Parental Leave and beyond

A book on Parental Leave policy sheds light on the situation of parents and young children in contemporary societies, but it cannot help but range into much broader questions: hence, the title of the book ‘Parental Leave and beyond’. Indeed, as well as a detailed focus on Parental Leave, the chapters in this volume bring to the fore a debate around which activities we consider to be essential to human functioning and flourishing, including income generation and unpaid care work, as well as questions about how and to whom these activities are distributed. Essentially, our enquiry is into the kinds of societies in which we want to live, with particular attention to parents and children.

When considering Parental Leave and beyond, we reflect too on how we perceive our relationship to the future. Is it about adapting as best we can to economic and technological developments assumed inevitable, or should we attempt something bolder, seeking to shape these developments to meet ideas of a better life for all? This might include broadening the concept of care beyond parents and children, to adult care, and then beyond our households to our community and to the environment in which we find ourselves (Jamieson, 2016). We may extend into other ‘time-use’ categories than time in paid work, care and leisure; categories that may be altered by adopting a life course approach and by new entitlements to time and money. Our starting point is a commitment to the search for policies that enable a good life for all citizens.

Parental Leave policy typically presumes some pre-existing relationship to the labour market and aims to preserve this relationship for the parent. Paid work has been seen as a lynchpin for female empowerment and emancipation from unhealthy economic dependencies on male partners (for example, Hobson, 1990; Lewis, 2001). Paid work has also been seen as very important for full social inclusion with the universal or adult worker model, though this has taken a different turn with the ‘activation’ social policy paradigm (Lewis and Giullari, 2005; Perkins, 2010). There is starting to be some considerable backlash to this presumption that paid work is necessarily the best conduit for human flourishing (for example, Fraser, 2016; Bregman, 2017; van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017).