Researchers from Oregon on How Paid Leave Supports Family Health and Economic Security

June is National Employee Wellness Month. And American Family Health & Fitness Day is on June 14th. In this episode of The Paid Leave Podcast we are focusing on family paid leave programs and how it affects the health and wellness and the economics of families and workers. 

Joining host Nancy Barrow, are two esteemed guests from Oregon State University. Dr. David Rothwell has a master's in social work and a Ph.D. in Philosophy in Social Welfare. He also leads the Oregon Family Impact Center that connects state policy makers with national research experts. He is Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at Oregon State University. His research and teaching focuses on how policies can best serve children and families with low incomes. Dr. Julia Goodman has a PhD in Health Policy and is an Associate Professor in the Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences at OHSU, which stands for Oregon Health and Sciences University. Julia has a secondary faculty appointment in the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. Her research examines inequities attributed to work-related social determinants of health among pregnant people. she explores how work-related policies, such as paid family leave, impact health and health equity, as well as potential spillover into the broader workplace.  

They discuss the need for flexible policies that include leave for various reasons, such as medical conditions and caregiving. Both highlight ongoing research to understand the impact of state-specific policies and the importance of collaboration with policymakers.

For more information about Dr. David Rothwell please visit, David Rothwell, MSW, PhD | College of Health | Oregon State University. (www.ohsu.edu)

For more information about Dr. Julia Goodman please visit, Julia M. Goodman PhD | OHSU People | OHSU. (www.oshu.edu)

For more information or to apply for benefits please visit ctpaidleave.org.

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Transcript

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Nancy Barrow: 0:01

Hello, Connecticut, and welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast. The title basically says it all. I'm Nancy Barrow, and I will be delving into this new state program and how it can help you and your family. This podcast will give you information you should know about Connecticut Paid Leave, and maybe just a little bit more, Connecticut Paid Leave brings peace of mind to your home, family, and workplace. Welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast. June is National Employee Wellness Month, and American Family Health and Fitness Day is on June 14. And speaking about families today, we're focusing on family paid leave programs and how it affects the health and wellness and the economics of families and workers. And joining me are two esteemed guests from Oregon State University, Dr. David Rothwell, who has a Master's in Social Work and a PhD in Philosophy and Social elfare. He's the Barbara E. Knudson Endowed Chair in Family Policy, and as that chair, he leads the Family Policy Group, which is a combo of student and faculty who want to advance family policies. He also leads the Oregon Family Impact Center that connects state policy makers and national research experts. He's the Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences at Oregon State University. His research and teaching focuses on how policies can best serve children and families with low incomes, and his research interests include poverty, families, and social policy. And in his research, he tries to find out what drives social and economic inequalities. He's written a number of publications, State Paid Parental Leave Policy, a Tool to Reduce Inequity Within Between Families, is the reason I got in touch with him after finding his work. And Dr. Julia Goodman, who has a PhD in Health Policy, is an Associate Professor at Oregon Institute of Occupational Health Sciences at OHSU, which stands for Oregon Health and Science University. She has a secondary faculty appointment in the OHSU School of Public Health. Her research examines inequities attributed to work-related social determinants of health among pregnant people. She explores how work-related policies, such as paid leave and impact health and health equity, as well as potential spillover into the broader workplace. And she's co-written a number of publications on paid leave, including, A Research Agenda to Maximize the Health Equity Impacts of Paid Family and Medical Leave Policies and Barriers to Accessing Paid Parental Leave Among Birthing Parents with Perinatal Health Complications. So, Dr. Julia Goodman and Dr. David Rothwell, thank you both for joining me on The Paid Leave podcast. I could have gone on and on about what you do, because you guys are so knowledgeable in what you do. So, thank you both for joining me on The Paid Leave Podcast.

Julia Goodman: 2:49

Thank you for having us.

Nancy Barrow: 2:51

Well, you've done important research on paid family and medical leave, especially around family and economic security, and pregnancy and parental leave, and I'd love to explore how your work kind of overlaps in what the research is telling us about what families like really need, so to start, for listeners who don't know your work, how do you describe your research focus within paid leave? And David, you can start first.

