Shawna Freeman Lane, 34, continued to teach college-level business by laptop after she gave birth by C-section in 2017. Her husband, Eric Lane, was home with her in Fircrest, Wash., for three weeks. The same thing happened in 2018, when their second child was born—except this time, Mr. Lane only got two weeks at home.
Having to leave his still-healing wife in the lurch was hard for Mr. Lane, as was tracking his children’s development via text messages while at work. But when their third was born last May, things were different. In 2020, Washington state had passed a new law entitling working parents to 12 weeks of paid leave, to bond with their newborn.
“It felt like winning the lottery, honestly,” said Mr. Lane, who stayed home for six weeks after their son was born, then another six weeks when Ms. Freeman Lane went back to work.
They are part of an explosion in the number of workers taking parental leave. In the 12 months through February, a monthly 406,000 workers were absent on average due to paid or unpaid parental leave, up 13.5% from 2021, according to Labor Department data. The 478,000 working parents absent in January was the most since records began in 1994.
One driver behind the upswing is likely the increase in births in the past two years versus the prepandemic trend. The pandemic itself may also be a factor, as lockdowns and Covid kept many workers home.
But the main factor appears to be government and employer policies. While the U.S. remains the only advanced economy without nationally mandated paid parental leave, the share of workers with access to leave is growing, to 25% in March last year versus 19% in 2019, according to the Labor Department. Seven states plus the District of Columbia now require employers to provide paid leave, up from four in 2018, while private employers are also expanding the benefit. Four more states will require paid parental leave by 2026.
“As the state laws have passed, there has been a culture change, and more awareness and support for mothers and—especially—fathers around taking leave,” said Jane Waldfogel, a public affairs professor at Columbia University.
A greater propensity by fathers to take leave is an important contributor. The number of men on parental leave tripled to an average of 76,500 in the six months ended in February from five years earlier, whereas the number of women rose 11% to 336,000, according to census data.
More parental leave-taking benefits the economy in the impact on families’ well-being, said Emily Oster, economics professor at Brown University—ranging from near-term outcomes such as infant mortality rates to longer-term measures, including child test scores and adult earnings. “In this sense, leave now is an investment in the economic future,” Ms. Oster said.
It also has costs. Work that parents on leave are no longer doing must be done by someone else—or not at all. That can leave employers and co-workers scrambling to fill the gap. Larger companies with employees in different states can find themselves struggling with the increased administrative cost of managing a patchwork of leave policies of different jurisdictions, said Marc Freedman, vice president of employment policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The burden falls especially heavily on smaller firms, said Holly Wade, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business Research Center.
“Having to pay more in mandated leave is part of the cost increase, but sometimes it’s the cost of the paperwork and compliance that’s most burdensome for small employers,” she said.
Leave policies are a small but increasingly key way that firms compete for workers, according to Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. About 3% of currently active online job postings nationwide explicitly advertise parental leave, about a fivefold increase from before the pandemic, ZipRecruiter data show.
Industries seeing the biggest increase are retail, and transportation and warehousing, said Ms. Pollak—something she calls the “Amazon effect.” The e-commerce giant was at the forefront of offering parental-leave benefits, prompting competitors to do the same.
Taking time off can be costly for some workers. State policies compensate a percentage of wages, and cap the maximum benefit.
Many workers also fear that taking leave will hurt their career, or shunt extra work onto colleagues. For both reasons, Ms. Freeman Lane declined to take maternity leave with her first two children. That helped her get tenure faster, she said, adding that when she took maternity leave with her third child, being away cost her some professional and social capital.
That is still a big problem” for parents, she said. “You are likely to lose footing on projects and work that you helped lead or build because someone else will be forced to take it over.”
Parents are also taking longer leaves. The typical mother now takes 120 days of bonding leave, up from 110 in 2019, and the median father is out for 60 days, a 15-day increase, according to Sparrow, a leave-management platform. New York state family bonding claims data show a similar trend, with moms claiming 9.9 weeks in 2021, a three-week gain from 2018, and dads extending their average leave by 2.3 weeks, to 6.9.
Last year, Justworks, a tech firm specializing in human resources, increased its paid parental leave plan to 16 weeks from 12, said Allison Rutledge-Parisi, the company’s senior vice president of people. Based in New York, the company’s policy piggybacks on the state program, making up the difference between the employee’s weekly wage and what the state pays. It also covers the entire wage bill for workers in states without leave programs.
Justworks had to assess the value of supporting working parents versus concerns about disrupted workflow and extra labor costs, said Ms. Rutledge-Parisi. Before expanding the policy, Justworks rolled out a program to support teams whose managers were on leave, to understand how to fill the gaps and keep projects running. Ultimately, management deemed those costs a worthy investment in employee well-being, she said.
“Working here is intense,” she said, and longer leave helps balance that with “time committed to one’s own wellness but also family formation which is not a vacation.”
The policy change proved serendipitous for Jonathan Leslie, a 36-year-old software engineer at Justworks who spent two months at home after his son Dylan was born in September and two more weeks in January.
Having joined Justworks recently, Mr. Leslie worried that being out too long could hurt the impression he left on new colleagues. But he also wants to avoid the mistake of some friends who regretted not taking all of their leave. He is looking forward to using the remaining half of leave when his wife, Natalie, starts working again.
“My son is so much fun now. He’s getting to the stage where he’s his own human,” he said. “Having the open-ended play with him—that opportunity won’t come again.”