HOW do US women physically manage to back to work so quickly after birth?!

[boboismylove]

I was watching The Good Fight the other day and one of the characters said she was planning on returning to work THREE DAYS after birth. I know this is fictional but I looked it up and apparently 1 in 4 American women return to work within 10 DAYS.

This is obviously awful. But I don't actually understand how it's physically possible?! I couldn't sit up properly for a month after birth, and was limping for around the same time. I didn't have a C section, and technically had a relatively smooth birth - so I can't imagine going back earlier! How do women in the US manage it physically?! What about prolapse risk? Looking after stitches? Extremely heavy bleeding? - and again, this is only with a "normal" birth.

I know even in quite a few developing countries they have 6 weeks leave - maybe connected to the idea women should rest and be housebound for 40 days.

There is a much smaller pay gap here in America. I've audited payroll globally and nationally for European and North American entities. In public companies the number of women in senior management is embarrassing low in Europe. In governmental roles there are far more women in senior roles.

The anomaly is Canada which always had a surprisingly low pay gap between men and women and good leave packages. Speaking to management about this it's because there is a shortage of labour.

Anita What makes you think women in Europe have a choice while women here don't?

Many women here decide to stop working when they have DC. It's also not uncommon for a man to stay home either. Just in our immediate circle two couples have a SAHD. I see many more SAHDs here compared to Europe. I like this and think it shows movement towards equality.

One possibly unpopular opinion I have as someone who's lived in Britain and the US is that while lengthy maternity leaves is undoubtedly good for babies it has distinct disadvantages for mothers/women. It sets up a dynamic of the childrearing/house being the women's job because she's there for months on end and makes her paid employment seem less important as she may be taking multiple years out of the workplace. So it only seems natural for her to continue to deprioritise her career and for the man to deprioritise looking after his own children

I agree, and have said so many times before on MN even though I am uncomfortable with the logical consequences of seeing short mat leave as a "good thing for women"

One possibly unpopular opinion I have as someone who's lived in Britain and the US is that while lengthy maternity leaves is undoubtedly good for babies it has distinct disadvantages for mothers/women. It sets up a dynamic of the childrearing/house being the women's job because she's there for months on end and makes her paid employment seem less important as she may be taking multiple years out of the workplace. So it only seems natural for her to continue to deprioritise her career and for the man to deprioritise looking after his own children.

I agree with this too although I amoung the families I know in the US, it's still the women that are generally the default carers, they still tend to be the ones who've organized their work around children, they're still more likely to take lower pressure positions so they can juggle things, they're still more concerned about switching jobs because they're don't know if they're going to be able to get the accommodations they need to make family life run. Not as much but it's still not equal and they're having to struggle back to work after just a few weeks.

how they are affording it. Even day care for babies 6-12 months is eye wateringling expensive, which makes sense because the ratio is something like 1 carer/2 babies.

That ratio is a British thing (ime). USA and most other countries the ratio isn't so strict & the childcare works out cheaper (also tends to be subsidised more by state in some countries, like Scandanavia). Last week I heard someone on radio raising this point about their childcare experience somewhere in Europe (Belgium?) being cheaper, due to different ratios.

Also, in USA, there aren't tonnes of regulations about who can babysit or childmind; rules must vary by state, but what I mean is you don't require set qualifications & early years curriculum & extensive set bits of paperwork. So it's much easier to become & be a childcare provider.

I have read claims many times (from Brit officials) that the tough regulatory regime in UK doesn't make a blind spot of difference to price or availability -- I don't believe those claims in the slightest. The tough regulations obviously make childcare much less appealing as a job & the scarcity of providers & the strict ratios drives price up; has to.

In my American background, EVERY woman works after having kids, usually within first 6 months after birth, and has done since the 1970s (or maybe 1960s). They rely on a patchwork of childcare options that would not be legal in UK.

I couldn't have returned to work so soon after birth. I was a wreck and still breastfeeding round the clock. I want to watch The Good Fight. I thought I'd miss Alicia too much tho :/

I agree with that observation of yours, BoomBoomsCousin.

