Take a look at this graph… How does it make you feel?
Actually, let’s put our feelings and emotions aside for a moment and first, what does this graph make you realize and understand?
I am quite disheartened by the absence of paid maternity leave in America. One of the largest and most developed countries in the world, and yet no obligatory action for something so important for humankind with a multiplicity of facets.
Whoever was in charge of this decision was kind enough to give the United States 12 weeks of UNPAID maternity leave. Which essentially means that you can stay home with your new baby for 3 months without benefitting from income to support your child— let alone yourself. That doesn’t seem right! But that’s not the only horrid issue here. There is a deeper reason that other countries are getting paid maternity leave to stay at home with their babies from 6 months to a year. It’s because of the mere facts of biological and developmental social science, everyone.
Did you know that not bonding and not raising your own children for the first year of their lives actually causes many detrimental interferences in the psychology of their developing brains? Some people who have to go back to work right away after bearing a child for 9 months will take that question with a grain of salt and think “Well, my child turned out okay…”
But did they?
At the ripe stages after birth in an infant’s life, is the only time a brain will increase at the rapid rate as such. Neurological synopses and connections are firing and developing in a new way every single moment in the brain of a growing infant by getting their needs met and gaining new experiences by exploring new things for the very first time outside the womb. Not to mention, they are observing stimulus to develop healthy reactions—Efficient mirror neuron development leads to overall essential development to raise an emotionally intelligent child. Every baby needs proper nourishment, love, and nurture to be able to properly process every single one of these important psychological shaping facilitators.
To uncover some truth based evidence, Erikson’s stages of physical, emotional, and psychological stages of development states that joy-based family bonding is the foundation that establishes your child’s lifelong ability to share emotional intimacy, attain optimal intellectual potential, develop compassion, empathy, and the ability to trust in relationships, form self-identity and self-esteem, control emotions, develop language and motor control, and strengthen brain structures and organization of the nervous system. However, a child whose parents compromise the infant’s biological desperation to trust will physically move through each subsequent stage, but will emotionally carry with him or her the remnants of their incomplete, foundational rupture of what mattered most. With this crack in the foundation of the child’s developing personality, normal completion of the following stages is placed at-risk. All stages are dependent upon the healthy process and completion of the task before.
Needless to say, the lack of paid maternity leave in this country is more than just a lack of paid maternity leave as you can grasp. The downfall of many unfortunate conditions and decisions made by human beings essentially starts with the psychological development in the mind of an infant, let alone child. Hopefully, the United States can come to an agreement in the near future to oblige paid maternity leave for American women to embrace the essential development of human beings in our vastly growing and over developed country!
So if you want to Make America Great Again, go ahead!
But if you want to really be proactive, let’s start with day 1, literally!
Think about it…
the whitney nicole 