David Rothwell: 3:14

Thanks, Nancy. Thanks, it's an honor to be here, and thanks for doing this. So, for me personally, I work primarily on social welfare policies, but then I was developing new classes in our unit on family policy, and paid family leave is a quintessential family policy. It involves work, caregiving roles, and so it's kind of a really good example when we start introducing students to this idea of family policy, and around the same time I was developing those courses, Oregon was passing its law in 2019 As someone who studies various policies, I was thinking this would be a great opportunity to merge my teaching interests and my research interests. As I dug into it, I realized there's been a lot of work on paid family leave, and Julia has made tremendous contributions to that, and she'll talk about that. I'm sure I'm I'm a relative newcomer to this space. As I was looking at the literature and merging my interest, I became kind of focused on how low-income mothers, first-time mothers, you know, how they manage the trade-offs between work care and this new idea of paid leave, but then also the existing kind of welfare cash assistance programs, and so that's how I got into it. I saw opportunity here to study Oregon's new policy and really think about how specifically low-income families use potentially this new paid leave policy in the context of existing ones, and that's how I got into it.

Nancy Barrow: 4:47

Right? And how it works for them, right? And Julia, how did you get involved in this?

Julia Goodman: 4:52

Well, first, thank you for doing this podcast, really exciting to have the opportunity to get this work out there to lots of countries, and states. I come from the public health background, my background is health policy and maternal and infant health, and I first came to this work because I was interested in trying to think about how we support families and new mothers in particular in this really vulnerable period around pregnancy and childbirth, and paid leave just kept coming up over and over again, as sort of something that is a really critical support. Originally, I was focused on breastfeeding support and promotion, and one of the areas where we have the strongest evidence is around the relationship between access to leave and breastfeeding. So that was where I originally came to this work many, many years ago, but over time my research has sort of shifted more to focusing on how policies are designed and implemented in order to actually be accessible to everybody who needs them. And this is something that's come up because we've just seen with each state that has passed a paid leave policy, it's been so exciting, you know, all the advocates that have done this great work to get a law passed, and then people don't know about it. People don't even know the policy exists, or people don't understand that they're eligible, or what they're eligible for, or how to actually benefit from these policies that people have worked so hard to get past. And so, a lot of my work in the last decade or so has shifted more towards thinking about the design and implementation of these policies, and making sure that in particular the most marginalized workers are actually able to access these benefits, people who would not have access to paid leave through their employers, whose employers are not necessarily telling them all about the benefits that they might have available to them, whether through the company or through the state. And so a lot of the work has been focused on thinking about what are the elements of a policy that are needed to be in place in order to make sure that people can use them.

Nancy Barrow: 6:44

It's really interesting what you brought up, is you have to get the word out, so people know about this program, right? And if they're paying into this program, this is what I always tell people when I see them at events: if you're paying into this program, you have the right to utilize this program. What is the challenge, and it is a challenge, right? I'm doing this podcast. We do a lot of social media here at Connecticut Paid Leave. How do you overcome that challenge, really, of getting the word out to the people that you want to be able to use this program?

Julia Goodman: 7:13

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I don't, I don't know that any state has cracked it yet, but I mean, having a podcast and having dedicated outreach, I think, is a good start. I mean, in states like Oregon, I think they really have put a lot of effort into outreach from the state program itself. We've, David and I, have been working for a few years now with a few people from Paid Leave Oregon, from both the policy team and the outreach team, just to kind of make sure that we're on the same page and we're collaborating and we're able to make sure our research is informed by what's going on with the program. And we've heard a lot about what the state has been doing in terms of outreach and they are really thoughtful there you know there is some especially at the beginning there was some media campaign to try to get the word out, but then in the years since I know they've been doing a lot of showing up in person, tabling at events, going out to the communities that really have been harder to reach in the past that haven't gotten the information that they need about paid leave. So they've been doing a lot of that work, and I think that's making a difference, but it's still so hard. I mean, if the strategy that works is to go to individual events and tell people and tell trusted community partners, so they can get the word out to their networks, that's hard work that takes a long time, and it's really hard to reach everybody in the state.

