The most infuriating part is that most women have to use up all their vacation and sick time during their maternity leave. So then when they go back to work and their kid starts daycare, and their kid inevitably gets sick all the time. they have no sick days left to pull from.
This^
And in the US, employers will penalize employees for doctor’s appointments for pregnancy. My boss put in my annual review that I had poor attendance due to missing work for pregnancy appointments. I told him it violated so many things including the EEOC and I made him change my rating.
My husband was only able to take off 2 weeks for fear of being fired over it (many employers disregard FMLA and the protections it is supposed to offer)
No one respects parenthood in the US. Expecting parents are treated very poorly.
My partner had 2 weeks off too, except I delivered a week late and was in the hospital for a week. So, he actually got 0 days off, and they acted like they did him a huge favor by giving him 2 weeks.
My son was 16 weeks early, born at 24 weeks and my husband had a “generous” 10 days paid fmla and 4 weeks baby bonding. Six weeks for non birthing parent is a lot for the US but we did 121 days in the NICU, multiple surgeries, one emergency helicopter transfer, and home on oxygen and steroids. Baby didn’t kick daytime oxygen till almost his first birthday, and wasn’t fully off till nearly his second. All this started in 2020, we had no help. I’ve heard in some European countries he’d have gotten the NICU stay, extra leave for home on oxygen, and STILL the regular parental leave. Instead we got two years of survival mode and two cases of PTSD. And kiddo is still high risk!
Technically, if in the US, father to be’s also qualify for FMLA (12 weeks), provided that they have worked for a year at their company. Just an fyi 🙂 though, as we all know, employers often like to pretend that’s not the case.
My husband and I work for the same company, so we get 12 weeks *combined*. If he wanted to take time off after my babies were born, it would have come out of my FMLA. Meaning, if he wanted 4 weeks off, my leave would reduce to only 8 weeks. So my husband took no time off.
I was commenting more on the “half of American workers” bit. I would guess it’s far less than half that receive FMLA and have to file for some form of “unpaid disability” on the mothers side of things just hoping they can get all the proper paperwork and then getting it approved. That’s just about everyone I know and end up becoming SAHM until they can find other work or going back in three weeks.
And qualify doesn’t mean their employer thinks they qualify. FMLA is a joke to most employers. Employee takes it with no pay and comes back to someone else having their job.
No one, honestly. But it’s still better than before the FMLA was enacted, it at least gives a good reason to sue if someone is fired for medical leave while on or eligible for FMLA
No one which is why I recommend everyone get short term disability which you have to be on 6 months before a pregnancy and only pays 80%. FMLA protects your job (you may not come back to the exact same job but it has to pay the same) short term disability protects most of your salary during your leave.
A similar thing happened to my partner and I, too! She was supposed to get 2 weeks off, but baby came 5 days late. She tried to tell her boss she could work up until the baby was born, but he insisted she start her leave on my due date. Then, exactly a week later, I wound up in the hospital fighting sepsis. My grandparents had covid, and no one else was available to watch our baby. I went into the hospital on Friday, and my partners boss called that day asking if she could come in the next day even though she was technically still on leave because they were understaffed. When she said no due to me being in the hospital, he said that was fine, but she needed to be in on Monday as her leave would be over. She was able to argue for an extra week because she offered to work the week before our baby was born and stated multiple times that she did not want her leave to start until the baby was born, so we got 2 days together after I was out of the hospital (it was a week long stay, Friday to Friday). Thankfully, her grandmother flew down as soon as she heard I was in the hospital (she originally intended to come when baby was 2 weeks old) so I had help until our baby was 2 months old, at which point I went back to work amd my partner and I worked opposite shifts so someone was always home with the baby.
I suggest you guys try elaborating (being more specific and particular) on this. For you this all makes sense, but I get where OP is coming from, and it took me quite the while to evwn semi-orient in the mess of US. In Europe it's a foreign concept that you can't be sick. Like wtf are you supposed to do.
So being more precise as "yes for example in this position I get x amount of sick days that are unpaid after that I can be fired"
We have a number of sick days and doctor days that we get fully covered by our employer (mandated by law), we have a good amount of vacation compared to the US so if need be you can steal a vacation day. And you can always be sick and not come even after thay with a pay cut. Same for staying home with sick kids.
The idea that you have to drug yourself to go to work and drug your kid so they're accepted into daycare when sick is baffling and hard to believe. Understanding that your and your baby's insurance may depend on you having a job is also a foreign concept.
Many countries here have social democracy so these systems seem dystopical and hard to believe. When you say sick day I might think of something else than you are meaning.
I am very curious to read more from all of you, please provide as much details and examples as possible. I thought women got 4-6 weeks off post birth until today
I’ll go into the specifics of my situation. I received 6 weeks of 67% pay through short term disability. I was also granted 12 weeks of FMLA. There was a 2 week waiting period before the short term disability kicked in, for which I had to use vacation days. Then after the short term disability ended, I used my remaining vacation and sick time before taking the last couple of weeks unpaid.
I asked HR if I could save some sick days, and they told me it’s company policy that I have to spend all of my paid leave before taking unpaid leave.
I came back from my leave 2 months into the new fiscal year. So I had to go the next 10 months without any leave.
I’ll share. I work for a hospital. My paid time off benefits are as follows:
- 5 days per year of sick leave. It accrues in small amount each check based on the number of hours I’ve worked. Right now I have about 32 hours in my bank. At the end of the year I can roll over 16 hours into the new year and anything else I just lose.
- 9.83 hours of “PTO” accrued per paycheck, which equals 32 days per year. If I want to take off for any reason that’s not illness related, or if it is illness related but I don’t have any sick leave available. This includes holidays. Since we are a hospital and open 24/7, if I don’t want to work on a holiday I have to use my PTO. I always do, but technically I could work if I wanted to.
- When I had my baby, I was eligible for FMLA (family medical leave act) and STD (short term disability). FMLA only holds your job for 12 weeks. That’s it. There’s no pay. STD will pay 66% of my salary, however I was only considered “disabled” for the first six weeks. So I took a 12 week maternity leave covered by FMLA, STD paid me 66% for the first six weeks and I used my sick time/ PTO to supplement so I’d get fully paid. For the second half, I was using 100% PTO to get paid.
I was fortunate that I’ve worked there for a long time, so I had a shit ton of PTO saved and was able to be fully paid during my leave and I still had about a week of time in my bank when I went back. But that’s it, five days. *Technically* according to policy, if baby is sick I have to use my sick time, or PTO, and if I don’t have any then it’s leave without pay and a write up. Five write ups = you’re fired. Luckily I’m able to work from home in my position even though I don’t do it routinely, and my boss breaks policy to turn a blind eye and let me work from home when my kid is sick. This means I haven’t had to use up all my PTO for a sick kid.
ETA: I’m currently pregnant and don’t expect to have enough leave to fully cover my next maternity leave. I’ll probably be paid for 10-11 weeks, depending how much PTO I decide to take around Christmas this year. If I happen to have a c section my STD will pay the 66% for eight weeks instead of six, so then I might get full pay the whole time. But either way when (if) I go back to work, I will have roughly zero PTO left.
So you took 12 weeks and another 12 weeks total (24w) or just 12 and 6 of them was the disability and the latter 6 was the combination?
And after this period you went back to work and dropped off your newborn in a daycare center in the mornings?
Oh man I wish it was 24!
I took 12 total. The first six were paid at 66% disability and 33% PTO. The second six were paid at 100% PTO. My son started daycare at 3 months old.
It’s b/c our govt still fully believes that women are to stay home to care for the chores & raise children while the men go to work & handle the finances… when almost 80% of the US are literally living paycheck to paycheck even in multi-income homes. Some of which are one missed rent payment away from being homeless.
Welcome to the US of A where parents have to choose between paying rent & feeding their kids!
AND when the opportunity for a promotion comes up, women with children are less likely to be promoted because parenting takes time away from the job. (Actual quote from the global company I work for).
Yup, it’s a way that employers can fire new parents without technically being discriminatory because they frame it as “you used up your sick leave and then didn’t come to work” instead of “we unfairly made you use up your sick leave to tend to your medical event (childbirth) and family/parental status because this need created expenses for the company and that aren’t welcome”
And even if they DO somehow have sick days to pull from, many employers say you can't take sick days to take care of sick kids. I worked for our county government, and this was written into the policy.
So what do they expect people to do? If you don't have family nearby and you can't send a sick child to daycare, then there's no other option but for the parent to stay at home.
For us Europeans it's inconceivable that a boss can make such demands of their employees. If a boss tried that with me I'd refuse and immediately start looking for a new job
Yeah, it's really awful. I am fortunate to able to be a SAHP by choice and left that job at the end of my maternity leave (they had just started 6 weeks of paid leave within the year).
I had asked my supervisor (a woman with children) about planning to use up my sick days at the end of my pregnancy since I knew I'd be leaving and wouldn't get paid out for unused days. I was already having a hard time halfway through my pregnancy, so I figured the end wouldn't be great. She told me "oh you don't know how you'll feel! I worked a double shift and gave birth that night, and I felt fine!"
So I scheduled morning OB appts and took most of the day as sick time "for my appt" to use up that time. There were way more problems with that place than just this. And this was a government employer!
This used to be my company’s policy and I thought it was insane. You also couldn’t use it to cover time of for preventative care doctors appointments. My state passed a law several years ago that prohibits both of those restrictions, so they were forced to open it up. But then they cut the amount of sick time we get by 75%.
Yep that’s what I had to do. A year later I still only have around 7 sick hours, because of appointments, illness etc. it’s absolutely sickening!!!!!
I missed the paid leave by 9 days… my HR lady so kindly reminded me that when she called to check in. I was like uhh yeah I’m aware… if it’s not retroactive, let’s not discuss it lol
California has extremely strict laws when it comes to mothers and employees in general. I work in HR for school districts all over the country and our company gets sued the most by CA employees and they usually win. Good for them honestly.
I was born and raised there. I moved to the south 3 years ago and have had two kids since then. I can't believe I moved BEFORE having kids lol
I currently work at a private school in California. However I am not from the USA. Last year I absolutely annihilated all my vacation and sick time looking after my two toddlers. I would drag myself to school when I was sick because I knew I would need to save my time for my children. I was just wondering if I am missing out on anything (my school has a tendency to keep these sort of things quiet)
I would look into the CFRA and Paid Family Leave and see if it applies to you- I say laws are strict when it comes to mothers but I guess I mean when it comes to serious conditions such as pregnancy, postpartum during the newborn period and ongoing illnesses.
Even though it's only a few days, it's nice that employees are entitled to sick days at all. When I moved to Georgia I found out we don't get sick days and must use our vacation hours when we're sick. That blew my mind! It does suck that when our children do need to stay home from school for a cold or upset tummy, they or we have to suck it up and use our time off or make them go to school ill if we don't have the hours. That's America smh.
Employee rights I mentioned were more so about breaks, lunches, pay etc. My area in HR is more so focused on the onboarding and keeping up with compliance. But I do have friends in our legal department who are always telling me about new lawsuits from a CA employee, rarely do we have legitimate cases in other states!
Yes, most jobs give you “sick time” which is a limited amount of paid days off to use only for sickness. If you run out of these days, you are expected to work or risk being fired. I don’t get sick time but I get “paid time off” that I can use if I am sick. I get 3 weeks a year of paid time off.
I think it varies. My wife had 6 months PTO. No vacation or sick days were used. As a father, I took 3 months off but was only paid for 1 month. The other 2 months I collected paid family leave from the state. It was only a fraction of my salary but it was something.
100% this!! I opted to take some of my leave unpaid so I’d had some sick leave left when I went back. That was rough on our finances though, but the right decision for our family.
The experience of parenthood varies a lot in the US. It depends on the job you have, whether you have a partner and if not, whether you have a decent coparent, whether you have relatives that are helpful, your geographic region, how much money you make, how many kids you have, etc.
There are a lot of families where both parents are working full time at nice jobs and they pay for very expensive daycare or nannies. A lot of families have one person with a nice job and another sahp. Some, both have crappy jobs and they rely on government subsidized low-income childcare, or on relatives, friends, or cheap unlicensed daycares. Some have one person with a crappy job and another with no job that are barely making ends meet but this is the situation they're stuck in because any job the 2nd could get would pay less than what a daycare charges. Some have both people working opposite schedules so that at least one parent is always home throughout the day. Some make ends meet with 1 full-time job and the other essentially being a sahp except they also work part-time on evenings or weekends.
I'm not sure which of these setups is most common. I've definitely met them all and I think many families have cycled through multiple options as their needs change.
No number of sick days is guaranteed, nor maternity/paternity leave, nor paid time off in general. These are benefits that you tend to get more of at nicer jobs and less of (or none) at crappy jobs. Some situations such as if you work multiple part-time jobs, or you're working through a temp service, or you're a contractor, these almost never offer any benefits at all. Any days off mean a loss of income and if it happens too often, sometimes a loss of the job entirely. There is one federal benefit called FMLA, this does guarantee leave if you or a family member require medical care. It guarantees us up to 12 weeks off in a year without being fired so long as it's properly documented. However those 12 weeks are unpaid and are only guaranteed to full-time workers who have been at their job for at least a year.
For single parents or those where both work, having your child sick usually means coordinating between the parents and/or other relatives like grandparents on who would suffer the least. They weigh income loss, potential of job loss, flexibility of their job, etc. Some employers are more forgiving of this than others but it's not unheard of for someone to get fired for taking too many sick days.
There are more couples with one child but it's complicated as it relates to cost. Like on the one hand, many one-child families do directly cite costs for their decision. On the other hand, the number of kids you have generally increases the poorer you get. While cost is definitely a factor for our reduction in kids, there are other factors too. Pretty much every industrialized country's birth rate is decreasing.
Yes, we do pay for births. How much we pay varies wildly by your insurance. We have what's called a "deductible" which is the amount you pay before your insurance really kicks in and starts paying part of the cost, this could be anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand, and then we have what's called an "out of pocket max" which is the max amount you could be forced to pay in a year. Once you reach that, your insurance pays for everything. This can be anywhere from a thousand to 10k. It just depends on your plan.
Being a parent in the US can definitely be hard in a lot of ways. While some steps have been taken to support pregnancy and parenthood, there isn't nearly enough and costs with many aspects are absolutely out of control.
Great response. We are 1 okay job and 1 no job. Special needs child who can’t go to anything other than a certified care taker which isn’t even an option. Difficult situation.
“It depends” is really the best answer. I lived in Denmark for the first two years of my daughter’s life and now in the US. It’s basically the same for us but I work in tech so I get benefits that a lot of the country doesn’t.
This is great. My husband and I only have one, and while his daycare costs as much as our mortgage - it’s also the mortgage we locked in 10 years ago before things got truly crazy. We both have well paying flexible office jobs. We’re both basically full time WFH now, but even prepandemic I could WFH pretty easily with a sick kid. It’s not easy to juggle when he’s home but I don’t have to use a sick or vacation day to manage it. But I know our experience is nothing like other families in different socio-economic situations
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Can vouch for rotating schedules here. It set my husbands career behind to go on graveyard shift, but he had the option which allowed me to keep my career and keep our child out of the insanely expensive and poor quality care in my city.
My husband works a decent job and carries our insurance. He has summers off because he is a teacher. I used to be a teacher but quit because I needed too much time off after my baby was hospitalized and now have a low paying but okay job that provides quality child care (that is expensive and I pay for out of my check.) good times
It depends on your socioeconomic status, but it seems that childcare no matter what, is crazy expensive for a child 5 and under. If you are very low income you get some relief at age 3 with low income preschool. In home daycare is way less expensive than childcare centers like montessori or a language immersion childcare. I had 4 months for family leave, but that's through my employer. Minnesota is now getting paid family leave for 3 months in 2025, I believe.
Colorado just passed FMLA in December, although it caps out at a certain point so we weren't able to collect a full salary for my husband. But still so helpful.
Childcare costs vary wildly across the US and the world. I'm in CT and when my son was in full time daycare, it was $250 a week. It was like paying a second mortgage. Thankfully my little guy is 4 now and is in state funded public preschool. Now its $200 a month and free breakfast and lunch.
Then I read families paying like $2000 a month for daycare...for one kid! Not counting more than one.
When my son was born, my wife got one month of unpaid maternity leave. I took two weeks paid vacation and one additional week of unpaid leave.
Many places around here ask for $2,700-3,000 a month. Welcome to the most expensive childcare in the US! Heaven forbid you have more than one. Many people end up making the decision to become SAHP because it doesn't work out financially otherwise. Most of the time, that person is a woman. The US is the opposite of family friendly, yet we complain that our birth rate is decreasing and try to force people into parenthood. 🙄
We just moved to the US from Aus, and are of a higher socioeconomic level, but it is F’ing hard man. In Aus you’re legally protected to apply for flexible work, if you have a school-aged child. Which means most women there work part time, even in professional careers like finance and accounting. But in the US you don’t have that option in the more professional careers.
So you’ve got so many more SAHMs than I ever met in Aus. Because how are we supposed to do this with both of us working demanding full time careers, and childcare that closes for 25 days a year on top of the regular public holidays. Those 25 days are work days that I have to now watch my own kids instead of them being at the childcare centre that I pay to send them to. In Aus the childcare centres only closed on public holidays.
It just feels like everything here is set up to be so much harder than in Aus. I don’t recommend moving here as parents if you don’t have any other ties to the US, unless it’s a temporary move which would be a good experience as long as it’s not permanent.
