Parenting is quite possibly one of the most daunting tasks anyone will ever have to face. Finals week, work deadlines, starting a new job – all of these pale in comparison to the stressors that come with teaching a tiny human how to live, and as fall approaches many parents have to cope with the bittersweet experience of sending their kids off to college.
As difficult as it must be seeing the baby who once couldn”t hold their head up on their own leave home for the first time, there is a different group of parents struggling with the start of the school year – faculty members and parents-to-be who are given only the bare minimum when it comes to parental leave.
The United States” maternity leave policy, which holds a minimum standard of 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the mothers of newborns or newly adopted children, is globally infamous for its short length and lack of benefits provided to new parents. It”s a policy that the University of Idaho administration has decided not to change.
Corrin Bond
In a June 4 memo, UI President Chuck Staben addressed a number of policy changes proposed at a Faculty Senate meeting in May – the most notable of which was his decision to not approve a proposed change that would extend the time of unpaid parental leave for university employees from 12 to 16 weeks. Instead, Staben approved the change to allow both the mother and father of a newborn the 12 weeks of leave if both parents are employed at UI.
In the memo, Staben explained that the rationale behind the ruling was that a four-week extension of parental leave “would create too much of a burden on the University workforce which must fill in for the absent parent.”
The denial of the extension measure poses two problems. The first is that it sends a message that as a university, we believe minor restaffing grievances are more important than the individual welfare of university employees. Second, it implies that a shorter parental leave can actually be less beneficial to students in the long run.
For mothers of newborn babies, the recovery process can be exceptionally difficult. Leave isn”t always provided to both partners and is often exclusive to mothers, which means mothers are expected to fully recover from nearly a year of intense physical strain and be ready to head back to work after a mere three months, even though they spent the entirety of their leave getting little to no sleep and being the primary care-taker of their baby during the day.
Even in the case of leave granted to parents with newly adopted children, a new child is a new child. It”s going to be difficult to adjust to the responsibilities of sustaining a tiny human, regardless of how one came to be a parent. Three months is hardly enough time to prepare for finals, let alone to acclimate a brand new living being to planet Earth.
An additional four weeks of a parent spending time with their newborn child doesn”t seem like enough time to constitute, “too much of a burden.”
If faculty members are not allotted an appropriate amount of time to recover and adjust to having a new child, it has the ability to impact students in a negative way, especially when the faculty members on leave are professors.
The minor inconveniences that could possibly arise from having someone new fill in for a professor on leave in the middle of a semester are nothing compared to the difficulties of having an instructor who is so exhausted or sleep deprived or busy trying to find appropriate day care for their baby that they”re unable to put their students” needs first.
Even students would benefit from longer parental leaves, as the faculty members they interact with will be more mentally and physically capable of performing their jobs to the best of their abilities.
Some faculty members might not be comfortable or have the means to go 16 weeks without pay, while others might find 12 weeks to be an insufficient amount of time to adjust to having a new child in their household. The importance is the faculty member”s ability to have that choice and to remember that at the end of the day, the welfare of university employees and students should come first.
Corrin Bond can be reached at [email protected]