David Rothwell: 8:38

So one thing that that concretely that Oregon has been working hard on is language access, making sure everything is available, and probably not all the languages that people are speaking, but you know, the primary ones, that's one of them. And I, yeah, I just want to point out my limb, our limitations, my limitation, you know, we're researchers, so we're coming from the outside studying these things, and I, you know, we have a general idea of what, what the state is doing for outreach, but they're probably doing a lot that we don't know, because it's kind of outside the, the bounds of what we normally work on, you know. It's not data related, it's not, yeah, you know, empirically related. And then, as I've gotten into this, as I said, relative newcomer, what's interesting to me about paid leave compared to many other policies is that you have the employer as this intermediary, right, so that the worker's primary point of access is going to be through the employer, and so that outreach strategy I would think has to be really different than many other programs, you know, you know, if you think of Medicaid or social assistance, you know, earned income tax, you know, all the other major social welfare programs, those are kind of direct government to user kind of route. And with paid leave, it has to go through the employer, and so you know, having that employer be both knowledgeable and supportive and confident in how to implement things, you know, there's a lot of ways in which, in which things can get confusing in paid leave, as we know, and so that employer route really makes this an interesting policy to study, but it also is challenging from implementation perspective.

Nancy Barrow: 10:33

Where do you see gaps in the current policy, and what improvements would have the biggest immediate impact for families.

David Rothwell: 10:43

There's been a lot of work on on paid leave, a lot of research work on unpaid leave, and most of that has has drawn on the early state adopters, specifically California, and I think in 2004 started. So I don't know 80, 90% of the work on on state paid, you know, New York, I guess, is another early adopter that has a fair amount of research on, but as you know, the evolution of these policies, you know, there were the early adopters that were did tremendous work getting this momentum started, but the, you know, the later states, the, you know, the Connecticut's, the Colorados, Oregon's, and Washington's really built on that early work. And as you already mentioned, modified some of the policy parameters, right, the eligibility, the leave duration, the replacement rates, and so I don't know that. Just strikes me as, as one of the first research gaps, is we don't, it's research moves slowly, right? And so to understand the impact of these later state policies, you know, what was the effect of these different policy structures, is a major gap, and so there's a number of people around the country working on this to study these things, but you know, in the next, in the next years, I think we're going to start to see a lot of of new work on those type of things, trying to understand the role of state policies in our country. A lot of policy is devolved to the state level, and you know, we're not, we don't anticipate a national paid family leave policy in the near term, and so there's a real opportunity for different state, you know, both state-specific research projects, but comparative research projects, looking at what is the difference between, you know, Connecticut and Massachusetts and New York.

Julia Goodman: 12:56

And I would add to that, that in addition to having a lot of research from the earlier state programs, we also have a lot more research focused on parental leave relative to other kinds of leave, and I mean, this is like my whole area of research is all around parental leave. But I think that there needs to be more research on people using leave for their own medical needs, for caregiving, specifically thinking about caregiving for different kinds of family members and relationships. Some of the newer laws, I think, is we will discuss later on, maybe some of the newer laws have things like more flexibility in terms of who is who counts as a caregiver or who counts as somebody who you can care for, and that's really important to look at how are those more flexible definitions of family actually enabling people to care for the people that they need to care for, or to be cared for by the people that really matter. And there hasn't really been very much research on looking at those kinds of design elements. There's also in some of the newer states some interesting, you know, outside of leave for new parents, for own medical conditions, and for caregiving. There are other reasons for leave for military deployment, for example, or other military-related leave needs. For in Oregon, we have safe leave, so people who are dealing with stalking, harassment, harassment, or domestic violence can take leave for those purposes. I saw in Connecticut, I think you're the only state that has leave for bone marrow transplants and organ donors. Yeah, yeah, and organ donors. So there are different reasons for leave that are called out that I think to our earlier conversation, I'm sure most people do not know about those reasons for leave. I mean, in Oregon, we have heard this from our state partners that safe leave is not being taken up at rates that you would want, based on what we know about how many people are experiencing those things. So, I think that's an area that's we really need to understand to what extent those kinds of policies are actually helping people, and how we can make sure that people who need them know about them and can actually sort of navigate the process of applying for those benefits.

Nancy Barrow: 15:10

From the economic side. What differences do you see between families who have access to paid leave and those who don't? Have you done any research on that, for whether it's parental leave or any of that kind of research.