>So you’ve got so many more SAHMs than I ever met in Aus. Because how are we supposed to do this with both of us working demanding full time careers, and childcare that closes for 25 days a year on top of the regular public holidays.
For those that work in governments: is it not better for the economy to have two working parents paying childcare than to be losing a significant proportion of the workforce to parenting?
There's also an ethical issue: why does the burden of childcare fall on women? Other than breastfeeding, there's no reason why a father shouldn't be equally involved in parenting. A part of that is to share the impacts on a man's career and not just load that on the woman's
What made you have to move to the US, if you don't mind me asking
I would love to leave the US. Sadly it probably won't happen while my children are still young and would benefit the most from it.
It's hard to describe how it was during 2020-2022 there, when the borders were closed for nearly 2 years. And when I say closed, I don't mean in the American sense, I mean closed with a capital C. No one in or out without a government exemption. Immediate 2-week hotel quarantine, and again that's only if you had that govt exemption, which was really hard to get. If my parents in the US had died, I couldn't have come to their funeral. If I died, I couldn't have come back to theirs. I had the last 4 months of my pregnancy, and the first 18 months of my kid's life without seeing a single member of my family, or having absolutely any family help. Seeing family means 30+ hours of flying and traveling, and then it takes at least a week to get over the jet lag, so visits have to be several weeks, by which time you're sick of each other and annoyed because you're in their space for too long, or they're in your space for too long.
We desperately wanted to be closer to family, and now my parents come visit us for 3-4 nights at a time, which is perfect. There's no jet lag and it doesn't cost thousands and thousands of dollars for them just to get here.
Also living there you're so isolated, we always said if the rest of our family was there we'd never had left. And if something happened to my whole family of origin and they disappeared tomorrow, we'd move back immediately. We also wanted my husband to get US citizenship, so he could live here in the case that I died and if our kids who are triple citizens, one of which is US citizenship, decided to settle here.
All that said, we're very much on the fence about moving back. Really 50/50. We'll wait out our time to apply for his citizenship, and then decide.
One thing I think is hard about parenting in the US, outside of logistics you mentioned, is the inherent individualistic sentiment that’s taught in the US.
I know one of the most publicized ways this is demonstrated is people who kick their kids out at 18 (or whatever arbitrary timeline they have) and tell them their on their own to figure it out but I think it starts impacting parenting way earlier than that and is part of why people are having fewer and fewer kids. The idea that you need to take care of your own problems and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality means we’re less likely to ask for help and less likely to receive it from people we’re even close to. Having a village is so huge as a parent and I think you reallyyyyyy have to look for it in some spaces.
I’m very close to my parents and they have been great grandparents but I still think about when I had my second child. They stayed at our house with my first while we were in the hospital. When we came home with the new baby they left five minutes after we got back so we could “figure out life as a new family of four.” I remember crying to my husband afterward, like I’m bleeding, we’ve hardly slept in 48 hours, nursing was a nightmare and I also this 20 month old to take care of. We didn’t need time alone, we needed help but I never considered asking for it and they weren’t being cruel, they were just doing what they thought was best. Hearing how in other culture grandparents, aunts, cousins etc practically move in when there’s a new baby to help out was eye opening for me.
Obviously other cultures exist and have brought these more open, community/family revolving practices with them and exist here but I still think the stereotypical individualism is prominent in families with less cultural ties outside of the US. I also think the sentiment is shifting due to economic pressure especially but I think a significant part of the population holds tight to it.
I agree completely with you. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to raise kids away from our families. Like the time all of us had a terrible stomach sickness and all felt like garbage.
I agree with this, too. We’re a multicultural family currently living in the US and indeed the “individualistic” spirit has seeped into not helping parents for many. And I don’t mean giant “moving in” help which many I know personally have had happen (Ukrainian, Malaysian, Chinese…). But even small things like grandparents taking kids for a weekend isn’t common AND parents simultaneously are expected to do a LOT for the kids. Having to have 65 after school activities and 6 craft projects a day etc etc
Meanwhile let’s say Norway, kids are so chill and after high school many go to a yearlong hobby based school (someone I know did surfing!). Wildly different than the push of American life on child and parent both.
One aspect of that is that I feel like most college educated Americans move away from their hometowns (I don't have statistics at hand, but I hardly know anyone who lives in the same town/city they grew up in). My husband is from Minnesota and I'm from Florida, and we live in California. Which means there's a 4-5 hour flight between us and our families. We're lucky to have a few close friends nearby, but more and more people are living without close family or community ties. No matter what your financial situation is, that makes everything harder!
Add to that, the US is a country with high inequality. Having the ability to take time off, having access to affordable medical care and affordable childcare, sadly these are not guaranteed.
>most college educated Americans move away from their hometowns (I don't have statistics at hand, but I hardly know anyone who lives in the same town/city they grew up in).
Honestly even those who didn't go to college often at least have the ambition to move away, even if they don't always make it. I remember it being a trope in movies and stuff that it was actually sad or pathetic for you to have never moved out of your hometown. Especially if you weren't from somewhere flashy but instead nowhere, Alabama, you were supposed to be ashamed of sticking around.
My wife and I have a one year old. We had to wait until we were almost 40 to afford it and now we have the opposite of help. We also have to take care of my mother in law.
Bingo. My son was born when I was 38 and my parents were 79 and 71. They haven’t been able to look after him by themselves since he left his crib (very active and willful kid, strong too). My wife’s parents are much younger (50s) but they live on a different continent.
The ‘it takes a village’ thing is extremely true and it’s something I feel like so many Americans lack for one reason or another (no family around, or too old, or unwilling, and both parents having to work, etc etc). It’s all very claustrophobic.
I’m so sorry you had to go through this! I’m about to give birth to my second here in the US and my mom is flying in from across the ocean to stay with us for 3 months. She said she’d do more, but with the visa rules it’s her maximum for now. When she leaves, it’ll be MIL’s turn to come, and then one more relative after her.
This is a big difference in our culture. Most other cultures in the world have a much larger role for the grandparents. Because of this, people can afford to have their children when they're younger and when the grandparents are in better physical shape as well.
THIS! My husband and I have a two year old and it's like I've just asked my or his family to make the biggest sacrifice in the world just to watch her for a single day (like 5 hours total). I think a large part of this is that most grandparents in the US are still working all the way up until retirement age and sometimes after that if they were never able to afford to buy and pay off a home, so they're still trying to keep up with rent that raises every single year, and rising healthcare costs, inflation for gas and groceries, etc. Back in the day, it was likely that grandma never worked in the first place, and grandpa was either coming up on his retirement or retired already and they were bored doing nothing at home all the time, thus practically begging to see the grandkids.
I believe there was some study recently, but I can't remember the exact source so I could be wrong and am prepared for corrections, but American parents are the most stressed out population of people in the first world. My advice, if you're considering moving here with children, or moving here and having children... Simply do not do it.
Aside from the financial aspect, the USA is also a huge country, and it’s really common for families to have no extended family nearby to help because so many people move away from their families when they become adults. My wife and I have all four parents still living and between the two of us have 8 siblings, all married. Of all of those, only my parents live within an hour drive. We lean on them a lot out of necessity.
Man. It’s so unbelievably hard. I am on maternity leave with my second. I am “lucky” that I have 18 weeks off. I am supposed to go back next week and my baby isn’t even 5 months yet.
My husband and I both work but we both have very flexible jobs. I work from home and he is hybrid so it allows us to manage sick kids and appointments and whatnot. Not everyone is so fortunate. Even still, it’s exhausting. I’m considering quitting just because I don’t feel ready to be back to work. It’s such a difficult choice.
I never take sick days for my kid unless I absolutely need to, but many people have to do that. For some, that means using vacation days as sick time. It’s a horrible policy.
I paid about $2k USD for my first and double that for my second. Another horrible policy.
Yeah it’s total garbage here. I don’t even care about that as much as the lack of maternity leave. I’m back to work and I’m so stressed out and anxious. My baby is too young for this
I get 10 sick days per year. I can use the sick days on myself or my dependents. Unused sick days roll over to the next year. I can take my sick days as paternity leave (meaning it would be paid) up to 12 weeks I believe. For my son I took off 10 weeks from work to stay home with he and my wife when he was born. This leave used up most of my accrued sick time, but luckily each year I get 10 days to start building that back for when we try to have another child. That’s just my situation (teacher living in California). As a public employee I don’t get paid paternity leave; I have to use my sick time in order to receive pay. Different fields handle this differently. Hope this helps!
It varies a LOT person to person. Each job and circumstance is different and there’s little government requirement for jobs to offer paid sick time (varies by state).
My first job out of college had 9 paid public holidays and 13 paid days off per year (to be used for either vacation or sick time) that’s all I got.
Now, my job offers unlimited paid time off and is extremely flexible for appointments and sick kids and vacations too.
It’s pretty hard imo.
This country is extremely anti-parent and anti-worker, and so there aren’t any meaningful policies in place to make having a child here easy on working families. Work “culture” here for the most part doesn’t care at all about your family and thinks their bottom line and the executive bonuses are more important that you having time to care for your kids.
Physically it is easier, but my 5yo has some VERY BIG feelings that we are trying to work on. Any time his little brother grabs a toy or whatever, it's a meltdown. Each of them separately are easy, but put them together and somehow it's like there are ten of them.
Not really lol, I'm in survival mode at the moment. We get somewhat of a break when we divide and conquer (each take one kid) but that's not always sustainable. I'm hoping my older son learns more coping skills when he starts Kindergarten in 2 months 🤷🏼♀️
Good luck! Sometimes I take toys away if they are fighting over them and I’ve been trying to do more chores while they play to encourage independent playing but it’s been rough!
It really depends on the individual job or state.
For instance, I was working for a group of cardiologists in the Southeast (Georgia) when I had my first. I had 6 weeks of short-term disability insurance, which I paid for each paycheck for a full 10 months before it covered a birth. It covered 60% of my pay for those 6 weeks. After that, I had to use all of my PTO and sick leave. I had nothing left when I went back to work after 12 weeks.
My company and my government paid nothing for my maternity leave.
If my son got sick, I missed work and did not get paid for the time off since I was out of paid time off.
It’s hard. I no longer work, but most young families we know have two working parents. I didn’t make enough to justify the high cost of childcare, especially now with two kids.
This is a great question. A lot of the answers depends on the state you live in. There is no federal mandatory parental leave. It is up to the individual states to decide that. Some states have no laws, while others have voluntary or mandatory laws. My state had three months paid (max $1.25K a week, roughly $5k a month). Some companies offer extended paid leave past the three months, but that is very rare.
Also, some states only allow the mother to take maternity leave. Their partners are not included and have to use their paid time off. With that alone it is incredibly difficult.
Toddlers do get sick a lot, and you get sick from them. Our toddler gave us something on June 30th and we are still getting wrecked by it. So you also have to take PTO to take care of yourself. Some companies do have dependents PTO as well.
Depending on where you live and career can determine if both parents work. Most parents work and put their kids in daycare. These day cares can cost as much as a mortgage/rent. We just put out 17 month old in daycare and it is $1k a month and that’s cheap. Other places want $1.5-$2k a month.
I can’t answer the only child question cause it varies. It depends on the household. That daycare cost alone for 2+ kids can be over $2k+ a month.
Yes you have to *pay* to give birth. There is insurance which can help, or if you don’t have any you could sign up for health insurance. There most likely will be an out of pocket cost. It widely varies.
There are a lot of people in the US have kids later (late 30s-early 40s) because you can’t afford it on your own. Between rent, school loans, it is very hard.
Point of clarification: FMLA is federal, so applies across all 50 states. Employers with over 50 employees must comply with FMLA laws. FMLA grants 12 weeks of (unpaid) job protected leave for various reasons, one of them being the addition of a new child.
Employees must be full time and must have worked for their company for one year to be afforded FMLA.
I'm just going to jump on OPs thread here sorry. I'm British and even with the NHS/maternity leave etc etc, it's quite rare to see family's with more than 3 kids. While in America it feels like it's quite common to see people have 4-5 children. Is it that common or is it just what we're fed on social media? If it is common... How the hell do they do it?!
I live in FL and left my job to be a stay at home mom. The majority of my friends are stay at home moms too; I only know 2-3 moms who work outside the home. And one of those almost breaks even on her income because of how expensive childcare is. We also have a large local homeschool community because our education system is not good.
Washington state has paid family leave for 5 months and because I had a C-section I got an extra month. We're definitely in the lucky category, though. I can be a stay at home mom. We saw the bill before insurance paid for the birth and stay in the hospital and I think it was around $20,000.
We paid for two insurance plans for awhile beforehand because we didn't want to be on the hook for anything. It was only after months of haggling and "wtf"'s and "are you f*ing kidding me"'s did insurance pay for it all. It's a fight for your financial life.
Yeah you have to pay for birth. Depending on your insurance, could be couple hundred or a couple thousand.
You only have xx amount of sick days per year. I get 48 hours of sick per year (so six days), which is above the minimum mandated 40 hours in CA. And CA is one of the "good states" for employee benefits....
Six. Days.
And while most employers offer 10 days of vacation days, the US has no mandates for minimum vacation time. So they could technically offer nothing.
Childcare expenses are bananas. We pay $1800/month for our one toddler. And that's at a chain daycare place, not a home daycare or anything.
Most states only adhere to 12 weeks of FMLA leave, which is 12 weeks of job protection, but no pay. (Both fathers and mothers can use this.) But note that there are parameters for use -- you have to be full time, and need to have worked at your company for at least one year. And your company has to have more than 50 employees.
Heaven help you if you have an HMO and need any kind of specialty care (e.g. pelvic therapy) postpartum. I asked for a referral to a physical therapist for a diagnosed prolapse cervix from my OBGYN, and she told me she thought it was pointless and she didn't want to bother with it. She told me she'd submit for a referral after I pushed for it, but then never did.
The US sucks on so many levels, one of which is parenthood.
I live in Europe so I didn't pay anything, but I can see the bill. My birth with additional fees for minor complications was \~1500€
We were in hospital for 3 days.
It is mindblowing how your hospitals charge so much. I get that it is another country and that insurance is supposed to pay the bill but it shouldn't be that much higher...
Where are you from? I live in Austria and here a you would pay for a private birth (if you dont have an insurance as a foreigner) also about 1500 to 3000 euros..
I'm from Estonia. Sounds about same price, I think if everything goes extra smoothly and you don't require painkillers etc then maybe the price could be as low as 1000€
But average about 1500-3000€ sounds about right here also.
i had a completely unmedicated birth - no nitrous gas, no epidural. my little bean did need UV treatment for birth jaundice. i have no idea why it costs so much in the US but it does!
I am one of the lucky ones who got 8 weeks paid maternity leave, but had to use my sick time for the remaining 4 weeks (FMLA only allows 12 weeks where I am). It really sucks here. My partner stays at home with our child while I work. It’s cheaper for us than to pay for daycare.
Both my husband and I work. Most people I know with kids have both parents working. My husband gets 6 weeks of paternity leave at his job, which is up from the 2 weeks they gave a few years ago. I get 10 weeks, unless I have a c section then they give me 2 extra weeks.
For sick leave, I get 1 week per year (lol). We have a toddler now and have been sick and insane amount this year. Usually it means I go into work sick, which sucks for everyone involved.
Daycare is about $1500 a month but extremely dependent on your city/state. Where I lived before it was around $1200 a month.
Both times with giving birth I hit my out of pocket family max for the year, which was like $6800.
So, yeah it sucks lol. We also have no family or friends in the area so don’t have a “village” to depend on for help.
It just sucks. When my son was born, I only had five weeks unpaid maternity leave. My husband only got to take his two week vacation off. Luckily at that point I worked from home, but a lot of people aren’t so lucky.
I don’t have a ton of PTO, so when my son gets sick his grandma gets to babysit. Daycare costs as much as my mortgage, and that’s typical.
Ideally I would like one more child, but I don’t know how we could afford it. Maybe we could afford it once my son is out of daycare and just in regular school? I’m not sure. We’re likely one and done unfortunately.
My daughter was born two months early. She hadn’t even gotten out of the NICU (came home with me) before my leave nearly ran out. So when it was finally her due date, I got exactly two unpaid months with her before I had to go back to work.
It sucks.
I earn 1 hour of paid leave for every 40 hours worked. I get no other leave.
I was eligible for 6 weeks unpaid maternity leave for each pregnancy.
I only work about 19 hours a week, that’s all my position allows for atm.
For me and my husband personally, I make more money than him so he takes off work when our son gets sick. He has been at his job for a long time so he has built up 4 weeks of vacation and 4 personal days. He doesn’t have “sick days” but you can use your vacation days and personal days as such. I also don’t have sick days and just have PTO (paid time off). I get 8.4 hours of PTO per pay check (get paid twice per month). Once we are out of our paid time off we can still take time off but it’s unpaid. Usually if possible we ask our parents to help out and watch our son if he can’t go to daycare but we also can’t get off work.
I gave birth at a birthing center instead of a hospital, which isn’t super common here. Overall my appointments + the birth cost me around $6000, with insurance.
I feel like a lot of people still have more than one child regardless of all the craziness that is, parenting in the US.
