Parental Leave Policies, Parental Diversity and Precarity in Family Life: A Cross-National Comparison

Access to parenting leaves is often contingent on certain employment characteristics such as time spent with a current employer. If this is so, as the uncertainty of livelihoods changes, so might the proportion of parents who have access to such support. This chapter explores a range of parenting leave policy designs to showcase how parenting leave policies can either contribute to or rather mitigate aspects of employment precarity for families with very young children. Four in-depth case studies (France, Poland, Spain and the United States) are developed from 2021 policy data collated by the International Network on Leave Policies and Research.