Julia Goodman: 15:24

I mean, certainly in terms of who has access, like from the what's causing people to have paid leave or not, we see huge differences. I mean, the kind of the people who have jobs where they have paid leave are very, very different from the people who don't have paid leave through their jobs. Any measure that you look at, I mean, if you look at access to paid leave, whether it's do you actually have access through your employer or do you know that you have access, so the awareness gap as well. We see huge gradients by income, by education, by immigration status, by job category, it's just really stark. Every measure you look at, it's like the more marginalized workers, the lower income workers, the people with lower education are much less likely to have access to paid leave, among other benefits. I mean, that goes along with sick leave, health insurance, etc. So we see, I mean, it's just a real economic disparity in terms of who has access to paid leave, and then I don't know if the question is sort of about then what are the impacts of having paid leave or not on economic outcomes. I don't know if David, you want to speak to that.

David Rothwell: 16:32

It's worth saying that that's the role of a government policy, right, is to ensure that you know it's not fully universal. Most state policies, you have to have some earnings eligibility, and so on. And theoretically it's really reducing those gaps that we would see that Julia mentioned, right? Like, if you contrast the status quo in a state without any paid leave, where those benefits are distributed very unevenly by employer, and if you move that responsibility to the state, by definition, it's going to equalize access by giving access to those people who didn't before, which is stratified by the labor market and the economic characteristics of the people. So there's really strong theory and other empirical work. I mean, I spend the most time, my time, thinking about just family economic stress, right. And so, at that time, if we just focus on bonding time or parental leave, the evidence is crystal clear. Everyone can understand that time away from work will happen in an unpaid scenario that involves loss of resources at exactly the time when you're adding new people to your family. And so you know you have this double whammy of loss of, let's say, loss of income, increased needs and demands of the family level, which introduces a tremendous amount of stress to the individual parent to relationships among parents, you know, it affects the relationship between the parent and the child, like all the various relationships that are happening in a family unit are strained under that scenario. This idea of replacing the wages, of making sure that there's stability during this key transition has a lot of positive impacts on mental health and how people are relating to each other.

Nancy Barrow: 18:24

I think that's really interesting, and the impact of bonding leave for partners and non-birthing parents and infant development. There's a lot of research about all of that as well. So, have you done some research on that?

David Rothwell: 18:37

No, but there's a lot of good work using strong research designs, cash assistance, welfare safety net programs, universal basic income, like the impact of cash on families and child development is very well studied, and there's a lot that can be taken from that. Just an example from a research perspective, there's a lot of survey data on various topics, and a question might be, did you have access to paid leave in your workplace? And when you look at some of these smaller surveys, and you compare that to the national data, the best data that we have, there's these wide discrepancies, often lower or higher, it can go in both directions, because the respondent to that given survey is confusing things like paid sick time that's been accrued, they're confusing family medical leave act, we, you know, they're confusing a new state program and an opt-out, they're confusing all of these different things. And so I don't think anyone knows the answer on how to, how to get through that, but this awareness and understanding of this complex landscape of these protections is really hard.

Nancy Barrow: 19:50

Yeah, and there's a national FMLA policy, so that is also confusing, because that's restricted in so many ways.

Julia Goodman: 19:57

Yeah, and to your point earlier, there. There's the people who are likely to know whether they have access to these benefits are probably people who have needed to use them, right. If you've never needed to use leave, then you may have no idea whether your company offers this or whether your state has a program. It's just not something you pay attention to. If you've had a serious medical condition, a caregiving need, a new child, then you might be more aware of that, so that just makes it harder to measure from these surveys, like David's saying, because we just don't know, you know, whether people are actually aware and have accurate understanding of their what they have available to them.

Nancy Barrow: 20:36

Are you working on any more research as it pertains to paid leave, either one of you?

David Rothwell: 20:40

Oh, yeah, we got lots going on, as I mentioned, you know, kind of starting out, it's research takes time, so we've been working for years with our state partners, and we've got a number of different research ideas, so you know, in various stages of proposal to, you know, approved kind of funded study to really look at these things, and as I mentioned, I think you'll see a lot more research in the coming years on the impacts of these state policies. Just as an example, the thing that I'm really working on is the interaction between paid leave and existing safety net programs, so you know there's kind of this idea out there. Well, we found it, we found it in the organ data, for example, that in the absence of the paid leave program, there's a following a first-time mother, low-income mother, you know, there's this real spike in cash assistance TANF programs right at birth. You know, and it's very obvious to see in a visual display, you see this large spike, and then you know the majority of, of those people, you know, 40-50% they exit cash assistance within six months to a year. And so there's this idea out there, What will the introduction of a paid leave program of a paid leave policy do to this, the nature of this curve, will these similar mothers opt to take the paid leave, and will that reduce participation in these other programs, which is lower pay, more administrative burden, more stigma. That's one of the puzzles I'm trying to tackle.