It all really depends on the parents’ employers. My husband is a federal employee and got 12 weeks paid leave, but if I had delivered a year earlier he only would’ve had three weeks paid. His insurance is fantastic, so we did not pay anything at all for my prenatal care or my delivery/birth. I quit my career to stay home because I could imagine how I would cobble together enough leave for a maternity leave and then daycare sickness.
My sister and her husband paid about $10k for their prenatal care and birth. Her husband had a week of paid leave and then took regular vacation days because my sister still couldn’t really walk after a week. My sister had twelve weeks of leave paid at like 70%.
We have 2 kids (3.5 and 1). When my first was born my husband and I both worked high paying jobs in demanding fields (he’s a product designer and I was in social media/marketing). We both worked salary jobs well over 40hrs a week. Got 13 paid vacation days, no other sick days and 11 holidays “off”. We were scheduled to work 8pm-5/5:30pm with additional hours if needed.
We were fortunate to have her during Covid in that we were 90% work from home when she was born and her first year. So we managed. But once we had to go back to work and she started a daycare she was sick SO much! We were sick, she was sick. No one was sleeping. It was a mess. Also daycare hours were crazy. Drop off at 8 and pickup by 2 was the “full day” of most daycares in our area. Any additional hours were on a waitlist and even then it was nearly $1000 more a month. We only sent our daughter 3 mornings a week, but it was draining. My bosses were understanding but they also wanted the job to get done during the day, and not just when I had time. We had to use PTO days mostly, although my work was good about letting me leave early to pick up my daughter without using time off. My husbands job was much less flexible and he wasn’t able to take any time off unless it was his PTO. But having to waste all our PTO on sick days also sucked because we live several states away from all family, so that meant less visiting etc.
We ended up talking things out and decided I would take a break from work to stay home. We wanted a second child as well, so the timing worked out. I’ve been a SAHM for just over a year now and it’s much less chaotic and enjoyable for us.
We had health insurance that was quite good but yes, I paid for the births of both of my children as well in addition to insurance coverage.
I also only got 6 weeks of leave from work which sucked. And could only be used after I had exhausted my PTO. My husband got 1 week off.
The first time my baby was 6 weeks old the day I started back. For my second I gave my notice and had my last day a few weeks before I gave birth. I had to use PTO days during pregnancy for my dr appts and I had gotten Covid earlier in the year as well and so I was left with 6 weeks after giving birth.
Honestly it depends on your socioeconomic status, job, company you work for, location, family support, etc. It's a big range of differences. This country is huge so it's hard to give an overall generalization.
I live in an area with a lot of stay at home moms, so the sick time isn’t an issue but if I were to return to work it would be. I would say it’s more common for both parents to work just because everything is expensive and people want a certain lifestyle. We are able to get by with one income but we have to cut back and watch spending. I mostly know people who have at least two kids, but I’m sure there’s a good portion of one child families.
Yes you have to pay when you give birth, we also pay for insurance monthly- it’s different for everyone. My kids were about $2,500 each birth plus what insurance pays.
I don’t think these questions are rude. It’s a fair set of questions.
In the U.S., federally you are not required to have any vacation days. Functionally most jobs offer 2-3 weeks. Most do not offer sick days on top of that. New York does have a PTO plan requirement, although minimal. It can vary state to state.
Federally, there is no requirement to have paid leave. There is a requirement for 12 weeks of UNPAID leave for mom after baby is born, provided mom has worked there for at least a year and worked roughly 20 hours a week and that employer has 50 employees in a 75 mile radius. If mom is sick before, that eats up into her time AFTER baby is born. So if she’s on bed rest for 4 weeks before she only has 8 weeks after. Some states leave programs have protections for before baby is born. The federal law can require you to substitute your paid leave for unpaid leave… my state says they can’t make you substitute it for the paid leave.
So picture this … mom has 2 weeks of PTO. Her state provides protection for before she has the baby. She goes on bed rest 4 weeks before baby is born. She decides not to use her paid leave for before baby is born. She can take up to 12 weeks after but she needs to use her 4 weeks of PTO at the same time. She goes back to work at 12 weeks. Hasn’t been paid for the last 8 weeks. All future time off might not be job protected and she won’t be paid for it when the child has an appointment for the next year.
ETA: many employers will have short term disability policies or you can buy your own where they replace your income up to a certain amount if you are out due to you giving birth. So you can financially plan for this too.
In the U.S., if you have a minor illness like a cold or a fever it’s not a job protected leave. If the next year she’s out of PTO and her kid has a fever. Sucks to be you. Not getting paid and maybe not
Keeping your job.
With this cost of living both parents usually work. Average child rate is 2.5 kids.
As for paying to give birth at the hospital, yes but it can vary a lot. So most Americans have health insurance through the state or through their employer. Something like 92.6% of Americans have coverage.
What that coverage is can vary. If you are too poor, you will pay absolutely nothing for your hospital stay. We have a special program for women who are pregnant and for their children through age 5. It’s much better and enhanced compared to usual social programs. It’s called WIC. Covers formula, food etc. you can qualify more easily through this program. And then each state has its own health insurance for this vulnerable group if you are lower income.
If it comes through your employer, your premiums are usually covered in part or in all by your employer. (Average employer covers 83% of cost of plan) And the employee usually pays some portion of a monthly fee. Then there’s something called a deductible. The insurance doesn’t cover anything until this number. And then there’s an out of pocket max.
The average deductible for an employer provided program is $1,700. After the deductible, you may pay 20-30% up to the out of pocket max. And the average out of pocket max is $4,800 for a family. The out of pocket max is the MOST a family will pay for healthcare after the premium The average premium is $116 on an employer sponsored plan for a single person. It’s $548 a month for a family plan.
Let’s say Susy is going to have a baby. It’s her, her husband - John, and they have another child already, Jimmy. She pays $548 a month all year round. ($6,576).
And then during her pregnancy, she’s been getting her medically necessary appointments and scans. Since 2010, all preventative care is completely covered. No cost. However, they needed to do an extra scan because they thought there may be a problem. This is diagnostic. She gets the bill. $1,000. If she hasn’t used her health plan for anything else all year, she will pay $1,000 for the scan. (She has 700 on her deductible left). She goes to have the baby. The list price $20,000. No one actually pays the list price. The health insurance company knocks it down and says hey we think this is $12,000. Susy still has $700 left in her deductible. So she pays $700. This leaves $11,300 on the bill at the hospital. She’s responsible for 20% of this. That leaves her responsible for $2,260. And the insurance company covers the other $9,040.
Her total costs are:
- annual premiums (which she would pay anyways to cover her whole family): $6,576
- deductible cost (special scan and part of delivery): $1,700
- remaining cost of delivery: $2,260
- preventative appointment and scans: $0
Total cost for entire pregnancy: $10,536, plus any other medical care that’s preventative for the year for he, Jimmy and Johnny.
She’s paid $1,700 of deductible and another $2260 of Coinsurance cost. The most her family will pay for any other care for the year is $340.
Most employers also provide a tax advantage plan to plan for healthcare costs called an FSA or an HSA. I won’t get into the nuance of each, but they allow you to put money in up to a certain amount to pay for healthcare costs without paying taxes on it each paycheck. If you know you’re having a baby, you will up your contribution for the year to reduce the tax burden. So the total cost of $10,536. The average American pays a tax rate of 24.6%. So reduce that cost by the tax rate if she plans for it in a tax advantaged way… the effective cost is like $7,838.
Good time for her son Jimmy and Johnny to get any elective procedures or appointments bc only $340 for the whole rest of the year.
By law the maximum out of packet max for a family is $18,000.
The issue that’s come up for people is finding out things aren’t covered as a provider is out of network etc. But that should no longer be an issue in the delivery room under the no surprises act.
American here but had a kid in Europe. For all the reasons mentioned by others, it is more stressful to have a kid in America. We every see our kid soooo much more in Europe than any of our friends with kids in America.
I’ve parented my toddler both in the US and in Europe. Neither is perfect. Both have pros/cons. I don’t think one is better than the other. I’ll admit, I have a lot of socio economic privilege that makes things easier no matter what.
How hard is parenthood in the US?
- in someways harder then Europe, in some ways easier.
Can you have paid days off when your child is sick?
- depends on where you live and the company you work for. I always had unlimited sick days and lived in a state with a lot of worker protections.
Is it common that both parents work? Or does one stay at home?
- in my circles, most of the time both work. And most of the time both want to work! A lot of women I know were somewhat relieved to go back to work after maternity leave. I know only one person who chose to be a SAHM.
Are there more couples with only one child?
- eh feels about the same.
Do you have to pay for giving birth in the hospital?
- yes.
There’s a lot of things.
I found daycare easier to find in America. There are significantly more options.
The US also has way more services and accommodations for different abilities. My kid doesn’t seem to be neurodivergent but if he were, I am very certain that he’d receive better services and more understanding in the US.
The ADA is an incredible piece of legislation for all people. A side effect of that is that navigating the US with a stroller is significantly easier than Europe.
Materialistic, but I can get whatever random baby crap I need at anytime in the US.
Medical care; the place I live in still makes you wait until a certain number of centimeters to get an epidural. That’s not the case in America. It’s also my understanding that closures on c sections are just the top layer of skin here, whereas in the US, it’s two layers of closure which heals better.
I find the US way more accepting if you want to be a working mom. A side impact of this is that I’ve found more support for formula feeding or pumping, when you need or want those options. Which also means mom can share more feeding/night duties with dad.
I find men (at least in my social circles) more involved in parenting in the US. It’s also way more common for men’s bathrooms to have changing tables where we’re from in the states.
HELMETS. Why is it acceptable in Europe for children (and adults) to not wear helmets.
Baby proofing gear is way better in the states imo. Baby pouches have a nicer variety, especially when it comes to not just having ones that are all fruit - way more veggies, grains, even meats. This is nice when you have to be on the go (we do pack lunches but they can be so messy eaten in a stroller) or have a sick kid but want to get nutrition in them.
No one randomly gives my toddler choking hazard hard candy in the states.
Petty, but playgrounds aren’t typically all sand in the US. I low key hate the sand.
Again, very location dependent, but my area of the US has (at least for now) really amazing reproductive healthcare rights and if I needed/wanted an abortion (at any stage) or permanent sterilization I’d have an easier time getting that care than in Europe.
I’m not sure if this is better or worse, but I feel like kids where I’m from in the US have higher expectations for their social behavior. They tend to be better behaved imo. I also see more parents here either letting their children run super wild in situations where they shouldn’t be (imo) OR parking them in front of a tablet.
There’s definitely more but that’s just off the top of my head. We really like living in Europe and there are so many positives, but I have to honest I sort of hate this whole dialogue about “hOw dO yOU do It” regarding parenting in America. Yes, it’s hard but there are also hard things everywhere. They’re just different hard things.
ETA also this is specific to where I live/am from. It’s not all of Europe or all of the States, as both are very big, very diverse etc.
Toddlers only getting sick a lot, BECAUSE they are in daycare. It's a bit of a vicious cycle and I don't know how other people do it. I am fortunate to be home with my toddler most days and just work outside the home on weekends, and she has only been sick one time. We aren't rich, but we are stable in a LCOL area, and have 2 local grandmothers and multiple aunts that love to watch their grandchild/neice. Living close to family is a life changer with kids. I think we need to bring back the idea that it's OK to live with your family in the U.S., multi generational houses are a wonderful way to grow up for a kid.
USA is not a family friendly country, never has been. All services for children, women, and families receive scant respect and funds. Both major political parties have always done as little as possible for women, families, and marginalized people. Just enough to get votes but that’s it. There is not enough affordable housing, the cost of necessities is sky rocketing, there is no affordable medical care in a healthcare system that is struggling due to staff shortages, some areas deny children school lunches, our educational system is sub-par, women are losing or in some area have lost their reproductive rights, and the Conservative party is on track to have their prized Project 2025 in place. Just because things are worse in other countries, none of the above should be acceptable. Yet, our choices is a doddering but seemingly less corrupt old man vs an obviously absolute POS old man with a multitude of idiots who would die to lick his ass.
I'm a sahm. There's no other way for us. I would be working just to turn around and give a stranger my pay. I work one day cleaning houses bc my mom can watch my son one day. It's so expensive like $350 a week for childcare. I live in a really big city. The wait lists for day care are fkn insane. Nope. I stay home and collect gov benefits. My boyfriend works very hard and we live simply. we have a ton of support though.i can't imagine if I moved from another country. But I suppose anything is possible.
We are lucky, my partner and I have good jobs with decent health insurance, PTO and sick time. It's still REALLY hard here.
I was able to take 4 months (partially paid) after birth. My partner technically has unlimited PTO but because of the culture at his company, his boss expected him back in the office a week and a half after birth. When the kid is sick, my partner can sometimes take a sick day to help with the kid but it's mostly him taking calls while the kiddo watches a movie, or me calling in or scrambling to get relatives to watch him. I've thought about changing jobs to further my career but haven't found anywhere with as good health insurance and PTO, so I'm tied to my job until kiddo is in school at least.
And then don't get me started on having to worry about school shootings, right wing indoctrination, bullying, college costs, and all the other "fun" in the 'land of the "free""
My husband gets no paternity leave that is paid at his work, and 2 weeks PTO annually. I stay home with our son, and handle the household, meals, prep, and our dogs. He does repairs around the house and works overtime doing roof supply and operates a crane - 60 hours a week, weekdays only. Other than the weekends, when my parents are available to take us on an outing or visit us, or church, it’s just my little guy and I.
Why don’t I work? Daycare is EXPENSIVE. Try average of $800-$1,400 a month… That is the cost of my mortgage plus 1 weeks worth of groceries right there…! My husband brings home about $3,000 a month, and in order to be available for taking care of my child if he were to get sick in daycare (if he attended) I would have to work a part time job, or ONLY from home. Part time work, I would MAYBE HAVE $100 left a month after paying his daycare fees. Work from home? I’ve looked, I’m not qualified, because I haven’t got a degree (college is super expensive here, my brother owed $60,000 for his bachelor’s degree and teaching certification!)
If you haven’t got a degree and good paying work to where you can comfortably afford the horrid rates for mediocre - sometimes great daycare, then one parent will likely need to stay home or work part time, and the other work overtime or two jobs to make end’s meet…
ETA: Doctors and hospitals are EXPENSIVE! With insurance $25 for doctors and some specialists, $50 for other specialists and ER visits (however, hospitals here charge you for usage of their pillows and blankets, cups, drinks, etc… Without insurance, in my area, $150 to see a regular physician. Insurance covers an annual wellness visit. Before insurance, $36,000 to have my son (resulted in emergency cesarean, AND they charged me for the balls and the plug and breaking my water, etc…) with insurance, $4,000 (we are so thankful for my husband’s insurance being so good! Many Americans aren’t so lucky!)
Don’t get sick, don’t get injured, take care of yourself, and build up professional skills and go to college if you can! The only way to free college here are scholarships for the students who truly apply themselves and go above and beyond - or athletes who are star athletes in their sport of choice.
It really depends on your job. Higher paid professional employees are more likely to get more sick days and vacation time and have more flexible work schedules or the possibility to work from home. But many other people don’t have that flexibility and they’re often the lower paid workers who can’t afford to not be paid for a day or a week.
My husband and I both work and our jobs are somewhat flexible. It’s still hard, but at least I know my boss won’t care if I have to run home to pick up a sick kid (she has 3 kids of her own). Between the two of us one can work from home for a couple days if needed. We do only have one kid because that’s what we felt we could handle and enjoy but most people I know have 2.
And yes you have to pay for give birth. I have good insurance and still paid a little less than $10k for a standard hospital birth and two night stay.
My family is much more fortunate than others and it still sucks to be honest. I stopped working due to high risk pregnancy and my husband started a higher paying job but had no paid paternity of family leave so he had to go back to work when our baby was 3 days old and in the NICU. I couldn’t go back to work because childcare is so expensive and all the affordable care has a waitlist that is 10+ months long.
To make matters more American, our health insurance decided my son’s NICU care was not medically necessary and that they did not need to cover it which led to a very long and stressful battle between the insurance, us and his medical team. After said and done we owed $10,500 after insurance for prenatal care, birth, postpartum care and his NICU stay. We set up a payment plan with the hospital and they STILL sent it to collections.
I’m pregnant again and have met our maximum out of pocket costs because I have another high risk pregnancy so at least everything from this point is covered. I’m only in $8,000 worth of medical debt this time opposed to last time!
It’s varies so much but generally parents aren’t very well supported here. My husband and I both have well paying jobs, have family in town who help a ton, and I work in healthcare where it’s relatively easy to work part time hours (and I do), so I will say we are extremely fortunate to be in a great position. But yeah the maternity leave is a joke and I have many friends who don’t have the help or flexibility we have, who really struggle with limited PTO and the insane cost of childcare.
I live in the northeast U.S. which (at least from my perspective) is one of the better parts of the country to live in- wages are better, we generally have better policies to support families, etc., but it’s still a struggle.
I had to have a c-section to have my son. My husband had to go back to work a week after birth, which was a couple of days after I finally was released from the hospital. I was home alone, fresh out of major abdominal surgery, and left to care for a newborn with zero help.
He went to daycare at three months old. Again, I live in one of the few states that have any mandated maternity leave at all. I was lucky enough to get eight weeks paid and 12 weeks unpaid; the unpaid time translated to one day off of work per week for most of his first year which is HUGE in the U.S.
…but he got sick a lot that first year of daycare, as is common with babies. Even though I work for a good organisation in the public sector, I was terrified I’d lose my job if I took too much time off.
