Paid Family Leave and Caregivers’ Time Use

• In Event: Choices and Tradeoffs: How Modern Family Policies Reshape Time, Risk, and Work

Abstract

The arrival of a baby fundamentally shifts how parents allocate their time, influencing everything from work and household responsibilities to sleep, caregiving, and social connections, particularly for women (Kotila et al., 2013; Yavorsky et al., 2015). This transition can be challenging, requiring parents to balance the intense demands of infant care with employment obligations, relationships, and their own health. These shifts may be especially significant for working parents, who must navigate the competing demands of paid employment and caregiving, often with limited flexibility.

Paid family and medical leave (PFML) policies provide parents with financial security while enabling them to take time away from work to care for their newborn. In the past two decades, several states have enacted PFML programs that provide partial wage replacement surrounding the birth or adoption of a child, to care for an ill family member, or for a worker to recover from their own serious health condition (National Partnership for Women & Families, 2023). Research finds benefits of PFML for parents’ and children’s physical and mental health outcomes (Bartel et al., 2023). However, there is little empirical evidence describing how the availability of PFL affects parents’ allocation of time in their child’s first year of life. Gaining insight into whether paid leave enables healthier time use—such as more childcare, delayed work return, better sleep, stronger social connections, and greater self-care—both demonstrates additional effects of these policies as well as sheds light on the mechanisms underlying previously documented outcomes.

This paper examines how access to state PFML influences the way new parents allocate their time after the birth of a child. Focusing on a subsample of adults aged 20-50 residing with 1 or more children under age 1 from the 2003-2023 waves of the American Time Use Survey (n = 7,783), we use difference-in-differences (DD) methods, including the Callaway Sant’Anna approach to adjust for heterogeneous treatment timing, that exploit variations in the timing of PFML across states. We estimate the plausibly causal effect of access to public PFML on time spent in childcare, working, and in various forms of social connection among new parents.

Descriptive time use results indicate that women in the sample spend more time with household children and providing primary and secondary childcare than men, while men spend more time working. DD regression results suggest that access to PFML has different effects based on gender. Men work significantly less and spend less time with friends and non-household adults, and women spend more time providing secondary childcare, when state PFML is in effect.

In future analyses, we will: examine effects on parents’ leisure and sleep time; compare parents who have their first child under PFML to parents who have a child before and after PFML is in effect; and examine heterogeneity by socioeconomic status.

Authors

• Katie Vinopal, The Ohio State University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Madeleine Maylath, American University
  Presenting Author

• Stephen B Holt, University at Albany
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Taryn W. Morrissey, American University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author