Julia Goodman: 22:16

One of the things that I have been working on recently, just I think that just thinking of the parallels with David's been doing a lot of stuff, thinking about the integration of the paid leave program with other state programs and benefits. I'm trying to think now about how Oregon's Paid Leave program is being implemented by organizations. As David mentioned earlier, one of the things that's really interesting and complicated about paid leave programs is that it does involve a negotiation with your employer, you still have to work with your employer to actually access these benefits. So we've been doing a study with an organization where we've implemented a new training program for supervisors to help them to be more supportive of leave taking among their direct reports. We've implemented this training within an organization, we're in the middle of data collection, we're gonna collect some data after this training has been implemented to see if we're seeing any shift in supervisor support for leave taking in their employees. And just really trying to understand, like, how are these policies, it is really important that they get passed at the state level, and then how do they kind of trickle down to the end users' experience to somebody who actually needs to take leave? Do they are they getting information from their HR department, from their supervisor? Is their supervisor actually making it, making them feel comfortable talking to them about their need to take leave and using that leave and making a plan for what do you do while somebody's on leave, so that they can come back into the workplace. So really starting to think about what's happening at the organization level when we have these state programs.

Nancy Barrow: 23:58

Tell me, when you look back over your research, what you're most proud of that you've found in your research.

Julia Goodman: 24:06

I think, as challenging as collecting original data is, and I don't necessarily recommend it to any young researcher listening. It takes a lot of time, it's expensive. It's really hard to do, but I think that it has, in the end, led to, you know, the most kind of rewarding takeaways for me. I've now some even I've violated my own advice over and over again, and collected a lot of my own data. I've done several surveys of new mothers, I've done some surveys of employers to understand their response to paid leave policies. I've done quite a few qualitative projects with interviews and focus groups, and all of those have really just given so much more insight about how people are actually experiencing these programs than you can get from, you know, some of the big administrative data sets that are so important for helping us really understand, especially kind of causal impacts of policies on all kinds of outcomes. They, the thing that they miss is what is happening on the ground. How are people actually experiencing these policies? What are the barriers that people are facing, and that's something from the surveys that we did when I was studying San Francisco's paid parental leave ordinance several years ago, and that was the research where we thought we were going to see a big impact of this policy on maternal and infant health outcomes. We thought we would be able to see this big shift in who's taking leave, and we didn't really see that much of a change. But what came out of our surveys was that people were really not aware of the program and were not getting information from their employers, especially low-wage workers. And we just, we learned a lot from that project about some of the challenges that these programs face in terms of actually benefiting people who need them. So that was something that I think, because we had designed these surveys and asked the questions we wanted to ask, and they weren't perfect, but they really helped us to kind of start going down this road of how do we design and implement policies in a way that's really going to benefit the people who need to use them.

Nancy Barrow: 26:30

It's great that you use, you know, that you were surprised by your own research.

Julia Goodman: 26:35

That doesn't often happen. Usually, you're kind of going in like, I already think I know what I'm going to see. And you know, to be honest, that was, it was an interesting process working on that project, because we were working closely with several partners in the Bay Area, we had done some work at the beginning of that project, we did qualitative interviews with a bunch of different key informants who were involved in developing that policy, some of the great advocates who were involved in helping to get the word out to employers and employees, and when we, you know, our initial findings were that we didn't see a big shift in terms of leave taking. We did see that fathers were taking more leave than before the policy, but we didn't see a big change among mothers, and that was really hard to share that back with our partners, because nobody wants to hear that, right? Everybody is invested in this policy, but as researchers, you know, we can't - we're not going to change what we find. And so, you know, we shared that back with our partners, but we also felt like we needed to help explain well, why do we think that there's not a change? It's not that this program has no value, but what's going on here, and that's what led us to looking into some of the issues around awareness and where people are getting information or not. Luckily, we had asked those kinds of questions, so we at least had anticipated that awareness might be an issue enough that we would need to ask those questions.