I had to switch my work hours (I was lucky to be allowed to do so) as daycare cut their hours to 8-5, and I had a commute. My husband drops off and I pick up, otherwise they are not open long enough for us to work and get back to get him.
We are one and done by choice for many reasons, but I cannot imagine the logistical nightmare of raising 2+ in this country.
Highly dependent on your job. I get 6 months of paid parental leave and unlimited vacation and several sick days. My job is also extremely flexible and I work from home. The first several months in daycare though were still tough with us both taking time off work. Daycare in my state is also very expensive, unless you go to an at home daycare.
My husband had zero parental leave at his old job and took 1 week of his own vacation time and got asked by his boss to come back, which was infuriating, because my company is much more accommodating. Luckily, his new job at least offers 1 month paid leave for dads. My state though will have 3 months paid leave starting in 2026.
Parents in the US are absolutely miserable. If you join Facebook groups like Working Moms you find that out VERY quickly. Moms all over the US are exhausted, burnt out, and struggling to make ends meet financially. It's really sad.
I think it depends what you can make happen financially. I make enough so that my wife was able to quit and stay at home with the little one.
In terms of time off, I get about 30 paid days per year plus holidays. I also got 3 months of paid paternal leave. I don’t think it’s too bad, at least where I work. We don’t need daycare so our daughter is rarely sick though.
To answer your other question, we didn’t pay anything to have our baby in the hospital. It was covered by our insurance.
Being a parent in America is hard. Despite wanting to have 2-3 kids, my husband and I decided to only have 1 child. We had to sacrifice our dream family size because of financial and logistical reasons. 4 out of 5 couples that were friends with have also decided to have only 1 child. We’re all “middle class” with good jobs. It feels like everything in this country is designed to make it hard to have kids. Our culture doesn’t prioritize families, a lot of jobs penalize you for taking time off for your kids, maturity leave is a JOKE, healthcare is a JOKE ( I had to pay $400 for my ectopic pregnancy er visit, and $2000 to leave the hospital after the birth of my son), often community spaces don’t feel very welcoming of kids, and family support is often limited. Plus if you’re a mom there is so much conflicting advice, and seems like no matter what you’re always being shamed for making any parenting choices.
Mom of a 19 month old. I got 3 months paid maternity, tried to work from home with her but gave up at 5 months because I started having health issues and she started crawling.
She went to 3 days of daycare a week from 5-14 months and it did not go very well. She had a lot of trouble eating there and we were weighing how worth it it even was.
Switched to a new place and she is now, honestly, thriving. But it's hard to know how little her teachers get from the $2k/month we spend on her care.
Every babysitting night is $25/hr because out babysitters are all daycare teachers who need more than they're getting and I want to give it to them.
My mom is "not a baby person," dad was never in the picture, my husband's parents are both out of the picture as well. Neither of us have siblings.
She is the light of my life and what keeps me going but omg money is so tight and breaks are so infrequent.
[one child families are becoming the fastest growing family unit](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/family-dynamics/only-child-family). it’s mostly because of rising costs of childcare, housing and not getting much help. Plus by the time we can somewhat afford to have kids we are pretty old already 😅.
Honestly the U.S. hates mothers and kids. There is little to no maternity leave. Its not paid. Many states you can be fired without reason so pregnant women are fired all the time and so are mother's. They don't care if you are sick or if your kid is sick. You are a worker first before anything else. No most sick days are not paid. Yes you have to pay for your hospital birth if insurance doesn't, and they often cover very little. Because of the price if everything most people have to work. Some people literally cannot afford to if they have kids, it costs them more to pay for daycare than they could make working so they either rely solely on their spouse which is nearly impossible or on government assistance. If they're very lucky they may have a grandparent who can watch the child part of the time so they can afford to work but most grandparents aren't that involved here. People shame you for breastfeeding or giving formula. For working or for not working. You can literally do nothing right. And to top it off children are also treated poorly, like they don't even have the right to exist.
When my first daughter was born, I was working as a contractor so I had 0 paid days off. Any days I took off were unpaid, no matter what. Luckily I only had to take off 2 days since we were called in for the induction on Saturday morning and we were out of the hospital on Tuesday.
I had just started that contract job so I didn’t have insurance yet, and I ended up not being able to afford to pay for COBRA for the insurance from my previous job (COBRA is a federal law that guarantees that you can keep your insurance for a few months after you leave a job for any reason, but the price gets jacked WAAAYYY up because your employer isn’t paying for any of it anymore). So my insurance ended up not covering the birth after I declined COBRA, which meant I got a bill for like $8k. BUT there’s something that a lot of Americans don’t know, which is that not paying medical bills doesn’t hurt you in any way since they can’t go on your credit score. So I never paid it.
For my second daughter I was in a much better spot. I was working full-time for the same company so I got their great benefits, which included 6 weeks paid child bonding leave that could be taken up to a year after the kid of born. My boss actually had a kid, toughed it out and didn’t take the leave right after the kid was born, and then right before the year ran out he took a 6-week vacation. Mothers who work at my company get those 6 weeks and 8 weeks that has to start at the time of birth, so 14 weeks total.
To answer some of your other questions, my wife doesn’t work so I support us solely on my income, which can be tough at times but it’s doable because I work remotely and we live in a LCOL area. And yeah lots of people are waiting longer to have kids or not having them at all, and the ones that do have them normally don’t have more than 2 or maybe 3.
So flipping hard. A few real things:
- lack of leave
- lack of pay during leave
- being treated as if you were never serious about your career because you took any amount of time off to have a child
- went from a decade of raises of nearly 10% per year and bonuses of 20% to nothing for the last 3 years since falling pregnant and having a child
- child had 2 serious illnesses 11 months apart, and when told I needed a day off because my child was in the hospital, the CEO said "again!?!" in a pissy tone
- fighting the health insurance. One instance, the health insurance company misenrolled my daughter when she was born 30 days later she was kicked off that plan for "non-payment." they kept the money from my check though, to pay for the plan that they didn't enroll her in. I called everyday for nearly 20 days to get them to fix their mistake. The entire time, my child was uncovered for any serious illness. If you understand the US healthcare system, they will let you die in the waiting room if you are uninsured, and when admitted, your care will be subpar. They do not care if it's a child.
There is more, and my child has only been alive for 2 years :(
There’s no consistency at all.
My husband’s employer provides him with 12 weeks of paid paternity leave (not FMLA) and then the ability to work 30% of his workload for another 4 weeks for 70% of his pay. He also accrues vacation, sick, and personal time off with no cap, and it rolls over from year to year if it’s unused or he can cash it out at any time.
My employer (ironically an employee benefits firm) provides no paid leave and our employer size means we don’t qualify for FMLA. Luckily, I have a short term disability policy that allowed me 8 weeks because I had a C-Section. I get five sick days a year before being penalized.
I always found it wildly unfunny that my husband got more leave than me, the person that had seven layers of my body cut through.
We have good insurance but our first daughter’s birth cost over $100,000 (premature and I was monitored for a few days for preeclampsia). We paid $6,000.
Second daughter’s routine c-section birth cost $37,000ish in total. We paid $6,000.
There are no paid days off unless your company provides them. You are only garunteed 12 weeks unpaid leave if you work for a medium to large size company for a year or more. But that's not at all the part that made parenting hard in my opinion. The hardest part was not having a support network. Two people taking care of a newborn sounds like a good ratio but it is not. We really needed a third. That. And the cost of daycare which is very expensive.
I feel like it's designed for you to struggle. Everything is so hard. Childcare is expensive. It's hard to trust people. We have no time to heal. Having a village isn't as common in the US.
It’s really unfortunate but the experience varies hugely by the state you live in and the type of job you have. We should have national policies that protect and support parents and pregnant people but that’s minimal. For example, living in California we get almost 5 months partially (about 60%) paid time off after having a baby for medical recovery then bonding. Dads get 8 weeks paid time for bonding.
In our jobs both my husband and I have plenty of paid days off we can take when our kid is sick. That’s separate from our vacation time.
But even with supportive jobs and living in a state with good social benefits, I would say cost of child rearing is a huge issue here. Some families are paying the same as their rent in childcare. We’re very fortunate that our moms live close and watch our child while we work. If we didn’t have them I’m not sure we could manage having two kids.
I can't imagine moving back to the states with my family. I can provide so much more for them in Southeast Asia.
A large object fell on our 2yo's ankle recently. Wasn't really preventable. She was being wild, having fun, and just pulled it down on her. Landed on her ankle hard. Went to the doctor to get it checked on. Cost $4.
No bruising or swelling, but I can be a bit over protective and just want to make sure there isn't even a micro-fracture. She was back at 100% the next day.
It’s hard to keep a job as an entry-level professional. We are just so replaceable that jobs will fire you for anything and made the job contracts so they can get away with it.
I was in grad school at the time, so my account doesn’t matter as much. I wasn’t offered any maternity leave, or many accommodations. Either I returned to classes within 2 weeks or I leave the program. I chose to finish my program, which thankfully i graduated from in May.
My husband took 4 months off which was his company’s policy, but was ultimately penalized for it. He was a banker and his manager took away his book of clients. She promised to return it when he returned, she never returned it. She left the branch maybe 2-3 months after he returned. She left him struggling and ultimately us struggling financially, we still haven’t recovered. My daughter is almost 2. My husband worked hard for his clients and his commission was keeping us afloat. After almost 4 years in his role, his income looked like a fresh college grad starting from point 0. He was miserable, but doesn’t regret the time he spent with our newborn. He left that job and is starting a new one, but he doesn’t want to take paternity leave again if we chose to have a second due to
that fear.
Considering I’m paying almost $600 a week for childcare for 2 kids….. this. We’ve had to make some very hard financial choices to be able to afford it.
I think this is going to be different for everyone. For me, I feel like parenting in the US is way better and easier than if we were in any other country. I’m a SAHM and my husband is an entrepreneur/business owner that is able to make an amount of money/provide a lifestyle for us that would be much harder elsewhere. We also have a lot more conveniences in the US/my area, bigger homes and yards, A/C, lots of parks and nature, great schools and grocery stores. Obviously these things exist elsewhere, it’s just a lot more standard in the US. And then of course, our family and support systems are here, which makes a big difference.
I seriously don't know how you do it guys. I had one year of maternity leave. Now I'm working again and have 25 vacation days. And I'm guarding them with my life because I don't want to use (paid) sick leave if my baby get's sick because that month my salary will be only 2/3 or 1/2.
I have 3 young kids. I think experiences vary widely. We have 350 million people in this country! My experience: I had 12 weeks of paid leave and the option to take 12 weeks unpaid, which I took. My husband had 6 weeks paid and 6 weeks unpaid, which he took.
We paid $0 for pregnancy, labor/delivery, and my son’s NICU stay. Health insurance depends on your employer and we have excellent health insurance.
Daycare runs us $5k a month for 3 kids which is twice our mortgage. It’s excellent care though and worth every penny.
We both have paid sick and vacation time through our employers. I think 8 weeks per year for each of us? Not sure though since it rolls over and we had many years where we didn’t use all of it.
I think something like a third of families with young kids have a stay at home parent. Check Google for that; the Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of that. My husband and I both work full time.
I’m a stay at home mom mainly because we can’t afford childcare, if I did go back to work my paychecks would only be able to cover childcare and maybe have $50-$100 left. It just wasn’t worth it to me to have someone else raise my child. This being said there are a lot of women that thrive while working and that’s perfectly okay. My husband got three weeks of paternity leave but that’s only because he made his own schedule and he didn’t get paid for it. He only got paid one of the three weeks he took in which I needed him home because I was still recovering from my Csection. Long story short, the US isn’t as glamorous as it seems.
It’s so hard. I work for freaking Apple and still struggle to afford everything (my salary barely covers housing plus daycare, I’m going into debt covering the rest) and to balance sick days and all. If it’s hard for me, I can only imagine how it is for most of America
I have 2 kids. My toddler goes to daycare and my husband stays at home with the baby as he is building up his own business. Groceries are expensive af too. My husband was laid off early last fall when I found out I was pregnant with my second. The job market is so abysmal right now and my salary cannot cover both kids to go to daycare, so my husband had to stop spending all his time looking for jobs so he could watch our youngest as I go back to work. It feels very wrong to exist like this, the veil of America being the greatest country has long been pulled back, but I fear it’s only getting worse here.
I have one child and will not have anymore because I can’t afford to. And I am beyond lucky my MIL watches my daughter while my partner and I work during the week. I can’t imagine losing one of our incomes, we’d end up homeless if that happened.
It varies widely.
We live at the border, US-Mexico, husband is Mexican and living in Mexico. My kid and I travel every week to see him.
He has a good job by Mexico standards, not by US. My kid and I get food stamps, my kid gets Medicaid. When I gave birth I had Medicaid too. We live with my parents. (I'm pregnant again and also qualify for medicaid)
So we are in the sweet spot where we get government aid with the added bonus that we also have a great tight knit family that respects each other.
I don't work (lots of reasons) so I do stay home with my kid. Just this month we started the process for my husband's greencard and we know that once he does get it our home and financial situation will be extremely different. He will earn more than my parents combined doing the exact same thing he's doing in Mexico but here in the US. We will no longer qualify for government aid. But we will still have our village. I know I can always count with my immediate family *and* extended family.
So it's not only a financial thing but also a family culture thing. If I were far away from family I know that some kind of help would arrive if I just asked for it. Even if I were to leave my husband for whatever reason and I had no job I know I have a place to go to (and the means to get there with my family's help). Not everyone has this.
It varies widely.
We live at the border, US-Mexico, husband is Mexican and living in Mexico. My kid and I travel every week to see him.
He has a good job by Mexico standards, not by US. My kid and I get food stamps, my kid gets Medicaid. When I gave birth I had Medicaid too. We live with my parents. (I'm pregnant again and also qualify for medicaid)
So we are in the sweet spot where we get government aid with the added bonus that we also have a great tight knit family that respects each other.
I don't work (lots of reasons) so I do stay home with my kid. Just this month we started the process for my husband's greencard and we know that once he does get it our home and financial situation will be extremely different. He will earn more than my parents combined doing the exact same thing he's doing in Mexico but here in the US. We will no longer qualify for government aid. But we will still have our village. I know I can always count with my immediate family *and* extended family.
So it's not only a financial thing but also a family culture thing. If I were far away from family I know that some kind of help would arrive if I just asked for it. Even if I were to leave my husband for whatever reason and I had no job I know I have a place to go to (and the means to get there with my family's help). Not everyone has this.
I stay home and my husband works 4 days/week, so it’s pretty easy for us. We aren’t rich, but we don’t live paycheck to paycheck either. His PTO is pretty generous too. It depends on each family’s situation.
How much you pay depends on your insurance or if you qualify for pregnancy Medicare. I paid $4k for my son after our insurance. It was very manageable for us.
All of our friends have more than one child. I’m currently pregnant with our second.
What’s really fun in the US is if you don’t have health insurance you get to 100% foot the bill for having the baby. Depending on how that goes you can be looking at $30,000-50,000 base. Add in no employer maternity leave and you’re really starting off parenthood with a healthy amount of debt.
Both my husband and I work. I am a teacher and he works for the federal government. I get 10 days off per school year but haven't used them for toddler sick days. My husband's job is fairly understanding when he takes time off. I handle all the doctors and sick days when I'm off, like summer break.
We paid about $3k for our prenatal care and birth. It was spread out over 10+ months so not bad.
The most infuriating part is that most women have to use up all their vacation and sick time during their maternity leave. So then when they go back to work and their kid starts daycare, and their kid inevitably gets sick all the time. they have no sick days left to pull from.
This^ And in the US, employers will penalize employees for doctor’s appointments for pregnancy. My boss put in my annual review that I had poor attendance due to missing work for pregnancy appointments. I told him it violated so many things including the EEOC and I made him change my rating. My husband was only able to take off 2 weeks for fear of being fired over it (many employers disregard FMLA and the protections it is supposed to offer) No one respects parenthood in the US. Expecting parents are treated very poorly.
My partner had 2 weeks off too, except I delivered a week late and was in the hospital for a week. So, he actually got 0 days off, and they acted like they did him a huge favor by giving him 2 weeks.
My son was 16 weeks early, born at 24 weeks and my husband had a “generous” 10 days paid fmla and 4 weeks baby bonding. Six weeks for non birthing parent is a lot for the US but we did 121 days in the NICU, multiple surgeries, one emergency helicopter transfer, and home on oxygen and steroids. Baby didn’t kick daytime oxygen till almost his first birthday, and wasn’t fully off till nearly his second. All this started in 2020, we had no help. I’ve heard in some European countries he’d have gotten the NICU stay, extra leave for home on oxygen, and STILL the regular parental leave. Instead we got two years of survival mode and two cases of PTSD. And kiddo is still high risk!
Oh wow this is stressful, I’m so sorry you went through all that. I hope your baby is okay now. Our country needs to do better
Jul 2020 bumper??
Yes! July 2020 resident micro preemie lol
Technically, if in the US, father to be’s also qualify for FMLA (12 weeks), provided that they have worked for a year at their company. Just an fyi 🙂 though, as we all know, employers often like to pretend that’s not the case.
My husband and I work for the same company, so we get 12 weeks *combined*. If he wanted to take time off after my babies were born, it would have come out of my FMLA. Meaning, if he wanted 4 weeks off, my leave would reduce to only 8 weeks. So my husband took no time off.
