Dr. Katherine Ahrens, a researcher at the University of Southern Maine, and five other researchers from the United States and Canada have found that newborns in New York state suffered fewer respiratory illnesses when their parents had access to the state’s eight-week paid family leave.
The study looked at data for nearly 53,000 hospital and emergency department visits for children eight weeks old and younger from 2015 to just before the pandemic in 2020. New York’s data was compared to Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, regional states that did not have family leave at the time.
Maine approved paid family leave in 2023 and benefits are set to begin in 2026.
The research found that newborn hospital and emergency department visits for respiratory tract infections, whooping cough, and other dangerous respiratory illnesses dropped by 26% in the first three months of 2018, when paid family leave started. It dropped 20% between October 2018 and March 2019 and 9% from October 2019 to February 2020. Fall and winter months are typically the peak time for respiratory illnesses. Overall, researchers found an 18% lower acute care encounter rate than in the four states with no paid family leave.
“There are all these health benefits of paid family leave on top of the economic benefits,” said Ahrens, Associate Research Professor at the University of Southern Maine and lead author of the study. “Further, there are health benefits to kids. Our study may be useful in garnering support for paid leave legislation federally and in the 37 states that have not enacted paid family leave.”
While other studies have looked at the health benefits of paid family leave for mothers and older infants, this is the first multi-state research to focus exclusively on newborns eight weeks and younger. Researchers in this study hypothesized that if families were going to take paid leave after the birth of a baby, they were most likely to take it immediately and any infant health benefits would be seen in those first eight weeks.
New York began offering eight weeks of paid family leave in 2018. It has since expanded leave to 12 weeks. The policy provides job protection, continued health insurance, and paid time off to eligible workers who need to care for a newborn, newly adopted or fostered child, care for a seriously ill family member, or help loved ones when a family member is deployed with the military.
The research appeared in JAMA Pediatrics this week. The paper’s co-lead is Jennifer Hutcheon, Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. It was also co-authored by Teresa Janevic, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health; Justin Ortiz, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine; Erin Strumpf, Professor at McGill University; and Arijit Nandi, Associate Professor at McGill University.
The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.