David Rothwell: 28:00

I'm happy that you found that that paper, and it's, it's great that it's open access in this area. I'm really excited about the government partnerships we've built. Julia alluded to that this has been ongoing for years now, and like doing your own data collection, it takes work. It's not immediately rewarding, but just like in many domains of life, this research work is relationship-based, and we're now getting to the point where we're, we have a lot of exciting plans to do some important research, and through those relationships with various, you know, not just the paid leave folks, but with the in Oregon, it's called the Department of Human Services, the Health Department, and the Employment Department, you know, we were able to build one of these large administrative databases where all the births in Oregon, the whole state, you know, we have the data linking the birth record and some information about the about the parents to both their future work patterns and their cash assistance, their safety net, SNAP, TANF, even take, you know, employment-related daycare subsidies, both after the birth and before the birth, and so prior to doing this, like these groups didn't, they weren't thinking about this, and the connections between these things, but you know, we've had numerous meetings and cyclical back and forth, like, what is the research telling us about this? You know, we've been invited to talk to policymakers in the legislature. I mean, there's a lot of research to policy feedback loops here that think that's one of the main reasons why Julia and I are doing this work, is to hopefully inform policy and improve these policies, and so if you know just. Concretely, you know, is building some large data linked data across sectors that no one had ever done before or thought about, and trying to leverage that to create some insights that influence policy.

Nancy Barrow: 30:13

Yeah, it's that collaboration that that's so important, especially with the state programs that you're talking about. Those are those are really good. Speaking of policymakers, if you could communicate one message to policymakers about paid leave, what would it be? What would you try to shift?

David Rothwell: 30:30

It's not based on my own work, but it's based on the literature, and the biggest thing that comes up is something we've touched on already, is around this concern about small businesses and the private sector side, and there's several studies out there surveying employers. I haven't seen any that are truly negative on thinking about the benefits of paid leave, so you know, the costs of turnover and losing an employee versus retaining that employee are very much in the business interest. We know that providing paid leave and these type of supportive work family policies are going to improve employer productivity and happiness that they bring to their job. And so I know it can be a mindset shift from our typical, you know, market-based society, the benefits across the board, you know, the short-term economic benefits, the benefits to economic stress, to health, maternal and child partner relations, and the productivity. There's so many benefits, and so thinking about a bit of a mindset shift around, like, how much is the business might lose in the bottom line. There's really a social and collective value to providing these type of policies, so that's what I'd like people to think differently about.

Julia Goodman: 31:50

Policies need to be very flexible. The reasons why people need to take leave and how people take leave is very individual. And so thinking about things like policies that allow for intermittent leave rather than only in large chunks of time.There are lots of people who need to take leave, and the way that it works for them is that they have a reduced schedule for a period of time, or they take a day off every week, or they need to take a half a day off because they have some condition or a treatment plan that requires an intermittent leave. And that's something I mean again I think a lot of the more recent policies have built in quite a bit of flexibility in that way but that's something that's really important to maintain. Also thinking about the kinds of leave we talked about earlier, beyond just new parents and medical needs and caregiving for certain family members, really expanding who can be cared for, expanding leaves into other areas like military service and safe leave, and other reasons. There are just, there are so many reasons why an individual might need to take leave, and what's going to work for them is going to be different. And so making sure that we're designing policies in ways that are as flexible as possible. I think about around pregnancy-related leave, we haven't, we haven't really touched on this, but some of the research I've been doing recently is trying to look at how are people taking leave during pregnancy, whether they're starting their sort of maternity leave at the end of pregnancy or if they're starting to take some kind of intermittent leave during pregnancy because they're ill or need to be put on bed rest, for example. And there are some state programs that have an allotment for leave during pregnancy, but not all states do. It's not always standalone. It could be that if you take leave during pregnancy, that's leave that you don't get to take when your baby is born. And when you design a program like that, then you know people are going to hold off as long as they can, because they want to save that time that's pretty limited already, or you know, with their baby. So thinking about ways that we can design these programs that really allow people to use leave for all of the different reasons that they might need to.

Nancy Barrow: 34:11

Were you surprised by any of the maternal research that you've done, or anything that happened when they went back to work? I think that's also a difficult time when you know the 12 weeks is up and then you got to go back to work. Have you done any research with that?