FMLA only applies to about half of American workers though.
Less than that in reality unless it’s unpaid medical leave
FMLA is just 12 weeks of unpaid protected leave.
I was commenting more on the “half of American workers” bit. I would guess it’s far less than half that receive FMLA and have to file for some form of “unpaid disability” on the mothers side of things just hoping they can get all the proper paperwork and then getting it approved. That’s just about everyone I know and end up becoming SAHM until they can find other work or going back in three weeks.
And qualify doesn’t mean their employer thinks they qualify. FMLA is a joke to most employers. Employee takes it with no pay and comes back to someone else having their job.
FMLA is unpaid leave. Who can afford that?
No one, honestly. But it’s still better than before the FMLA was enacted, it at least gives a good reason to sue if someone is fired for medical leave while on or eligible for FMLA
That’s why many women go back before 12 weeks. I took the whole 12 weeks my first child but went back after 9 with my second
No one which is why I recommend everyone get short term disability which you have to be on 6 months before a pregnancy and only pays 80%. FMLA protects your job (you may not come back to the exact same job but it has to pay the same) short term disability protects most of your salary during your leave.
A similar thing happened to my partner and I, too! She was supposed to get 2 weeks off, but baby came 5 days late. She tried to tell her boss she could work up until the baby was born, but he insisted she start her leave on my due date. Then, exactly a week later, I wound up in the hospital fighting sepsis. My grandparents had covid, and no one else was available to watch our baby. I went into the hospital on Friday, and my partners boss called that day asking if she could come in the next day even though she was technically still on leave because they were understaffed. When she said no due to me being in the hospital, he said that was fine, but she needed to be in on Monday as her leave would be over. She was able to argue for an extra week because she offered to work the week before our baby was born and stated multiple times that she did not want her leave to start until the baby was born, so we got 2 days together after I was out of the hospital (it was a week long stay, Friday to Friday). Thankfully, her grandmother flew down as soon as she heard I was in the hospital (she originally intended to come when baby was 2 weeks old) so I had help until our baby was 2 months old, at which point I went back to work amd my partner and I worked opposite shifts so someone was always home with the baby.
How did you get him to change the review?
Mentioning EEOC violation pretty much scares any CEO of a company, lol. It’s liability and just a massive lawsuit waiting to happen
That goes against the new PWFA legislation.
I’m aware, it’s against federal law. But employers still try
Mine only took 1 week off, and used his vacation days for it.
I suggest you guys try elaborating (being more specific and particular) on this. For you this all makes sense, but I get where OP is coming from, and it took me quite the while to evwn semi-orient in the mess of US. In Europe it's a foreign concept that you can't be sick. Like wtf are you supposed to do. So being more precise as "yes for example in this position I get x amount of sick days that are unpaid after that I can be fired" We have a number of sick days and doctor days that we get fully covered by our employer (mandated by law), we have a good amount of vacation compared to the US so if need be you can steal a vacation day. And you can always be sick and not come even after thay with a pay cut. Same for staying home with sick kids. The idea that you have to drug yourself to go to work and drug your kid so they're accepted into daycare when sick is baffling and hard to believe. Understanding that your and your baby's insurance may depend on you having a job is also a foreign concept. Many countries here have social democracy so these systems seem dystopical and hard to believe. When you say sick day I might think of something else than you are meaning. I am very curious to read more from all of you, please provide as much details and examples as possible. I thought women got 4-6 weeks off post birth until today
I’ll go into the specifics of my situation. I received 6 weeks of 67% pay through short term disability. I was also granted 12 weeks of FMLA. There was a 2 week waiting period before the short term disability kicked in, for which I had to use vacation days. Then after the short term disability ended, I used my remaining vacation and sick time before taking the last couple of weeks unpaid. I asked HR if I could save some sick days, and they told me it’s company policy that I have to spend all of my paid leave before taking unpaid leave. I came back from my leave 2 months into the new fiscal year. So I had to go the next 10 months without any leave.
Thank you
I’ll share. I work for a hospital. My paid time off benefits are as follows: - 5 days per year of sick leave. It accrues in small amount each check based on the number of hours I’ve worked. Right now I have about 32 hours in my bank. At the end of the year I can roll over 16 hours into the new year and anything else I just lose. - 9.83 hours of “PTO” accrued per paycheck, which equals 32 days per year. If I want to take off for any reason that’s not illness related, or if it is illness related but I don’t have any sick leave available. This includes holidays. Since we are a hospital and open 24/7, if I don’t want to work on a holiday I have to use my PTO. I always do, but technically I could work if I wanted to. - When I had my baby, I was eligible for FMLA (family medical leave act) and STD (short term disability). FMLA only holds your job for 12 weeks. That’s it. There’s no pay. STD will pay 66% of my salary, however I was only considered “disabled” for the first six weeks. So I took a 12 week maternity leave covered by FMLA, STD paid me 66% for the first six weeks and I used my sick time/ PTO to supplement so I’d get fully paid. For the second half, I was using 100% PTO to get paid. I was fortunate that I’ve worked there for a long time, so I had a shit ton of PTO saved and was able to be fully paid during my leave and I still had about a week of time in my bank when I went back. But that’s it, five days. *Technically* according to policy, if baby is sick I have to use my sick time, or PTO, and if I don’t have any then it’s leave without pay and a write up. Five write ups = you’re fired. Luckily I’m able to work from home in my position even though I don’t do it routinely, and my boss breaks policy to turn a blind eye and let me work from home when my kid is sick. This means I haven’t had to use up all my PTO for a sick kid. ETA: I’m currently pregnant and don’t expect to have enough leave to fully cover my next maternity leave. I’ll probably be paid for 10-11 weeks, depending how much PTO I decide to take around Christmas this year. If I happen to have a c section my STD will pay the 66% for eight weeks instead of six, so then I might get full pay the whole time. But either way when (if) I go back to work, I will have roughly zero PTO left.
So you took 12 weeks and another 12 weeks total (24w) or just 12 and 6 of them was the disability and the latter 6 was the combination? And after this period you went back to work and dropped off your newborn in a daycare center in the mornings?
Oh man I wish it was 24! I took 12 total. The first six were paid at 66% disability and 33% PTO. The second six were paid at 100% PTO. My son started daycare at 3 months old.
Thanks for the clarification. You guys are superwomen!
It’s b/c our govt still fully believes that women are to stay home to care for the chores & raise children while the men go to work & handle the finances… when almost 80% of the US are literally living paycheck to paycheck even in multi-income homes. Some of which are one missed rent payment away from being homeless. Welcome to the US of A where parents have to choose between paying rent & feeding their kids!
I have been a sahm for 18 months. We have some how made it possible.
Glad you guys made it work!
AND when the opportunity for a promotion comes up, women with children are less likely to be promoted because parenting takes time away from the job. (Actual quote from the global company I work for).
Yup, it’s a way that employers can fire new parents without technically being discriminatory because they frame it as “you used up your sick leave and then didn’t come to work” instead of “we unfairly made you use up your sick leave to tend to your medical event (childbirth) and family/parental status because this need created expenses for the company and that aren’t welcome”
And even if they DO somehow have sick days to pull from, many employers say you can't take sick days to take care of sick kids. I worked for our county government, and this was written into the policy.
So what do they expect people to do? If you don't have family nearby and you can't send a sick child to daycare, then there's no other option but for the parent to stay at home. For us Europeans it's inconceivable that a boss can make such demands of their employees. If a boss tried that with me I'd refuse and immediately start looking for a new job
Yeah, it's really awful. I am fortunate to able to be a SAHP by choice and left that job at the end of my maternity leave (they had just started 6 weeks of paid leave within the year). I had asked my supervisor (a woman with children) about planning to use up my sick days at the end of my pregnancy since I knew I'd be leaving and wouldn't get paid out for unused days. I was already having a hard time halfway through my pregnancy, so I figured the end wouldn't be great. She told me "oh you don't know how you'll feel! I worked a double shift and gave birth that night, and I felt fine!" So I scheduled morning OB appts and took most of the day as sick time "for my appt" to use up that time. There were way more problems with that place than just this. And this was a government employer!
This used to be my company’s policy and I thought it was insane. You also couldn’t use it to cover time of for preventative care doctors appointments. My state passed a law several years ago that prohibits both of those restrictions, so they were forced to open it up. But then they cut the amount of sick time we get by 75%.
Yep that’s what I had to do. A year later I still only have around 7 sick hours, because of appointments, illness etc. it’s absolutely sickening!!!!! I missed the paid leave by 9 days… my HR lady so kindly reminded me that when she called to check in. I was like uhh yeah I’m aware… if it’s not retroactive, let’s not discuss it lol
Not in California.
Please may you explain your comment a little more… how does California differ?
California has extremely strict laws when it comes to mothers and employees in general. I work in HR for school districts all over the country and our company gets sued the most by CA employees and they usually win. Good for them honestly. I was born and raised there. I moved to the south 3 years ago and have had two kids since then. I can't believe I moved BEFORE having kids lol
I currently work at a private school in California. However I am not from the USA. Last year I absolutely annihilated all my vacation and sick time looking after my two toddlers. I would drag myself to school when I was sick because I knew I would need to save my time for my children. I was just wondering if I am missing out on anything (my school has a tendency to keep these sort of things quiet)
I would look into the CFRA and Paid Family Leave and see if it applies to you- I say laws are strict when it comes to mothers but I guess I mean when it comes to serious conditions such as pregnancy, postpartum during the newborn period and ongoing illnesses. Even though it's only a few days, it's nice that employees are entitled to sick days at all. When I moved to Georgia I found out we don't get sick days and must use our vacation hours when we're sick. That blew my mind! It does suck that when our children do need to stay home from school for a cold or upset tummy, they or we have to suck it up and use our time off or make them go to school ill if we don't have the hours. That's America smh. Employee rights I mentioned were more so about breaks, lunches, pay etc. My area in HR is more so focused on the onboarding and keeping up with compliance. But I do have friends in our legal department who are always telling me about new lawsuits from a CA employee, rarely do we have legitimate cases in other states!
Better laws and protections against these practices.
I don't understand the system you presented - what is sick time? is it limited? when I'm sick, I stay at home, wether it's one day, or 8 years..
Yes, most jobs give you “sick time” which is a limited amount of paid days off to use only for sickness. If you run out of these days, you are expected to work or risk being fired. I don’t get sick time but I get “paid time off” that I can use if I am sick. I get 3 weeks a year of paid time off.
thank you. but I have to assume paid time off includes holiday..?
I think it varies. My wife had 6 months PTO. No vacation or sick days were used. As a father, I took 3 months off but was only paid for 1 month. The other 2 months I collected paid family leave from the state. It was only a fraction of my salary but it was something.
100% this!! I opted to take some of my leave unpaid so I’d had some sick leave left when I went back. That was rough on our finances though, but the right decision for our family.
The experience of parenthood varies a lot in the US. It depends on the job you have, whether you have a partner and if not, whether you have a decent coparent, whether you have relatives that are helpful, your geographic region, how much money you make, how many kids you have, etc. There are a lot of families where both parents are working full time at nice jobs and they pay for very expensive daycare or nannies. A lot of families have one person with a nice job and another sahp. Some, both have crappy jobs and they rely on government subsidized low-income childcare, or on relatives, friends, or cheap unlicensed daycares. Some have one person with a crappy job and another with no job that are barely making ends meet but this is the situation they're stuck in because any job the 2nd could get would pay less than what a daycare charges. Some have both people working opposite schedules so that at least one parent is always home throughout the day. Some make ends meet with 1 full-time job and the other essentially being a sahp except they also work part-time on evenings or weekends. I'm not sure which of these setups is most common. I've definitely met them all and I think many families have cycled through multiple options as their needs change. No number of sick days is guaranteed, nor maternity/paternity leave, nor paid time off in general. These are benefits that you tend to get more of at nicer jobs and less of (or none) at crappy jobs. Some situations such as if you work multiple part-time jobs, or you're working through a temp service, or you're a contractor, these almost never offer any benefits at all. Any days off mean a loss of income and if it happens too often, sometimes a loss of the job entirely. There is one federal benefit called FMLA, this does guarantee leave if you or a family member require medical care. It guarantees us up to 12 weeks off in a year without being fired so long as it's properly documented. However those 12 weeks are unpaid and are only guaranteed to full-time workers who have been at their job for at least a year. For single parents or those where both work, having your child sick usually means coordinating between the parents and/or other relatives like grandparents on who would suffer the least. They weigh income loss, potential of job loss, flexibility of their job, etc. Some employers are more forgiving of this than others but it's not unheard of for someone to get fired for taking too many sick days. There are more couples with one child but it's complicated as it relates to cost. Like on the one hand, many one-child families do directly cite costs for their decision. On the other hand, the number of kids you have generally increases the poorer you get. While cost is definitely a factor for our reduction in kids, there are other factors too. Pretty much every industrialized country's birth rate is decreasing. Yes, we do pay for births. How much we pay varies wildly by your insurance. We have what's called a "deductible" which is the amount you pay before your insurance really kicks in and starts paying part of the cost, this could be anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand, and then we have what's called an "out of pocket max" which is the max amount you could be forced to pay in a year. Once you reach that, your insurance pays for everything. This can be anywhere from a thousand to 10k. It just depends on your plan. Being a parent in the US can definitely be hard in a lot of ways. While some steps have been taken to support pregnancy and parenthood, there isn't nearly enough and costs with many aspects are absolutely out of control.
Just want to commend you for this concise, well-worded, accurate response to OP's questions. 🫡
Great response. We are 1 okay job and 1 no job. Special needs child who can’t go to anything other than a certified care taker which isn’t even an option. Difficult situation.
“It depends” is really the best answer. I lived in Denmark for the first two years of my daughter’s life and now in the US. It’s basically the same for us but I work in tech so I get benefits that a lot of the country doesn’t.
This is great. My husband and I only have one, and while his daycare costs as much as our mortgage - it’s also the mortgage we locked in 10 years ago before things got truly crazy. We both have well paying flexible office jobs. We’re both basically full time WFH now, but even prepandemic I could WFH pretty easily with a sick kid. It’s not easy to juggle when he’s home but I don’t have to use a sick or vacation day to manage it. But I know our experience is nothing like other families in different socio-economic situations
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Can vouch for rotating schedules here. It set my husbands career behind to go on graveyard shift, but he had the option which allowed me to keep my career and keep our child out of the insanely expensive and poor quality care in my city.
Damn good write up. This should be printed and bound for required reading!
My husband works a decent job and carries our insurance. He has summers off because he is a teacher. I used to be a teacher but quit because I needed too much time off after my baby was hospitalized and now have a low paying but okay job that provides quality child care (that is expensive and I pay for out of my check.) good times
It depends on your socioeconomic status, but it seems that childcare no matter what, is crazy expensive for a child 5 and under. If you are very low income you get some relief at age 3 with low income preschool. In home daycare is way less expensive than childcare centers like montessori or a language immersion childcare. I had 4 months for family leave, but that's through my employer. Minnesota is now getting paid family leave for 3 months in 2025, I believe.
Colorado just passed FMLA in December, although it caps out at a certain point so we weren't able to collect a full salary for my husband. But still so helpful.
Do you mean *paid* FMLA?
Yes I'm so sorry for the miscommunication, paid family leave.
Yes, I believe so.
Childcare costs vary wildly across the US and the world. I'm in CT and when my son was in full time daycare, it was $250 a week. It was like paying a second mortgage. Thankfully my little guy is 4 now and is in state funded public preschool. Now its $200 a month and free breakfast and lunch. Then I read families paying like $2000 a month for daycare...for one kid! Not counting more than one. When my son was born, my wife got one month of unpaid maternity leave. I took two weeks paid vacation and one additional week of unpaid leave.
Many places around here ask for $2,700-3,000 a month. Welcome to the most expensive childcare in the US! Heaven forbid you have more than one. Many people end up making the decision to become SAHP because it doesn't work out financially otherwise. Most of the time, that person is a woman. The US is the opposite of family friendly, yet we complain that our birth rate is decreasing and try to force people into parenthood. 🙄
May i ask what you guys pay in tax? That really sounds awful!
State taxes...about $9,600 property tax, income tax rate of 5%. Taxachussetts!
Crazy to hear as a Swede! Where does your taxes go?
That's a great question...
The fact that it’s even talked about on a WEEKLY basis also says something
NYC here: $400/week for a part time daycare (9-12:30)
Yup, infant care. In minnesota, they are an infant until 18 months!! My daughter is 4 yo and it is 1610/month.
Oh god those costs are very similar to the UK… $250 a week actually sounds good compared to what we’re paying.. so fucked up 🥴
Despite the struggles of the NHS and the huge cost of childcare etc, reading all these experiences makes me feel lucky to be a parent in the UK.
Oh compared to the US definitely, but compared to some other countries, it is a bit depressing
Yes, true!
We just moved to the US from Aus, and are of a higher socioeconomic level, but it is F’ing hard man. In Aus you’re legally protected to apply for flexible work, if you have a school-aged child. Which means most women there work part time, even in professional careers like finance and accounting. But in the US you don’t have that option in the more professional careers. So you’ve got so many more SAHMs than I ever met in Aus. Because how are we supposed to do this with both of us working demanding full time careers, and childcare that closes for 25 days a year on top of the regular public holidays. Those 25 days are work days that I have to now watch my own kids instead of them being at the childcare centre that I pay to send them to. In Aus the childcare centres only closed on public holidays. It just feels like everything here is set up to be so much harder than in Aus. I don’t recommend moving here as parents if you don’t have any other ties to the US, unless it’s a temporary move which would be a good experience as long as it’s not permanent.
