation’s fourth-largest school system, Chicago Public Schools. In 2018, New York City, the country’s largest district, rolled out six weeks of paid leave at full salary for mothers, fathers, and foster parents after a petition garnered 85,000  

“In an era where our educators are feeling so disrespected, it is bills like this that give our worth and dignity back and that we are seen as the professionals that we are,” said Bishop, whose state whittled the initially proposed 12-week paid leave down to six. “I think that is so important for people to understand.”

‘There’s no one to help me out’

By the time Jeremy Hight and his wife had their first child in 2019, he had been teaching at a small, rural public school in Nevada for over a decade and had accrued 110 sick days — the equivalent of 22 months. 

Yet, when his wife gave birth, his district would only allow him to take four weeks off paid, he said. At the time, regardless of how many sick days a teacher had banked, only 20 could be used for paternity leave. He could take an additional two months through FMLA, but they would be unpaid, which Hight’s family couldn’t afford.

So, four weeks after his wife’s emergency C-section he returned to the classroom. 

“It was painful for her,” he said. “For me it was emotionally painful just to not be able to be there and help out my wife. She did have some family nearby but not anybody who could get there and help her to stand up, help her to move around as easily as she could. Or just to put the baby down in a crib very easily. She couldn’t bend over to put the baby down very well. Having to leave after a month — four weeks — was just heartbreaking.”

Despite the challenges, he recognized he was lucky to even have those 20 days set aside in the first place. He said for an early career teacher, that kind of time with their family would be out of reach.

While some may conceive of parental leave policies as relevant only to the person who gives birth, Ruth Martin, senior vice president of advocacy group , said it’s important for policies to incorporate men and non-birthing parents. When dads are able to access paid time away from work they feel more bonded to their child, she said, and are more likely to play a larger role in the household labor that is unpaid, time-consuming and typically left for women.

Since then Hight’s district has updated its contract, allowing fathers to take six weeks off paid and mothers to take eight — but only if they have the sick days banked. 

In light of the after over 17 years, the editorial team and other contributors shared their reflections, an overview of the journal and its . Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow at Brookings, moderated the discussion among the following panelists.

• Robert Doar, president and Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies at the American Enterprise Institute
• Chris Wimer, co-director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at The Columbia School of Social Work
• Darrick Hamilton, Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and founding director of the Institute on Race and Political Economy at The New School
• Diane Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Margaret Walker Alexander Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University
• Tim Smeeding, Lee Rainwater Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison

Below are our top three takeaways from the presentation.

1.Ìę Paid maternity and family leave matter. Journal editor Anna Aizer said, “Over half of U.S. mothers with infants are employed, and yet we lack a national paid maternity leave policy.” The U.S. is an outlier compared to European countries, though eight states have developed maternity leave policies.

“Paid maternity leave results in fewer premature births, increased on-time vaccination and reduced diagnoses of ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] among school-aged children,” Aizer said, “The lack of access to paid leave to care for family members in an emergency this past year has harmed both family outcomes and economic recovery efforts.”

2. Income support is essential. For families with little savings and no income source other than employment, a loss of a job or work hours can trigger loss of child care, housing and health insurance. The absence of money can potentially compromise important child development processes and outcomes. Wimer said, “From the family stress perspective, it can compromise parent mental health, increase stress and increase harsh parenting.”

proposes to improve stability and support young children through the crisis and beyond. Smeeding explained, “Both the Future policy brief and The National Academy Report push for more subsidized child care, extending the child tax credit to all families to be paid monthly and a higher earned income tax credit (EITC).” Hamilton said, “If we want to, we could reduce the work requirement of EITC and literally eliminate poverty and expand the EITC phaseout all the way up to middle income, so as to lift more families up to middle class.

3. Stability promotes healthy development. Aizer said, “Poverty is the main determinant of instability in a young child’s life.” Before the pandemic, 17% of young children were living in poverty.

After acknowledging the pandemic and the emergency situation that we must respond to, Doar said, “I do have some concern of taking this situation and using it to develop big, significant, long-term changes that we will live with after we’re passed the pandemic.” He added, “I’m not comfortable with a big increase in the tax credit that isn’t explicitly attached to work,” citing concerns of long-term diminishing returns for families and the labor force. “I want to be in a place where we’re reducing child poverty, and I think that requires a combination of employment and assistance.”

While parents are working, it is key that they have access to high-quality child care. The pandemic has been devastating to the whole industry’s infrastructure. While diagnosing the damage and advocating for rebuilding, Schanzenbach said, “Keeping the role of caregiving along with economic resources for young children front and center is key.”