The First Three Months
October, 2014
The Challenge:
There’s a pressing need to broaden the conversation about the challenges of early working parenthood in New York, where paid family leave legislation has recently been introduced. Public discussion of the difficulties of working while caring for family members is, ironically, limited by the broad scope of the problem. Because the vast majority of people face these competing demands at some point in their lives, their struggles are often not seen as newsworthy. Thus, news media attention to these issues is less frequent and in-depth than it should be, and coverage in the traditional outlets tends to focus on specific legislative happenings or studies rather than on the overarching situation. Partly as a result, many of the people who struggle to balance work and caretaking fail to see their experience as part of a larger, solvable problem.
Two trends have made this situation more pressing: the increase of families in which all parents are working and, in the changing media landscape, the decrease of reporters available to focus on the strains on families. Following are several efforts designed to elevate, expand and change the conversation so that the challenges of balancing work and new parenthood are seen as the urgent problem they are. To start, this project will document the challenges of the first three months only in New York. But, because people throughout the country struggle to balance work and care for new babies – and because the problem will ultimately have to be solved on the federal level – my plan is to eventually expand The First Three Months into a nation-wide project.
First Three Months Multimedia Project: Across the country, more than half of working women return to their jobs within three months of having a baby, according to the Census. Many go back far sooner. More than a quarter are at work within two months of giving birth and one in 10—more than half a million women each year—are back on the job in four weeks or less.
What is life like for these new working mothers and fathers? How do they manage the first weeks and days of caring for their newborns while also commuting, finding childcare, and doing everything their jobs entail? No one can tell this story better than the parents themselves and “The First Three Months Project” is a place for them to do that. The interactive documentary site (which, in design, may bear some resemblance from these three models) will be a repository for stories of working mothers - and some fathers - who, out of financial necessity, have returned to work after having a baby sooner than they’d like.
“The First Three Months” will feature videos as well as photographs of new parents in New York paired with recordings of them talking about their experiences of their first three months as working parents. Our reporters will travel to record some of the interviews, which can be scheduled through the site. And we will offer instructions for parents interested in recording and sharing their own stories.
The “First Three Months” will also be a place where people can both learn more about the issue and become part of the solution. The site will contain pages that delve into the history of paid family leave; that graphically represent the global context of the policy (which exists in all but three nations throughout the world) with an interactive map; and that feature relevant news and promote local events. Those who sign up on the site will become part of the audience for reports, updates and news blasts from the project. We will also work with interviewees, helping them tell their stories through social media, op-eds and other channels.
Traditional media are crucial to the effort to pass paid family leave in New York. And “The First Three Months Project” will help both generate and increase the readership for well-placed news and feature stories. With its regularly updated videos, photos and audio files, the site will serve as a resource for journalists. The new parents featured on the site may be interviewed by reporters and will also be quoted in a stand-alone report (see below) about new parenthood in New York. I plan to edit the recordings so they may be produced as radio pieces (something I have done before with HIV, PINS and childcare).
The subject also lends itself to a photo-essay and the photos we collect of new mothers in their first few weeks of balancing work and parenting will be curated into a photo exhibit that could both be shown in conjunction with the public event about the challenges of early working parenthood in New York (see below) and published as a photo-essay.
Paired with thoughtful social media outreach, this multi-media project will do more than generate coverage of the need for paid family leave in newspaper and radio. It will delve into the brutal day-to-day struggles at the heart of the story – bringing depth and humanity to an issue that isn’t well suited to the traditional news format.
Reports: Three reports, which will be available in print and online as well as graphically presented on the First Three Months site, will focus on various ways that the current lack of paid family leave affects New Yorkers.
A. When New Mothers in New York Return to Work: This project involves determining when working women in New York return to their jobs, quantifying how many new mothers go back within three months of having a baby. We will break the total down by those who return at two weeks, at four weeks, at six weeks, etc. The raw data is publicly available but, right now, is only easily accessible as an average. The work will involve digging through New York’s Temporary Disability Insurance database to sort out the length of leave for all claims and claims for pregnancy. The numbers from these calculations will be featured prominently in news stories, on “The First Three Months” website, and in our published reports.