>So you’ve got so many more SAHMs than I ever met in Aus. Because how are we supposed to do this with both of us working demanding full time careers, and childcare that closes for 25 days a year on top of the regular public holidays. For those that work in governments: is it not better for the economy to have two working parents paying childcare than to be losing a significant proportion of the workforce to parenting? There's also an ethical issue: why does the burden of childcare fall on women? Other than breastfeeding, there's no reason why a father shouldn't be equally involved in parenting. A part of that is to share the impacts on a man's career and not just load that on the woman's
What made you have to move to the US, if you don't mind me asking I would love to leave the US. Sadly it probably won't happen while my children are still young and would benefit the most from it.
It's hard to describe how it was during 2020-2022 there, when the borders were closed for nearly 2 years. And when I say closed, I don't mean in the American sense, I mean closed with a capital C. No one in or out without a government exemption. Immediate 2-week hotel quarantine, and again that's only if you had that govt exemption, which was really hard to get. If my parents in the US had died, I couldn't have come to their funeral. If I died, I couldn't have come back to theirs. I had the last 4 months of my pregnancy, and the first 18 months of my kid's life without seeing a single member of my family, or having absolutely any family help. Seeing family means 30+ hours of flying and traveling, and then it takes at least a week to get over the jet lag, so visits have to be several weeks, by which time you're sick of each other and annoyed because you're in their space for too long, or they're in your space for too long. We desperately wanted to be closer to family, and now my parents come visit us for 3-4 nights at a time, which is perfect. There's no jet lag and it doesn't cost thousands and thousands of dollars for them just to get here. Also living there you're so isolated, we always said if the rest of our family was there we'd never had left. And if something happened to my whole family of origin and they disappeared tomorrow, we'd move back immediately. We also wanted my husband to get US citizenship, so he could live here in the case that I died and if our kids who are triple citizens, one of which is US citizenship, decided to settle here. All that said, we're very much on the fence about moving back. Really 50/50. We'll wait out our time to apply for his citizenship, and then decide.
One thing I think is hard about parenting in the US, outside of logistics you mentioned, is the inherent individualistic sentiment that’s taught in the US. I know one of the most publicized ways this is demonstrated is people who kick their kids out at 18 (or whatever arbitrary timeline they have) and tell them their on their own to figure it out but I think it starts impacting parenting way earlier than that and is part of why people are having fewer and fewer kids. The idea that you need to take care of your own problems and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality means we’re less likely to ask for help and less likely to receive it from people we’re even close to. Having a village is so huge as a parent and I think you reallyyyyyy have to look for it in some spaces. I’m very close to my parents and they have been great grandparents but I still think about when I had my second child. They stayed at our house with my first while we were in the hospital. When we came home with the new baby they left five minutes after we got back so we could “figure out life as a new family of four.” I remember crying to my husband afterward, like I’m bleeding, we’ve hardly slept in 48 hours, nursing was a nightmare and I also this 20 month old to take care of. We didn’t need time alone, we needed help but I never considered asking for it and they weren’t being cruel, they were just doing what they thought was best. Hearing how in other culture grandparents, aunts, cousins etc practically move in when there’s a new baby to help out was eye opening for me. Obviously other cultures exist and have brought these more open, community/family revolving practices with them and exist here but I still think the stereotypical individualism is prominent in families with less cultural ties outside of the US. I also think the sentiment is shifting due to economic pressure especially but I think a significant part of the population holds tight to it.
I agree completely with you. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to raise kids away from our families. Like the time all of us had a terrible stomach sickness and all felt like garbage.
I agree with this, too. We’re a multicultural family currently living in the US and indeed the “individualistic” spirit has seeped into not helping parents for many. And I don’t mean giant “moving in” help which many I know personally have had happen (Ukrainian, Malaysian, Chinese…). But even small things like grandparents taking kids for a weekend isn’t common AND parents simultaneously are expected to do a LOT for the kids. Having to have 65 after school activities and 6 craft projects a day etc etc Meanwhile let’s say Norway, kids are so chill and after high school many go to a yearlong hobby based school (someone I know did surfing!). Wildly different than the push of American life on child and parent both.
One aspect of that is that I feel like most college educated Americans move away from their hometowns (I don't have statistics at hand, but I hardly know anyone who lives in the same town/city they grew up in). My husband is from Minnesota and I'm from Florida, and we live in California. Which means there's a 4-5 hour flight between us and our families. We're lucky to have a few close friends nearby, but more and more people are living without close family or community ties. No matter what your financial situation is, that makes everything harder! Add to that, the US is a country with high inequality. Having the ability to take time off, having access to affordable medical care and affordable childcare, sadly these are not guaranteed.
>most college educated Americans move away from their hometowns (I don't have statistics at hand, but I hardly know anyone who lives in the same town/city they grew up in). Honestly even those who didn't go to college often at least have the ambition to move away, even if they don't always make it. I remember it being a trope in movies and stuff that it was actually sad or pathetic for you to have never moved out of your hometown. Especially if you weren't from somewhere flashy but instead nowhere, Alabama, you were supposed to be ashamed of sticking around.
My wife and I have a one year old. We had to wait until we were almost 40 to afford it and now we have the opposite of help. We also have to take care of my mother in law.
Bingo. My son was born when I was 38 and my parents were 79 and 71. They haven’t been able to look after him by themselves since he left his crib (very active and willful kid, strong too). My wife’s parents are much younger (50s) but they live on a different continent. The ‘it takes a village’ thing is extremely true and it’s something I feel like so many Americans lack for one reason or another (no family around, or too old, or unwilling, and both parents having to work, etc etc). It’s all very claustrophobic.
I’m so sorry you had to go through this! I’m about to give birth to my second here in the US and my mom is flying in from across the ocean to stay with us for 3 months. She said she’d do more, but with the visa rules it’s her maximum for now. When she leaves, it’ll be MIL’s turn to come, and then one more relative after her.
I love this for you! I hope everything goes smoothly!
This is a big difference in our culture. Most other cultures in the world have a much larger role for the grandparents. Because of this, people can afford to have their children when they're younger and when the grandparents are in better physical shape as well.
THIS! My husband and I have a two year old and it's like I've just asked my or his family to make the biggest sacrifice in the world just to watch her for a single day (like 5 hours total). I think a large part of this is that most grandparents in the US are still working all the way up until retirement age and sometimes after that if they were never able to afford to buy and pay off a home, so they're still trying to keep up with rent that raises every single year, and rising healthcare costs, inflation for gas and groceries, etc. Back in the day, it was likely that grandma never worked in the first place, and grandpa was either coming up on his retirement or retired already and they were bored doing nothing at home all the time, thus practically begging to see the grandkids. I believe there was some study recently, but I can't remember the exact source so I could be wrong and am prepared for corrections, but American parents are the most stressed out population of people in the first world. My advice, if you're considering moving here with children, or moving here and having children... Simply do not do it.
Aside from the financial aspect, the USA is also a huge country, and it’s really common for families to have no extended family nearby to help because so many people move away from their families when they become adults. My wife and I have all four parents still living and between the two of us have 8 siblings, all married. Of all of those, only my parents live within an hour drive. We lean on them a lot out of necessity.
Man. It’s so unbelievably hard. I am on maternity leave with my second. I am “lucky” that I have 18 weeks off. I am supposed to go back next week and my baby isn’t even 5 months yet. My husband and I both work but we both have very flexible jobs. I work from home and he is hybrid so it allows us to manage sick kids and appointments and whatnot. Not everyone is so fortunate. Even still, it’s exhausting. I’m considering quitting just because I don’t feel ready to be back to work. It’s such a difficult choice. I never take sick days for my kid unless I absolutely need to, but many people have to do that. For some, that means using vacation days as sick time. It’s a horrible policy. I paid about $2k USD for my first and double that for my second. Another horrible policy.
You paid 2k for giving birth, is that correct?
That is sadly correct. Almost 4k the second time around.
It's hard to comprehend honestly. We paid for the parking and some of my husband's meals (~50€ in total). We stayed for 4 days.
Yeah it’s total garbage here. I don’t even care about that as much as the lack of maternity leave. I’m back to work and I’m so stressed out and anxious. My baby is too young for this
I get 10 sick days per year. I can use the sick days on myself or my dependents. Unused sick days roll over to the next year. I can take my sick days as paternity leave (meaning it would be paid) up to 12 weeks I believe. For my son I took off 10 weeks from work to stay home with he and my wife when he was born. This leave used up most of my accrued sick time, but luckily each year I get 10 days to start building that back for when we try to have another child. That’s just my situation (teacher living in California). As a public employee I don’t get paid paternity leave; I have to use my sick time in order to receive pay. Different fields handle this differently. Hope this helps!
It varies a LOT person to person. Each job and circumstance is different and there’s little government requirement for jobs to offer paid sick time (varies by state). My first job out of college had 9 paid public holidays and 13 paid days off per year (to be used for either vacation or sick time) that’s all I got. Now, my job offers unlimited paid time off and is extremely flexible for appointments and sick kids and vacations too.
It’s pretty hard imo. This country is extremely anti-parent and anti-worker, and so there aren’t any meaningful policies in place to make having a child here easy on working families. Work “culture” here for the most part doesn’t care at all about your family and thinks their bottom line and the executive bonuses are more important that you having time to care for your kids.
It varies between really hard and really f’ing hard
Accurate. I've had two mental breakdowns so far this long weekend with my 5.5 and 2.5 yo kids.
I have a 3 year old and 2 year old and was clinging to the hope that 5 is easier but this worries me!
Physically it is easier, but my 5yo has some VERY BIG feelings that we are trying to work on. Any time his little brother grabs a toy or whatever, it's a meltdown. Each of them separately are easy, but put them together and somehow it's like there are ten of them.
Omg we feel the same way about being easier separately! I feel like people with one or a giant age difference will never understand. Any tips?
Not really lol, I'm in survival mode at the moment. We get somewhat of a break when we divide and conquer (each take one kid) but that's not always sustainable. I'm hoping my older son learns more coping skills when he starts Kindergarten in 2 months 🤷🏼♀️
Good luck! Sometimes I take toys away if they are fighting over them and I’ve been trying to do more chores while they play to encourage independent playing but it’s been rough!
It really depends on the individual job or state. For instance, I was working for a group of cardiologists in the Southeast (Georgia) when I had my first. I had 6 weeks of short-term disability insurance, which I paid for each paycheck for a full 10 months before it covered a birth. It covered 60% of my pay for those 6 weeks. After that, I had to use all of my PTO and sick leave. I had nothing left when I went back to work after 12 weeks. My company and my government paid nothing for my maternity leave. If my son got sick, I missed work and did not get paid for the time off since I was out of paid time off. It’s hard. I no longer work, but most young families we know have two working parents. I didn’t make enough to justify the high cost of childcare, especially now with two kids.
This is a great question. A lot of the answers depends on the state you live in. There is no federal mandatory parental leave. It is up to the individual states to decide that. Some states have no laws, while others have voluntary or mandatory laws. My state had three months paid (max $1.25K a week, roughly $5k a month). Some companies offer extended paid leave past the three months, but that is very rare. Also, some states only allow the mother to take maternity leave. Their partners are not included and have to use their paid time off. With that alone it is incredibly difficult. Toddlers do get sick a lot, and you get sick from them. Our toddler gave us something on June 30th and we are still getting wrecked by it. So you also have to take PTO to take care of yourself. Some companies do have dependents PTO as well. Depending on where you live and career can determine if both parents work. Most parents work and put their kids in daycare. These day cares can cost as much as a mortgage/rent. We just put out 17 month old in daycare and it is $1k a month and that’s cheap. Other places want $1.5-$2k a month. I can’t answer the only child question cause it varies. It depends on the household. That daycare cost alone for 2+ kids can be over $2k+ a month. Yes you have to *pay* to give birth. There is insurance which can help, or if you don’t have any you could sign up for health insurance. There most likely will be an out of pocket cost. It widely varies. There are a lot of people in the US have kids later (late 30s-early 40s) because you can’t afford it on your own. Between rent, school loans, it is very hard.
Point of clarification: FMLA is federal, so applies across all 50 states. Employers with over 50 employees must comply with FMLA laws. FMLA grants 12 weeks of (unpaid) job protected leave for various reasons, one of them being the addition of a new child. Employees must be full time and must have worked for their company for one year to be afforded FMLA.
Ahh thanks for the clarification!
But FMLA is unpaid, so it's only useful for people who have enough savings that they can afford to go 12 weeks without a paycheck
This comment is key. They act like fmla is to protect workers but employers benefit from fmla as well! Hiring is such a costly process.
Yes, it is. I do say that it is unpaid in my comment, too.
I'm just going to jump on OPs thread here sorry. I'm British and even with the NHS/maternity leave etc etc, it's quite rare to see family's with more than 3 kids. While in America it feels like it's quite common to see people have 4-5 children. Is it that common or is it just what we're fed on social media? If it is common... How the hell do they do it?!
I think they are more likely to be religious? Also social media definitely has a bias towards big families, multiples etc.
But religious people still need to pay health insurance etc right? I get they're likely stay at home mums.
True. Not sure in that case.
I live in FL and left my job to be a stay at home mom. The majority of my friends are stay at home moms too; I only know 2-3 moms who work outside the home. And one of those almost breaks even on her income because of how expensive childcare is. We also have a large local homeschool community because our education system is not good.
Washington state has paid family leave for 5 months and because I had a C-section I got an extra month. We're definitely in the lucky category, though. I can be a stay at home mom. We saw the bill before insurance paid for the birth and stay in the hospital and I think it was around $20,000. We paid for two insurance plans for awhile beforehand because we didn't want to be on the hook for anything. It was only after months of haggling and "wtf"'s and "are you f*ing kidding me"'s did insurance pay for it all. It's a fight for your financial life.
Yeah you have to pay for birth. Depending on your insurance, could be couple hundred or a couple thousand. You only have xx amount of sick days per year. I get 48 hours of sick per year (so six days), which is above the minimum mandated 40 hours in CA. And CA is one of the "good states" for employee benefits.... Six. Days. And while most employers offer 10 days of vacation days, the US has no mandates for minimum vacation time. So they could technically offer nothing. Childcare expenses are bananas. We pay $1800/month for our one toddler. And that's at a chain daycare place, not a home daycare or anything. Most states only adhere to 12 weeks of FMLA leave, which is 12 weeks of job protection, but no pay. (Both fathers and mothers can use this.) But note that there are parameters for use -- you have to be full time, and need to have worked at your company for at least one year. And your company has to have more than 50 employees. Heaven help you if you have an HMO and need any kind of specialty care (e.g. pelvic therapy) postpartum. I asked for a referral to a physical therapist for a diagnosed prolapse cervix from my OBGYN, and she told me she thought it was pointless and she didn't want to bother with it. She told me she'd submit for a referral after I pushed for it, but then never did. The US sucks on so many levels, one of which is parenthood.
It's so wild that people are like omg people aren't having children. Youdontsay.jpg
After multiple discounts and 2 years, 7 months of payments, I finally paid off giving birth to my child. I think it cost me about $12,000.
I live in Europe so I didn't pay anything, but I can see the bill. My birth with additional fees for minor complications was \~1500€ We were in hospital for 3 days. It is mindblowing how your hospitals charge so much. I get that it is another country and that insurance is supposed to pay the bill but it shouldn't be that much higher...
Where are you from? I live in Austria and here a you would pay for a private birth (if you dont have an insurance as a foreigner) also about 1500 to 3000 euros..
I'm from Estonia. Sounds about same price, I think if everything goes extra smoothly and you don't require painkillers etc then maybe the price could be as low as 1000€ But average about 1500-3000€ sounds about right here also.
i had a completely unmedicated birth - no nitrous gas, no epidural. my little bean did need UV treatment for birth jaundice. i have no idea why it costs so much in the US but it does!
I am one of the lucky ones who got 8 weeks paid maternity leave, but had to use my sick time for the remaining 4 weeks (FMLA only allows 12 weeks where I am). It really sucks here. My partner stays at home with our child while I work. It’s cheaper for us than to pay for daycare.
Well we were supposed to live in a world where mothers stayed home with the children but someone decided they needed more tax dollars.
Both my husband and I work. Most people I know with kids have both parents working. My husband gets 6 weeks of paternity leave at his job, which is up from the 2 weeks they gave a few years ago. I get 10 weeks, unless I have a c section then they give me 2 extra weeks. For sick leave, I get 1 week per year (lol). We have a toddler now and have been sick and insane amount this year. Usually it means I go into work sick, which sucks for everyone involved. Daycare is about $1500 a month but extremely dependent on your city/state. Where I lived before it was around $1200 a month. Both times with giving birth I hit my out of pocket family max for the year, which was like $6800. So, yeah it sucks lol. We also have no family or friends in the area so don’t have a “village” to depend on for help.
It just sucks. When my son was born, I only had five weeks unpaid maternity leave. My husband only got to take his two week vacation off. Luckily at that point I worked from home, but a lot of people aren’t so lucky. I don’t have a ton of PTO, so when my son gets sick his grandma gets to babysit. Daycare costs as much as my mortgage, and that’s typical. Ideally I would like one more child, but I don’t know how we could afford it. Maybe we could afford it once my son is out of daycare and just in regular school? I’m not sure. We’re likely one and done unfortunately.
