Without parental leave I might be dead

I suspect that "very well off" people in the US most likely have only one breadwinner and one stay at home parent more or less full time. And/or a nanny.

The upside like I said, is that you save all that unnecessary work in the bureaucracy around the parental leave systems. Just look at sweden for example, it's a huge mess around the parental leave, they have a centralized agency now to micro manage every single household in the country with exactly how many days here and there, they will stay home with their child. It's basically central planning for child care.

And there are tons of edge cases and contradictions and bugs in this, of course. It's even become somewhat of a virtual currency now these "days" that parents are given as a gift from the state. Every single family in the whole country is now basically a welfare case that has to be processed through this machinery, with all the applications, paperwork etc, regardless of how well they actually manage on their own. It's incredibly costly, inflexible and inefficient, compared to just giving people higher salaries and letting them manage their family time themselves.

Edit: and, surprise surprise, it's also abused and people game the system. Many parents for example use their parental leave at the same time, to make extended vacations abroad of several months.

So yeah, the nuance to my comment is that the first things you list are important for social reasons - keeping your same position in the face of these additional burdens. I admit that my above comment is addressing the social problem purely through economic means (if an employer doesn't engage with your needs, walk away and find a new employer when you're available again). Unfortunately what we're offered in the US is mainly this economic lens, both policy and politically.

I don't know that I agree with the specific optimism in your last paragraph. Apart from the basic death toll, I think most of what is driving the "labor shortage" is people knocked out of situations where they were barely treading water, and retreating to lower rent areas and living with family. So wages will only rise enough to get people moving back onto the rent treadmill, and won't necessarily give away surplus wealth to increase their bargaining power. I'd love love to be wrong about this, of course.

IMO what is really needed to fix the economy is for the government to stop feeding the asset bubbles (aka giveaway to the upper class) through this ongoing combination of ZIRP plus austerity. Raising interest rates would lower asset prices, making home ownership more obtainable (despite the short term pain). And government-spent stimulus will cause distributed price inflation that will hopefully make the Fed raise rates, as opposed to the past few decades of runaway asset-only inflation that they've been able to conveniently ignore.

Not disagreeing with the point of this comment, but just as an aside, pumping is something that even mothers who are on leave do. Speaking from personal experience as the dad, I was able to feed the baby pumped milk for some of the many daily feedings instead of my wife doing the breastfeeding, which let her get a few extra minutes/hours of sleep when the baby needed to be fed. Both of us were on parental leave during this period. That tradeoff (getting some extra sleep vs. pumping) is not one that all parents would make, but it did help us get through the first few weeks of a newborn.

There is nothing wrong with parental leave, but I don't see a compelling reason to have it be mandated by law. If company wants to offer it, good for them. It may help retaining senior employees who reached the phase in their life when they want to have children.

I don't think we should incentivise families with two working parents and young kids. It increases the pool of workers keeping wages down, benefiting employers, and increases stress in the family, likely contributing to the epidemic of broken families we're looking at - which have negative effects on these generations' mental health and crime history.

If you're middle class and you manage well your spending and are willing to relocate / look into alternative career paths, it's possible to maintain a family on one career and I firmly believe it's better for the children. If you're having kids you can either outsource your kids early years education to the government or do it yourself. There are some studies (albeit I find social studies to be murky and hard to rely on) finding correlations between UK government programs paying for nurseries and increase in teenage crime roughly 15 years later. Study or not, I think that kids before 2/3 should not go to nursery, the social trauma of being unattended with other bigger kids needs to wait a bit longer, once they're ready.

In our family, we didn't send the kids to nursery before 2.5/3 years and my partner didn't work (for an employer, she kept working on her own personal projects, for "entertainment"). They integrated in nursery very well, we never had detachment problems and they're fairly well behaved. We're both developers, so maintaining the family on one salary is trivial, but I've met people from all walks of life who managed to do it.

Sure, some people are simply not creating enough value for society to break even on one salary and that's suboptimal. I'd advise to sort their life out to earn enough to support a new family, before making babies.

There are plenty of studies that link stable family structures to success and unstable family structures to crime and mental health issues.

The last time the government meddled with families, it didn't end up well for the black community: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/the_decline...

And nowadays the stats for broken families, across all ethnicities, is higher than ever.

This actually highlights a major misunderstanding in parental leave discussions: Most government-sponsored paid parental leave programs in other countries aren't paying 100% salary during the leave.

Sweden has one of the more generous programs that pays up to $41K/year (USD equivalent) or 80% of your income, whichever is lower. That amount is actually quite good if you're living modestly, but it may not be what people earning $100-150K have in mind when they see "paid parental leave".

Definitely better than nothing, though!