anothermagyar said:
It's interesting because in Hungary where my child was born and raised, the government gives free choice since the 60's for mothers to stay at home for 3 years, after a child was born, and pay the 75% of the regular salary of the mother for one year and 50% for the rest of 2 years.
I thought supports like this exists in Western Europe, as far as I know in Germany.
You are right, maternity leave is important but it's only a partial solution. Even in Europe, corporations continue to assault maternity leave as it interferes with their profit. In the US, welfare was originally designed to allow poorer mothers to stay home with their children, like middle-class mothers did; everybody seems to have forgotten about it.
But there's something else going on here, too. In Russia, there were always similar rules to the ones you are describing: partial salary paid out for the first 18 months with an option of staying home further; the daycare centers are state-run and numerous. In the US, maternity leave is 3 unpaid months; daycare centers are mostly private and costly, and standards vary. And yet, the daycare enrollment in Russia was always pretty high for infants and practically 100% for children age 2 and up, whereas in the US only 50% or so children are cared for by non-relatives, and the difference between rich and poor is not as pronounced as one would expect. There is a lot more mothers in the US who drop out of work to take care of children, reasoning perhaps that, what's the point paying most of your salary for daycare or nanny and being away from your child. In Russia, the debate between a "working mom" and a "stay-at-home mom" was non-existent -- there really were no stay-at-home moms.
But the end result for women's achievement at work is the same, whether there is maternity leave or not. Whether you are out of work for 2-3 years with guaranteed employment, or for 3-5 years on your own until your kid goes to school or daycare, and then look for new employment, your working peers, male or female, at this time have completed a medical residency or a post-doc training, published a few articles in professional magazines, or worked their way a few notches in a corporation. You, on the other hand, are coming back at the same point as you left, if you are lucky, and have a kid who is still little, gets sick, gets into scrapes, so you have to keep taking time off or pay someone else to totally pick up childcare while you dive into work. If you have another child and skip more time, you might as well start over and go to school again either way, because your experience by now will be totally outdated. I remember when I was working in a lab in Russia, my female bosses were talking about how women drop off the face of science in their 20-s en mass: maternity leave or not, science doesn't wait. I wish I paid attention to it at a time, because US academia was much more intense and this was more obvious. I have recently seen stats showing that in the US, professionally successful women are disproportionately childless, even if they did intend to have children originally. They simply can't find time to pause their lives for childbearing and childrearing.
So even if the state may have a generous maternity leave policy, the culture still encourages women to separate from their children early. There is a sort of a schizophrenic split between the demands and attitudes women get. On one hand, the society conveys the idea that children are the nations's future (through governmental programs that encourage birth rates, or religious incentives along the lines of "be fruitful and multiply"). On the other hand, when a woman actually has a child, it is viewed by those around her as a personal choice the cost of which she, or her family, is alone to bear. Promoting peaceful parenting ideally should go hand n hand with alleviating this pressure as well.
fwiw