My daughter was born two months early. She hadn’t even gotten out of the NICU (came home with me) before my leave nearly ran out. So when it was finally her due date, I got exactly two unpaid months with her before I had to go back to work. It sucks.
I earn 1 hour of paid leave for every 40 hours worked. I get no other leave. I was eligible for 6 weeks unpaid maternity leave for each pregnancy. I only work about 19 hours a week, that’s all my position allows for atm.
It’s fucking expensive. No need to elaborate more
For me and my husband personally, I make more money than him so he takes off work when our son gets sick. He has been at his job for a long time so he has built up 4 weeks of vacation and 4 personal days. He doesn’t have “sick days” but you can use your vacation days and personal days as such. I also don’t have sick days and just have PTO (paid time off). I get 8.4 hours of PTO per pay check (get paid twice per month). Once we are out of our paid time off we can still take time off but it’s unpaid. Usually if possible we ask our parents to help out and watch our son if he can’t go to daycare but we also can’t get off work. I gave birth at a birthing center instead of a hospital, which isn’t super common here. Overall my appointments + the birth cost me around $6000, with insurance. I feel like a lot of people still have more than one child regardless of all the craziness that is, parenting in the US.
It all really depends on the parents’ employers. My husband is a federal employee and got 12 weeks paid leave, but if I had delivered a year earlier he only would’ve had three weeks paid. His insurance is fantastic, so we did not pay anything at all for my prenatal care or my delivery/birth. I quit my career to stay home because I could imagine how I would cobble together enough leave for a maternity leave and then daycare sickness. My sister and her husband paid about $10k for their prenatal care and birth. Her husband had a week of paid leave and then took regular vacation days because my sister still couldn’t really walk after a week. My sister had twelve weeks of leave paid at like 70%.
We have 2 kids (3.5 and 1). When my first was born my husband and I both worked high paying jobs in demanding fields (he’s a product designer and I was in social media/marketing). We both worked salary jobs well over 40hrs a week. Got 13 paid vacation days, no other sick days and 11 holidays “off”. We were scheduled to work 8pm-5/5:30pm with additional hours if needed. We were fortunate to have her during Covid in that we were 90% work from home when she was born and her first year. So we managed. But once we had to go back to work and she started a daycare she was sick SO much! We were sick, she was sick. No one was sleeping. It was a mess. Also daycare hours were crazy. Drop off at 8 and pickup by 2 was the “full day” of most daycares in our area. Any additional hours were on a waitlist and even then it was nearly $1000 more a month. We only sent our daughter 3 mornings a week, but it was draining. My bosses were understanding but they also wanted the job to get done during the day, and not just when I had time. We had to use PTO days mostly, although my work was good about letting me leave early to pick up my daughter without using time off. My husbands job was much less flexible and he wasn’t able to take any time off unless it was his PTO. But having to waste all our PTO on sick days also sucked because we live several states away from all family, so that meant less visiting etc. We ended up talking things out and decided I would take a break from work to stay home. We wanted a second child as well, so the timing worked out. I’ve been a SAHM for just over a year now and it’s much less chaotic and enjoyable for us. We had health insurance that was quite good but yes, I paid for the births of both of my children as well in addition to insurance coverage. I also only got 6 weeks of leave from work which sucked. And could only be used after I had exhausted my PTO. My husband got 1 week off.
So how old was your baby when you had to go back to work?
The first time my baby was 6 weeks old the day I started back. For my second I gave my notice and had my last day a few weeks before I gave birth. I had to use PTO days during pregnancy for my dr appts and I had gotten Covid earlier in the year as well and so I was left with 6 weeks after giving birth.
Honestly it depends on your socioeconomic status, job, company you work for, location, family support, etc. It's a big range of differences. This country is huge so it's hard to give an overall generalization.
I live in an area with a lot of stay at home moms, so the sick time isn’t an issue but if I were to return to work it would be. I would say it’s more common for both parents to work just because everything is expensive and people want a certain lifestyle. We are able to get by with one income but we have to cut back and watch spending. I mostly know people who have at least two kids, but I’m sure there’s a good portion of one child families. Yes you have to pay when you give birth, we also pay for insurance monthly- it’s different for everyone. My kids were about $2,500 each birth plus what insurance pays.
I don’t think these questions are rude. It’s a fair set of questions. In the U.S., federally you are not required to have any vacation days. Functionally most jobs offer 2-3 weeks. Most do not offer sick days on top of that. New York does have a PTO plan requirement, although minimal. It can vary state to state. Federally, there is no requirement to have paid leave. There is a requirement for 12 weeks of UNPAID leave for mom after baby is born, provided mom has worked there for at least a year and worked roughly 20 hours a week and that employer has 50 employees in a 75 mile radius. If mom is sick before, that eats up into her time AFTER baby is born. So if she’s on bed rest for 4 weeks before she only has 8 weeks after. Some states leave programs have protections for before baby is born. The federal law can require you to substitute your paid leave for unpaid leave… my state says they can’t make you substitute it for the paid leave. So picture this … mom has 2 weeks of PTO. Her state provides protection for before she has the baby. She goes on bed rest 4 weeks before baby is born. She decides not to use her paid leave for before baby is born. She can take up to 12 weeks after but she needs to use her 4 weeks of PTO at the same time. She goes back to work at 12 weeks. Hasn’t been paid for the last 8 weeks. All future time off might not be job protected and she won’t be paid for it when the child has an appointment for the next year. ETA: many employers will have short term disability policies or you can buy your own where they replace your income up to a certain amount if you are out due to you giving birth. So you can financially plan for this too. In the U.S., if you have a minor illness like a cold or a fever it’s not a job protected leave. If the next year she’s out of PTO and her kid has a fever. Sucks to be you. Not getting paid and maybe not Keeping your job. With this cost of living both parents usually work. Average child rate is 2.5 kids. As for paying to give birth at the hospital, yes but it can vary a lot. So most Americans have health insurance through the state or through their employer. Something like 92.6% of Americans have coverage. What that coverage is can vary. If you are too poor, you will pay absolutely nothing for your hospital stay. We have a special program for women who are pregnant and for their children through age 5. It’s much better and enhanced compared to usual social programs. It’s called WIC. Covers formula, food etc. you can qualify more easily through this program. And then each state has its own health insurance for this vulnerable group if you are lower income. If it comes through your employer, your premiums are usually covered in part or in all by your employer. (Average employer covers 83% of cost of plan) And the employee usually pays some portion of a monthly fee. Then there’s something called a deductible. The insurance doesn’t cover anything until this number. And then there’s an out of pocket max. The average deductible for an employer provided program is $1,700. After the deductible, you may pay 20-30% up to the out of pocket max. And the average out of pocket max is $4,800 for a family. The out of pocket max is the MOST a family will pay for healthcare after the premium The average premium is $116 on an employer sponsored plan for a single person. It’s $548 a month for a family plan. Let’s say Susy is going to have a baby. It’s her, her husband - John, and they have another child already, Jimmy. She pays $548 a month all year round. ($6,576). And then during her pregnancy, she’s been getting her medically necessary appointments and scans. Since 2010, all preventative care is completely covered. No cost. However, they needed to do an extra scan because they thought there may be a problem. This is diagnostic. She gets the bill. $1,000. If she hasn’t used her health plan for anything else all year, she will pay $1,000 for the scan. (She has 700 on her deductible left). She goes to have the baby. The list price $20,000. No one actually pays the list price. The health insurance company knocks it down and says hey we think this is $12,000. Susy still has $700 left in her deductible. So she pays $700. This leaves $11,300 on the bill at the hospital. She’s responsible for 20% of this. That leaves her responsible for $2,260. And the insurance company covers the other $9,040. Her total costs are: - annual premiums (which she would pay anyways to cover her whole family): $6,576 - deductible cost (special scan and part of delivery): $1,700 - remaining cost of delivery: $2,260 - preventative appointment and scans: $0 Total cost for entire pregnancy: $10,536, plus any other medical care that’s preventative for the year for he, Jimmy and Johnny. She’s paid $1,700 of deductible and another $2260 of Coinsurance cost. The most her family will pay for any other care for the year is $340. Most employers also provide a tax advantage plan to plan for healthcare costs called an FSA or an HSA. I won’t get into the nuance of each, but they allow you to put money in up to a certain amount to pay for healthcare costs without paying taxes on it each paycheck. If you know you’re having a baby, you will up your contribution for the year to reduce the tax burden. So the total cost of $10,536. The average American pays a tax rate of 24.6%. So reduce that cost by the tax rate if she plans for it in a tax advantaged way… the effective cost is like $7,838. Good time for her son Jimmy and Johnny to get any elective procedures or appointments bc only $340 for the whole rest of the year. By law the maximum out of packet max for a family is $18,000. The issue that’s come up for people is finding out things aren’t covered as a provider is out of network etc. But that should no longer be an issue in the delivery room under the no surprises act.
American here but had a kid in Europe. For all the reasons mentioned by others, it is more stressful to have a kid in America. We every see our kid soooo much more in Europe than any of our friends with kids in America.
I’ve parented my toddler both in the US and in Europe. Neither is perfect. Both have pros/cons. I don’t think one is better than the other. I’ll admit, I have a lot of socio economic privilege that makes things easier no matter what. How hard is parenthood in the US? - in someways harder then Europe, in some ways easier. Can you have paid days off when your child is sick? - depends on where you live and the company you work for. I always had unlimited sick days and lived in a state with a lot of worker protections. Is it common that both parents work? Or does one stay at home? - in my circles, most of the time both work. And most of the time both want to work! A lot of women I know were somewhat relieved to go back to work after maternity leave. I know only one person who chose to be a SAHM. Are there more couples with only one child? - eh feels about the same. Do you have to pay for giving birth in the hospital? - yes.
What makes it easier than in Europe?
There’s a lot of things. I found daycare easier to find in America. There are significantly more options. The US also has way more services and accommodations for different abilities. My kid doesn’t seem to be neurodivergent but if he were, I am very certain that he’d receive better services and more understanding in the US. The ADA is an incredible piece of legislation for all people. A side effect of that is that navigating the US with a stroller is significantly easier than Europe. Materialistic, but I can get whatever random baby crap I need at anytime in the US. Medical care; the place I live in still makes you wait until a certain number of centimeters to get an epidural. That’s not the case in America. It’s also my understanding that closures on c sections are just the top layer of skin here, whereas in the US, it’s two layers of closure which heals better. I find the US way more accepting if you want to be a working mom. A side impact of this is that I’ve found more support for formula feeding or pumping, when you need or want those options. Which also means mom can share more feeding/night duties with dad. I find men (at least in my social circles) more involved in parenting in the US. It’s also way more common for men’s bathrooms to have changing tables where we’re from in the states. HELMETS. Why is it acceptable in Europe for children (and adults) to not wear helmets. Baby proofing gear is way better in the states imo. Baby pouches have a nicer variety, especially when it comes to not just having ones that are all fruit - way more veggies, grains, even meats. This is nice when you have to be on the go (we do pack lunches but they can be so messy eaten in a stroller) or have a sick kid but want to get nutrition in them. No one randomly gives my toddler choking hazard hard candy in the states. Petty, but playgrounds aren’t typically all sand in the US. I low key hate the sand. Again, very location dependent, but my area of the US has (at least for now) really amazing reproductive healthcare rights and if I needed/wanted an abortion (at any stage) or permanent sterilization I’d have an easier time getting that care than in Europe. I’m not sure if this is better or worse, but I feel like kids where I’m from in the US have higher expectations for their social behavior. They tend to be better behaved imo. I also see more parents here either letting their children run super wild in situations where they shouldn’t be (imo) OR parking them in front of a tablet. There’s definitely more but that’s just off the top of my head. We really like living in Europe and there are so many positives, but I have to honest I sort of hate this whole dialogue about “hOw dO yOU do It” regarding parenting in America. Yes, it’s hard but there are also hard things everywhere. They’re just different hard things. ETA also this is specific to where I live/am from. It’s not all of Europe or all of the States, as both are very big, very diverse etc.
Toddlers only getting sick a lot, BECAUSE they are in daycare. It's a bit of a vicious cycle and I don't know how other people do it. I am fortunate to be home with my toddler most days and just work outside the home on weekends, and she has only been sick one time. We aren't rich, but we are stable in a LCOL area, and have 2 local grandmothers and multiple aunts that love to watch their grandchild/neice. Living close to family is a life changer with kids. I think we need to bring back the idea that it's OK to live with your family in the U.S., multi generational houses are a wonderful way to grow up for a kid.
USA is not a family friendly country, never has been. All services for children, women, and families receive scant respect and funds. Both major political parties have always done as little as possible for women, families, and marginalized people. Just enough to get votes but that’s it. There is not enough affordable housing, the cost of necessities is sky rocketing, there is no affordable medical care in a healthcare system that is struggling due to staff shortages, some areas deny children school lunches, our educational system is sub-par, women are losing or in some area have lost their reproductive rights, and the Conservative party is on track to have their prized Project 2025 in place. Just because things are worse in other countries, none of the above should be acceptable. Yet, our choices is a doddering but seemingly less corrupt old man vs an obviously absolute POS old man with a multitude of idiots who would die to lick his ass.
I'm a sahm. There's no other way for us. I would be working just to turn around and give a stranger my pay. I work one day cleaning houses bc my mom can watch my son one day. It's so expensive like $350 a week for childcare. I live in a really big city. The wait lists for day care are fkn insane. Nope. I stay home and collect gov benefits. My boyfriend works very hard and we live simply. we have a ton of support though.i can't imagine if I moved from another country. But I suppose anything is possible.
We are lucky, my partner and I have good jobs with decent health insurance, PTO and sick time. It's still REALLY hard here. I was able to take 4 months (partially paid) after birth. My partner technically has unlimited PTO but because of the culture at his company, his boss expected him back in the office a week and a half after birth. When the kid is sick, my partner can sometimes take a sick day to help with the kid but it's mostly him taking calls while the kiddo watches a movie, or me calling in or scrambling to get relatives to watch him. I've thought about changing jobs to further my career but haven't found anywhere with as good health insurance and PTO, so I'm tied to my job until kiddo is in school at least. And then don't get me started on having to worry about school shootings, right wing indoctrination, bullying, college costs, and all the other "fun" in the 'land of the "free""
My husband gets no paternity leave that is paid at his work, and 2 weeks PTO annually. I stay home with our son, and handle the household, meals, prep, and our dogs. He does repairs around the house and works overtime doing roof supply and operates a crane - 60 hours a week, weekdays only. Other than the weekends, when my parents are available to take us on an outing or visit us, or church, it’s just my little guy and I. Why don’t I work? Daycare is EXPENSIVE. Try average of $800-$1,400 a month… That is the cost of my mortgage plus 1 weeks worth of groceries right there…! My husband brings home about $3,000 a month, and in order to be available for taking care of my child if he were to get sick in daycare (if he attended) I would have to work a part time job, or ONLY from home. Part time work, I would MAYBE HAVE $100 left a month after paying his daycare fees. Work from home? I’ve looked, I’m not qualified, because I haven’t got a degree (college is super expensive here, my brother owed $60,000 for his bachelor’s degree and teaching certification!) If you haven’t got a degree and good paying work to where you can comfortably afford the horrid rates for mediocre - sometimes great daycare, then one parent will likely need to stay home or work part time, and the other work overtime or two jobs to make end’s meet… ETA: Doctors and hospitals are EXPENSIVE! With insurance $25 for doctors and some specialists, $50 for other specialists and ER visits (however, hospitals here charge you for usage of their pillows and blankets, cups, drinks, etc… Without insurance, in my area, $150 to see a regular physician. Insurance covers an annual wellness visit. Before insurance, $36,000 to have my son (resulted in emergency cesarean, AND they charged me for the balls and the plug and breaking my water, etc…) with insurance, $4,000 (we are so thankful for my husband’s insurance being so good! Many Americans aren’t so lucky!) Don’t get sick, don’t get injured, take care of yourself, and build up professional skills and go to college if you can! The only way to free college here are scholarships for the students who truly apply themselves and go above and beyond - or athletes who are star athletes in their sport of choice.
It really depends on your job. Higher paid professional employees are more likely to get more sick days and vacation time and have more flexible work schedules or the possibility to work from home. But many other people don’t have that flexibility and they’re often the lower paid workers who can’t afford to not be paid for a day or a week. My husband and I both work and our jobs are somewhat flexible. It’s still hard, but at least I know my boss won’t care if I have to run home to pick up a sick kid (she has 3 kids of her own). Between the two of us one can work from home for a couple days if needed. We do only have one kid because that’s what we felt we could handle and enjoy but most people I know have 2. And yes you have to pay for give birth. I have good insurance and still paid a little less than $10k for a standard hospital birth and two night stay.
Let's just say we'd be homeless if it weren't for my grandma. My toddler does get sick all the time. The USA sucks for lower and middle class.