B. What New York State Businesses Do Without Paid Leave: What do businesses do when their employees take time off to care for family members? We’d answer that question through interviews with 20 diverse employers located throughout the state. We’d ask about how they manage employee leave and turnover; how they ensure that work gets done when employees need time off – and, critically, what the costs of those arrangements are. I undertook a similar effort last year that looked at the impact of that state’s Family Leave Insurance program on businesses.
C. Health Consequences of not having paid time off: A number of studies within the U.S. have shown the negative consequences of relatively short leaves both on infants, who are less likely to breastfeed and go to the doctor, and on mothers, who are more likely to be depressed. Yet, few have attempted to gauge the local negative impact of the lack of paid time off on new babies, mothers, and the elderly. This report would be based on interviews with pediatricians, obstetricians and geriatricians, who have perhaps the best vantage point from which to observe the health and medical consequences of inadequate leaves. We will ask how their patients are affected when parents have relatively little time off after the birth or (for pediatricians only) adoption of a new baby and, similarly, adult children cannot take off time during their parents’ illnesses.
Event:
This public forum will gather advocates, journalists, policy makers, labor leaders, representatives of the business community, and interested members of the lay public to explore the need for a paid time off to care for family members. Attendees will learn about the historical context of the issue; the state and national political landscape currently surrounding it; and, perhaps most importantly, the day-to-day struggles of working parents of infants. Panelists will include at least one of the parents featured on the “First Three Months” site; a national expert who can explain the challenges to passing paid leave legislation on the federal level as well as the progress being made in various states; a medical/health expert who can speak to the consequences of the current lack of time off for new parents, children, the elderly and others who would benefit from paid family and medical leave; a business leader who is supportive of FLI; and one who opposes it. The event is intended to be a forum for authentic debate, in which any hesitations about and resistance to paid family leave are hashed out; a way to generate news stories around the potential for legislation; and a tool for raising awareness of the issue.
Partners
Several people have offered their support of these projects, both on an individual level and through their institutions.
Economist Eileen Appelbaum, who has done extensive research on the need for and impact of family leave insurance laws in New Jersey and California, has offered to serve as an advisor to the business research.
Sherry Leiwant, co-president of New York-based legal and advocacy organization, A Better Balance, has helped support and develop these ideas.
Columbia University obstetrics and gynecology professor Wendy Chavkin, MD, MPH has generously offered to serve as advisor on the health study.
Digital storytelling consultant Amanda Hickman has offered to help with the design of “The First Three Months” and Twitter “guru” Alice Bradley to serve as social media consultant.
Project Leader: Sharon Lerner
Sharon Lerner, who will be coordinating this project, is a journalist who has covered children’s and family issues for more than 15 years. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, including The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Nation. Lerner also wrote a well-received book about how the lack of paid leave and other supportive policies has affected American mothers. The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation (Wiley, 2010) was featured by such media publications as The Wall Street Journal; Elle; Redbook; U.S. News and World Report; The Washington Post; The Buffalo News; the Toronto Sun; Brain, Child; Slate; and The Nation. NPR called it “A stinging account of how public policy and private businesses have failed to adapt to working mothers. ”
Lerner, who is currently a Senior Fellow at Demos, has taught journalism at The New School and the CUNY School of Public Health. She has worked as a columnist for The Village Voice; a staff producer for the public radio show, The Infinite Mind; Senior Fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs; and a contributing writer and special project editor at The American Prospect. She has spoken about the struggles of working parents on many TV and radio shows, including NPR’s The Brian Lehrer Show, Marketplace, The Takeaway, Tell Me More, ABC News’ “What If;” ABC-TV’s Annie Pleshette Murphy, CNN’s “Campbell Brown,” and C-SPAN’s “Book TV.”
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