I only know one woman outside of the teaching profession who managed to get decent maternity leave, and in her case for the youngest three of her four children. She is an engineer. She took almost a year off for each of her youngest two, doing some work at home.

Teachers that I know timed pregnancies to maximise mat leave plus annual vacation plus personal days plus summer vacation time, and some ended up with 5 to 6 months off, depending on whether Easter was late the year their children were born.

A lawyer I know returned to work two weeks after a CS, by choice. I never liked her (sorry not sorry) and her decision to do this cemented my dislike. She did it to show up other women who had taken their full maternity entitlement of six paltry weeks. The baby went with her to the office until at four weeks a place opened up in a downtown daycare that cost an arm and a leg.

For the vast majority of women who work in retail or fast food outlets or various other pretty unskilled occupations, there really is no choice. Many take more time off if they can afford it simply by quitting, and they then get another job when they can. Childcare is expensive and quality is poor in lots of areas. Many women actually lose money if they return to work thanks to childcare.

I am in the US and there's no mandatory paid maternity leave. I had a neighbor was is a vet and she was back to work 3 days later as she was self employed. Her husband stayed home with the baby. She developed terrible PND about 9 months after the birth.

Unregulated childcare explains a lot about how it is more affordable but I am not sure that that is a good thing. That said, given how litigious the US seems to be, maybe the fear of getting sued is more effective than OFSTED (cant be worse, frankly!)

Are nannies more common in the US? ARe they seen as a realistically affordable alternative to daycare?

Within a few weeks of moving to the US I was having my hair coloured and cut and the stylist told me that while the colour was setting, she'd be going into the back to breastfeed her five-week-old baby, who had been brought into the salon for that purpose by her partner. She actually did an office/corporate M-F job during the week so she could have medical insurance and only did hair on the weekends and I wish I could remember how she said she managed to do it all but it was a few years ago and I was so angry about it then and ranted a bit and I still feel angry about it now that I can't even remember. I do know that she agreed that the US system was completely fucked up beyond any sanity.

In theory I could have gone back to work the just after my second child was born because I had an easy birth and was able to go out shopping, do housework and cooking the day after they were born. In reality I'd have been absolutely knackered due to nighttime breastfeeding. So, I don't know how they go back after 10 days.

Are breastfeeding rates lower in the US?

Also, what about parents with babies who wake up a lot at night?

I couldn't have physically coped with working full time and the lack of sleep.

This actually stopped us moving to the US for jobs. We were at a point in our lives when we knew we wanted kids in the next few years so we looked up the maternity leave provisions at our prospective employers. 6 weeks classed as sick leave. We would have been working in universities for not particularly great wages and no on site childcare. Day care rates were expensive in the area and when we weighed it all up, we would have been very stretched.

Returning to work at 6 weeks is great if you work a corporate desk job with in-house childcare. Not so much if you’re doing a physical job with no childcare provision.

I’d rather we sort out why women are penalised for taking 1 year out of a 20-30 year career, than force all women to take an unhealthy amount of mat leave tbh.

Are breastfeeding rates lower in the US?

They’re actually quite a bit higher than the UK. But a lot of that is pumping not direct BF as women go back to work sooner.

I grew up in the US and a lot of what is called “daycare” is actually the same as childminding. Someone watching a few children in their own home. Daycare centers that have an educational component are typically more expensive as they are more regulated. There is also a lot of immigrant labor available to work as in home nannies/babysitters. Go to any playground in New York City and you’ll see a cohort of Caribbean nannies.

www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/pdf/2014breastfeedingreportcard.pdf

There is a breakdown by state here, and also a table of breastfeeding support indicators.

I’d rather we sort out why women are penalised for taking 1 year out of a 20-30 year career, than force all women to take an unhealthy amount of mat leave tbh.
Agree.

It is one of the reasons why maternal mortality rates are higher than other developed countries (the main one is utterly shocking levels of poverty and associated lack of healthcare, far beyond what you'd expect in such a rich country. And of course some of this 25% will be the poorest women. But many of those women returning within 10 days are relatively well off.)