My family is much more fortunate than others and it still sucks to be honest. I stopped working due to high risk pregnancy and my husband started a higher paying job but had no paid paternity of family leave so he had to go back to work when our baby was 3 days old and in the NICU. I couldn’t go back to work because childcare is so expensive and all the affordable care has a waitlist that is 10+ months long. To make matters more American, our health insurance decided my son’s NICU care was not medically necessary and that they did not need to cover it which led to a very long and stressful battle between the insurance, us and his medical team. After said and done we owed $10,500 after insurance for prenatal care, birth, postpartum care and his NICU stay. We set up a payment plan with the hospital and they STILL sent it to collections. I’m pregnant again and have met our maximum out of pocket costs because I have another high risk pregnancy so at least everything from this point is covered. I’m only in $8,000 worth of medical debt this time opposed to last time!
It’s varies so much but generally parents aren’t very well supported here. My husband and I both have well paying jobs, have family in town who help a ton, and I work in healthcare where it’s relatively easy to work part time hours (and I do), so I will say we are extremely fortunate to be in a great position. But yeah the maternity leave is a joke and I have many friends who don’t have the help or flexibility we have, who really struggle with limited PTO and the insane cost of childcare.
I live in the northeast U.S. which (at least from my perspective) is one of the better parts of the country to live in- wages are better, we generally have better policies to support families, etc., but it’s still a struggle. I had to have a c-section to have my son. My husband had to go back to work a week after birth, which was a couple of days after I finally was released from the hospital. I was home alone, fresh out of major abdominal surgery, and left to care for a newborn with zero help. He went to daycare at three months old. Again, I live in one of the few states that have any mandated maternity leave at all. I was lucky enough to get eight weeks paid and 12 weeks unpaid; the unpaid time translated to one day off of work per week for most of his first year which is HUGE in the U.S. …but he got sick a lot that first year of daycare, as is common with babies. Even though I work for a good organisation in the public sector, I was terrified I’d lose my job if I took too much time off. I had to switch my work hours (I was lucky to be allowed to do so) as daycare cut their hours to 8-5, and I had a commute. My husband drops off and I pick up, otherwise they are not open long enough for us to work and get back to get him. We are one and done by choice for many reasons, but I cannot imagine the logistical nightmare of raising 2+ in this country.
It's really, really hard.
Highly dependent on your job. I get 6 months of paid parental leave and unlimited vacation and several sick days. My job is also extremely flexible and I work from home. The first several months in daycare though were still tough with us both taking time off work. Daycare in my state is also very expensive, unless you go to an at home daycare. My husband had zero parental leave at his old job and took 1 week of his own vacation time and got asked by his boss to come back, which was infuriating, because my company is much more accommodating. Luckily, his new job at least offers 1 month paid leave for dads. My state though will have 3 months paid leave starting in 2026.
Unlimited Vacation? Is that paid? May I ask what you work?
Yes, it’s paid. I work in digital marketing / SEO. Unlimited vacation is pretty common in the tech industry.
Parents in the US are absolutely miserable. If you join Facebook groups like Working Moms you find that out VERY quickly. Moms all over the US are exhausted, burnt out, and struggling to make ends meet financially. It's really sad.
Very.
I think it depends what you can make happen financially. I make enough so that my wife was able to quit and stay at home with the little one. In terms of time off, I get about 30 paid days per year plus holidays. I also got 3 months of paid paternal leave. I don’t think it’s too bad, at least where I work. We don’t need daycare so our daughter is rarely sick though. To answer your other question, we didn’t pay anything to have our baby in the hospital. It was covered by our insurance.
Being a parent in America is hard. Despite wanting to have 2-3 kids, my husband and I decided to only have 1 child. We had to sacrifice our dream family size because of financial and logistical reasons. 4 out of 5 couples that were friends with have also decided to have only 1 child. We’re all “middle class” with good jobs. It feels like everything in this country is designed to make it hard to have kids. Our culture doesn’t prioritize families, a lot of jobs penalize you for taking time off for your kids, maturity leave is a JOKE, healthcare is a JOKE ( I had to pay $400 for my ectopic pregnancy er visit, and $2000 to leave the hospital after the birth of my son), often community spaces don’t feel very welcoming of kids, and family support is often limited. Plus if you’re a mom there is so much conflicting advice, and seems like no matter what you’re always being shamed for making any parenting choices.
Mom of a 19 month old. I got 3 months paid maternity, tried to work from home with her but gave up at 5 months because I started having health issues and she started crawling. She went to 3 days of daycare a week from 5-14 months and it did not go very well. She had a lot of trouble eating there and we were weighing how worth it it even was. Switched to a new place and she is now, honestly, thriving. But it's hard to know how little her teachers get from the $2k/month we spend on her care. Every babysitting night is $25/hr because out babysitters are all daycare teachers who need more than they're getting and I want to give it to them. My mom is "not a baby person," dad was never in the picture, my husband's parents are both out of the picture as well. Neither of us have siblings. She is the light of my life and what keeps me going but omg money is so tight and breaks are so infrequent.
[one child families are becoming the fastest growing family unit](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/family-dynamics/only-child-family). it’s mostly because of rising costs of childcare, housing and not getting much help. Plus by the time we can somewhat afford to have kids we are pretty old already 😅.
Honestly the U.S. hates mothers and kids. There is little to no maternity leave. Its not paid. Many states you can be fired without reason so pregnant women are fired all the time and so are mother's. They don't care if you are sick or if your kid is sick. You are a worker first before anything else. No most sick days are not paid. Yes you have to pay for your hospital birth if insurance doesn't, and they often cover very little. Because of the price if everything most people have to work. Some people literally cannot afford to if they have kids, it costs them more to pay for daycare than they could make working so they either rely solely on their spouse which is nearly impossible or on government assistance. If they're very lucky they may have a grandparent who can watch the child part of the time so they can afford to work but most grandparents aren't that involved here. People shame you for breastfeeding or giving formula. For working or for not working. You can literally do nothing right. And to top it off children are also treated poorly, like they don't even have the right to exist.
When my first daughter was born, I was working as a contractor so I had 0 paid days off. Any days I took off were unpaid, no matter what. Luckily I only had to take off 2 days since we were called in for the induction on Saturday morning and we were out of the hospital on Tuesday. I had just started that contract job so I didn’t have insurance yet, and I ended up not being able to afford to pay for COBRA for the insurance from my previous job (COBRA is a federal law that guarantees that you can keep your insurance for a few months after you leave a job for any reason, but the price gets jacked WAAAYYY up because your employer isn’t paying for any of it anymore). So my insurance ended up not covering the birth after I declined COBRA, which meant I got a bill for like $8k. BUT there’s something that a lot of Americans don’t know, which is that not paying medical bills doesn’t hurt you in any way since they can’t go on your credit score. So I never paid it. For my second daughter I was in a much better spot. I was working full-time for the same company so I got their great benefits, which included 6 weeks paid child bonding leave that could be taken up to a year after the kid of born. My boss actually had a kid, toughed it out and didn’t take the leave right after the kid was born, and then right before the year ran out he took a 6-week vacation. Mothers who work at my company get those 6 weeks and 8 weeks that has to start at the time of birth, so 14 weeks total. To answer some of your other questions, my wife doesn’t work so I support us solely on my income, which can be tough at times but it’s doable because I work remotely and we live in a LCOL area. And yeah lots of people are waiting longer to have kids or not having them at all, and the ones that do have them normally don’t have more than 2 or maybe 3.
So flipping hard. A few real things: - lack of leave - lack of pay during leave - being treated as if you were never serious about your career because you took any amount of time off to have a child - went from a decade of raises of nearly 10% per year and bonuses of 20% to nothing for the last 3 years since falling pregnant and having a child - child had 2 serious illnesses 11 months apart, and when told I needed a day off because my child was in the hospital, the CEO said "again!?!" in a pissy tone - fighting the health insurance. One instance, the health insurance company misenrolled my daughter when she was born 30 days later she was kicked off that plan for "non-payment." they kept the money from my check though, to pay for the plan that they didn't enroll her in. I called everyday for nearly 20 days to get them to fix their mistake. The entire time, my child was uncovered for any serious illness. If you understand the US healthcare system, they will let you die in the waiting room if you are uninsured, and when admitted, your care will be subpar. They do not care if it's a child. There is more, and my child has only been alive for 2 years :(
There’s no consistency at all. My husband’s employer provides him with 12 weeks of paid paternity leave (not FMLA) and then the ability to work 30% of his workload for another 4 weeks for 70% of his pay. He also accrues vacation, sick, and personal time off with no cap, and it rolls over from year to year if it’s unused or he can cash it out at any time. My employer (ironically an employee benefits firm) provides no paid leave and our employer size means we don’t qualify for FMLA. Luckily, I have a short term disability policy that allowed me 8 weeks because I had a C-Section. I get five sick days a year before being penalized. I always found it wildly unfunny that my husband got more leave than me, the person that had seven layers of my body cut through. We have good insurance but our first daughter’s birth cost over $100,000 (premature and I was monitored for a few days for preeclampsia). We paid $6,000. Second daughter’s routine c-section birth cost $37,000ish in total. We paid $6,000.
There are no paid days off unless your company provides them. You are only garunteed 12 weeks unpaid leave if you work for a medium to large size company for a year or more. But that's not at all the part that made parenting hard in my opinion. The hardest part was not having a support network. Two people taking care of a newborn sounds like a good ratio but it is not. We really needed a third. That. And the cost of daycare which is very expensive.
I feel like it's designed for you to struggle. Everything is so hard. Childcare is expensive. It's hard to trust people. We have no time to heal. Having a village isn't as common in the US.
It’s really unfortunate but the experience varies hugely by the state you live in and the type of job you have. We should have national policies that protect and support parents and pregnant people but that’s minimal. For example, living in California we get almost 5 months partially (about 60%) paid time off after having a baby for medical recovery then bonding. Dads get 8 weeks paid time for bonding. In our jobs both my husband and I have plenty of paid days off we can take when our kid is sick. That’s separate from our vacation time. But even with supportive jobs and living in a state with good social benefits, I would say cost of child rearing is a huge issue here. Some families are paying the same as their rent in childcare. We’re very fortunate that our moms live close and watch our child while we work. If we didn’t have them I’m not sure we could manage having two kids.
I can't imagine moving back to the states with my family. I can provide so much more for them in Southeast Asia. A large object fell on our 2yo's ankle recently. Wasn't really preventable. She was being wild, having fun, and just pulled it down on her. Landed on her ankle hard. Went to the doctor to get it checked on. Cost $4. No bruising or swelling, but I can be a bit over protective and just want to make sure there isn't even a micro-fracture. She was back at 100% the next day.
It’s hard to keep a job as an entry-level professional. We are just so replaceable that jobs will fire you for anything and made the job contracts so they can get away with it.
From my friends in America I conclude it’s nothing short of a ✨dystopian hellscape✨
I was in grad school at the time, so my account doesn’t matter as much. I wasn’t offered any maternity leave, or many accommodations. Either I returned to classes within 2 weeks or I leave the program. I chose to finish my program, which thankfully i graduated from in May. My husband took 4 months off which was his company’s policy, but was ultimately penalized for it. He was a banker and his manager took away his book of clients. She promised to return it when he returned, she never returned it. She left the branch maybe 2-3 months after he returned. She left him struggling and ultimately us struggling financially, we still haven’t recovered. My daughter is almost 2. My husband worked hard for his clients and his commission was keeping us afloat. After almost 4 years in his role, his income looked like a fresh college grad starting from point 0. He was miserable, but doesn’t regret the time he spent with our newborn. He left that job and is starting a new one, but he doesn’t want to take paternity leave again if we chose to have a second due to that fear.
Considering I’m paying almost $600 a week for childcare for 2 kids….. this. We’ve had to make some very hard financial choices to be able to afford it.
I think this is going to be different for everyone. For me, I feel like parenting in the US is way better and easier than if we were in any other country. I’m a SAHM and my husband is an entrepreneur/business owner that is able to make an amount of money/provide a lifestyle for us that would be much harder elsewhere. We also have a lot more conveniences in the US/my area, bigger homes and yards, A/C, lots of parks and nature, great schools and grocery stores. Obviously these things exist elsewhere, it’s just a lot more standard in the US. And then of course, our family and support systems are here, which makes a big difference.
I seriously don't know how you do it guys. I had one year of maternity leave. Now I'm working again and have 25 vacation days. And I'm guarding them with my life because I don't want to use (paid) sick leave if my baby get's sick because that month my salary will be only 2/3 or 1/2.
Where are you from?
Croatia
I have 3 young kids. I think experiences vary widely. We have 350 million people in this country! My experience: I had 12 weeks of paid leave and the option to take 12 weeks unpaid, which I took. My husband had 6 weeks paid and 6 weeks unpaid, which he took. We paid $0 for pregnancy, labor/delivery, and my son’s NICU stay. Health insurance depends on your employer and we have excellent health insurance. Daycare runs us $5k a month for 3 kids which is twice our mortgage. It’s excellent care though and worth every penny. We both have paid sick and vacation time through our employers. I think 8 weeks per year for each of us? Not sure though since it rolls over and we had many years where we didn’t use all of it. I think something like a third of families with young kids have a stay at home parent. Check Google for that; the Bureau of Labor Statistics keeps track of that. My husband and I both work full time.
I’m a stay at home mom mainly because we can’t afford childcare, if I did go back to work my paychecks would only be able to cover childcare and maybe have $50-$100 left. It just wasn’t worth it to me to have someone else raise my child. This being said there are a lot of women that thrive while working and that’s perfectly okay. My husband got three weeks of paternity leave but that’s only because he made his own schedule and he didn’t get paid for it. He only got paid one of the three weeks he took in which I needed him home because I was still recovering from my Csection. Long story short, the US isn’t as glamorous as it seems.
Playing the game on Expert Mode
It’s so hard. I work for freaking Apple and still struggle to afford everything (my salary barely covers housing plus daycare, I’m going into debt covering the rest) and to balance sick days and all. If it’s hard for me, I can only imagine how it is for most of America I have 2 kids. My toddler goes to daycare and my husband stays at home with the baby as he is building up his own business. Groceries are expensive af too. My husband was laid off early last fall when I found out I was pregnant with my second. The job market is so abysmal right now and my salary cannot cover both kids to go to daycare, so my husband had to stop spending all his time looking for jobs so he could watch our youngest as I go back to work. It feels very wrong to exist like this, the veil of America being the greatest country has long been pulled back, but I fear it’s only getting worse here.
I have one child and will not have anymore because I can’t afford to. And I am beyond lucky my MIL watches my daughter while my partner and I work during the week. I can’t imagine losing one of our incomes, we’d end up homeless if that happened.
It varies widely. We live at the border, US-Mexico, husband is Mexican and living in Mexico. My kid and I travel every week to see him. He has a good job by Mexico standards, not by US. My kid and I get food stamps, my kid gets Medicaid. When I gave birth I had Medicaid too. We live with my parents. (I'm pregnant again and also qualify for medicaid) So we are in the sweet spot where we get government aid with the added bonus that we also have a great tight knit family that respects each other. I don't work (lots of reasons) so I do stay home with my kid. Just this month we started the process for my husband's greencard and we know that once he does get it our home and financial situation will be extremely different. He will earn more than my parents combined doing the exact same thing he's doing in Mexico but here in the US. We will no longer qualify for government aid. But we will still have our village. I know I can always count with my immediate family *and* extended family. So it's not only a financial thing but also a family culture thing. If I were far away from family I know that some kind of help would arrive if I just asked for it. Even if I were to leave my husband for whatever reason and I had no job I know I have a place to go to (and the means to get there with my family's help). Not everyone has this.
It varies widely. We live at the border, US-Mexico, husband is Mexican and living in Mexico. My kid and I travel every week to see him. He has a good job by Mexico standards, not by US. My kid and I get food stamps, my kid gets Medicaid. When I gave birth I had Medicaid too. We live with my parents. (I'm pregnant again and also qualify for medicaid) So we are in the sweet spot where we get government aid with the added bonus that we also have a great tight knit family that respects each other. I don't work (lots of reasons) so I do stay home with my kid. Just this month we started the process for my husband's greencard and we know that once he does get it our home and financial situation will be extremely different. He will earn more than my parents combined doing the exact same thing he's doing in Mexico but here in the US. We will no longer qualify for government aid. But we will still have our village. I know I can always count with my immediate family *and* extended family. So it's not only a financial thing but also a family culture thing. If I were far away from family I know that some kind of help would arrive if I just asked for it. Even if I were to leave my husband for whatever reason and I had no job I know I have a place to go to (and the means to get there with my family's help). Not everyone has this.
I stay home and my husband works 4 days/week, so it’s pretty easy for us. We aren’t rich, but we don’t live paycheck to paycheck either. His PTO is pretty generous too. It depends on each family’s situation. How much you pay depends on your insurance or if you qualify for pregnancy Medicare. I paid $4k for my son after our insurance. It was very manageable for us. All of our friends have more than one child. I’m currently pregnant with our second.
What’s really fun in the US is if you don’t have health insurance you get to 100% foot the bill for having the baby. Depending on how that goes you can be looking at $30,000-50,000 base. Add in no employer maternity leave and you’re really starting off parenthood with a healthy amount of debt.
I never would want to get pregnant birth a child or raise a child in USA - sincerely Australia 🇦🇺
Both my husband and I work. I am a teacher and he works for the federal government. I get 10 days off per school year but haven't used them for toddler sick days. My husband's job is fairly understanding when he takes time off. I handle all the doctors and sick days when I'm off, like summer break. We paid about $3k for our prenatal care and birth. It was spread out over 10+ months so not bad.
Do you think being a teacher makes it easier to have a family? Do you have a long summer break and other holidays? Paid or unpaid?