Julia Goodman: 34:28

Yeah, I mean, I think that's where that flexibility is especially important in terms of how people come back to work, because you see, I mean, we've seen this in some of our qualitative research, I've certainly seen this anecdotally in my among friends and family, but when people are taking leave, and then at the end of whatever their period of leave is, if you have to go back full time to your, you know, as if nothing has happened, back to work, that is something that is such a challenge for people. It's such a shock, it's so hard for so many reasons, thinking about breastfeeding, for example. I mean, the people who are like stockpiling breast milk as they're getting ready to go back to work, or weaning their babies because they know that they're not going to be able to continue breastfeeding once they go back to work full time. I mean, those are real challenges that people face, and you can think about so many ways that we could just make it a little bit easier to transition back to work. I mean, obviously, there's things like lactation support in the workplace, and ways that you could support breastfeeding specifically, but just like allowing a modified schedule, a reduced schedule, having that flexibility, so that you know, maybe you take 12 weeks of full-time leave to be home with your baby, but then some period where you're working fewer hours or fewer days. I mean, we people in some kinds of jobs are able to navigate that to negotiate that with their employers, but for a lot of, especially lower wage workers, that's just not an option. So I think, I mean, you can have that sort of bundled together with a paid leave policy, where there's then some longer period that you could have a reduced schedule, but it might be a different thinking of David's work, and sort of how these policies fit together with other policies. I mean, I think there's sort of companion policies you could think of that allow for flexibility and scheduling that some of our European countries have have played around with those sorts of policies and ways to support families more broadly that we have not really gotten into yet in the US.

David Rothwell: 36:27

We want to think about really supporting families during this period. We have to start talking about, you know, the combination of paid leave to childcare policy, because the combination of these things is really what puts strain on economic strain on families, also has major implications for work and health, and so you know, anyway, that's just a note for for listeners that you know might be curious about, you know, how these fit into the broader landscape of things, but the, you know, I'm, yeah, there's a lot of reasons why paid paid leave in the family space is just the beginning of thinking about a continuum of supports that would, that would help families>

Nancy Barrow: 37:16

And what would you like people to take away from this podcast?

David Rothwell: 37:20

I don't know, we've had such a great conversation on so many things. I mean, paid leave is both complicated, and there's a lot of, on you know, it's a work in progress. So we've learned a lot, and there's a lot more, the a lot of gaps that we've talked about today that that Julia and myself and a number of colleagues across the country are working on. And you know, this is really the value of research, and we, you know, as university researchers, that we're working to influence the policies. You know, I think the big takeaway is that these really do have, if we think about, especially the later policies that Connecticut and others are implementing. I mean, these, these are really expected to reduce, to reduce the inequalities that we opened up with. We haven't, there's not a lot of documentation that that's happened yet, but we expect that to come, and there will be things that are unexpected that we didn't expect to know, and, so stay tuned.

Nancy Barrow: 38:31

What about you, Julia?

Julia Goodman: 38:34

Yeah, I think, I mean, just building on what David said, I think what is really clear from the research, and you know, from research done in the US, research done globally, from just anybody's experience, if you've needed to care for somebody, or you've had a serious medical condition, I mean, it's, it's very clear that these policies are important for people's health and financial well-being. Like there's tons of research that is known. What we are still trying to understand is how to make these policies better. How can we make these policies as helpful to people as possible? How can we make sure that they're reaching everybody? What are the impacts of different kinds of policies, different policy designs. Those are the questions I think, as researchers, that we have. We're not questioning whether these policies are good or useful. That is very well established. So, there's tons of work to be done, as David said, as we've been talking about throughout this conversation. These are really complicated policies, so we have our work cut out for us, but they have a lot of value, and that's very clear, and I think that's reflected also in how broad the support is for these policies. I mean, we've been talking about how, you know, we may or may not get a national policy anytime soon, but we are getting more and. State policies, we're seeing more support for these programs, bipartisan support for these programs. So, I think we're making progress in the right direction, because that evidence that these are good for families is so clear.

Nancy Barrow: 40:15

Yeah, I think that that's a great place to end this podcast. Dr. Julia Goodman and Dr. David Rothwell, thank you so much for sharing your insights. Your work continues to shape how we think about supporting families during some of life's most important moments. So, thanks for being on The Paid Leave podcast. You were both great.

Julia Goodman: 40:34

Thank you.

David Rothwell: 40:35

Thanks for the opportunity.

Nancy Barrow: 40:37

For more information or to apply for benefits, please go to ctpaid leave.org This has been another edition of The Paid Leave Podcast. Please like and subscribe, so you'll be notified about new podcasts that become available. Connecticut Paid Leave is a public act with a personal purpose. I'm Nancy Barrow, and thanks for listening.