It's not rocket science that early return to work increases the risk for complications, infection and so on not to mention postnatal depression. That's why in most developed countries there are laws about how quickly a postnatal mother can return to work. In the UK it's 2 weeks or 4 weeks if you're in a factory. In Germany it's 8 weeks. This is for insurance purposes, to cover the employer's back as you're effectively recovering from a traumatic event. Birth isn't easy on the body. You've got a large internal wound where the placenta has separated. You might have external wounds as well if you've had a section or perineal stitching.

If it's a desk job I suppose it's easier physically than resuming a school run twice a day, but if not I'm with you, I don't understand how they do it. Physically or emotionally.

Short maternity leave can't possibly be seen as a positive thing. Surely it can't be a healthy choice, neither for mothers nor babies, to give birth and then go straight back full time, leaving a newborn with carers for 8+ hours a day? It might be good for a woman's career (if she has such a thing, and not just a job to keep her head above water financially) but not for much else imo. If women are penalised for taking a year off from their careers, and their partners think they can opt out of parenting and housework, the root of the problem is society's misogynistic attitude! And the answer isn't forcing women back into work weeks after giving birth, the answer is accepting pregnancy and childbirth as a part of women lives which will temporarily stall, but not end their careers.

DSis had her son on the Wednesday and was back at work on the Sunday. She's a chef so pretty physically demanding work. She did reduce her hours for the first few weeks but was working FT+ before long. She had a nanny who came to the house. In the US so no family around at all. Her DH works long hours.

She says she would get bored on the maternity leave on offer at home. Guess it's just different culture.

You know what, if my work place offered some kind of day care provision on site or close by where I could pop in during the day and breastfeed once or twice, or if breastfeeding/pumping was genuinely something that women felt able to do in the workplace in the UK rather than it just being paid lip service to then actually I probably would have been able to come to terms with going back to work much earlier than I did.

I do think there is a balance to be had because current maternity leave provisions in the UK (and I have taken full advantage of them) are contributing to the harm of women in many ways whether we like it or not.

The problem is that as a society we have decided that it's acceptable that women's individual careers, life choices and earning potential take the hit rather than there being any kind of appetite to make huge systematic and infrastructure changes around enabling working parents to 'have it all'.

If women are penalised for taking a year off from their careers, and their partners think they can opt out of parenting and housework, the root of the problem is society's misogynistic attitude! And the answer isn't forcing women back into work weeks after giving birth, the answer is accepting pregnancy and childbirth as a part of women lives which will temporarily stall, but not end their careers.

There's a happy medium between two weeks and a year.

Personally I agree that a year is far too long and contributes to many women in the UK staying home long-term because the family has fully adapted to the "mummy at home" situation. I had 4 months leave with each pregnancy (not in US or UK), both c-sections, and physically I was fully recovered 8 weeks later, as confirmed by a physio.

I would say 3 months is probably the minimum needed to heal and to establish breastfeeding, and 6 months is probably the maximum needed to recover from more serious birth injuries.

Eeane I worked in a field where most of my friends (myself included) had taken shortened mat leave of 5-6 months. We were still penalised for it, partly because of attitudes to women that dare to have children and partly because we could no longer work 10 hr days, 6 days a week. The length of mat leave is not the issue here, it’s attitudes to working parents. It’s the expectation of long working hours without the salary for the childcare to support them. It’s also the expectation that your entire life should be your work, with no room for kids, family, outside interests.

Anyway, that’s a topic for another thread, probably one about the gender pay gap!

It horrified me to think of going back so soon. The exhaustion for one thing, but also the separation - I didn’t want to be away from my first baby for the first four months (for more than an hour or so whilst I had a bath or whatever) and I don’t think that’s unusual or neurotic. I think it says worrying things about a society which values work so very much more highly than family.

Olly my husband is a chef. I bought him a Fitbit and he clocks up 30,000 steps during working hours. Your poor sister must have been exhausted. I still felt like my fanny was going to fall right out after a week!

A friend in the UK is American. Her family were distraught at the thought of her taking her full UK maternity leave allowance with dc1, as they were convinced she had it wrong and would have no job to go back to. She's still pretty senior in a male dominated field after dc2 and I think they have calmed down a bit now.