Parenthood, Parental Benefits, and Career Goals Among Pediatric Residents: 2008 and 2019

OBJECTIVES Examine reported availability of parental benefits for pediatric residents and impact of parenthood on reported importance of characteristics of post-training positions and career goals in 2008 and 2019. METHODS We analyzed data from American Academy of Pediatrics surveys of graduating residents in 2008 and 2019 querying (1) parenthood, (2) benefits during residency, (3) importance of parental benefits and job characteristics in post-training position, and (4) subspecialty career goal. Logistic regression was used to estimate independent effects of gender, partner status, and parenthood via derived predicted values (PVs). RESULTS Of 1021 respondents, three-fourths were women. Respondents in 2019 were less likely than in 2008 to have children (24.5% vs 33.8%, P < .01). In 2019, respondents were less likely to report availability of maternity (PV = 78.5% vs 89.5%, P < .001) or parental leave (PV = 42.5% vs 59.2%, P < .001) and more likely to report availability of lactation space (PV = 77.8% vs 56.1%, P < .001.). Most residents reported control over work hours, family considerations, and number of overnight calls per month as essential or very important characteristics in post-training positions. Controlling for resident characteristics, parenthood was associated with importance of family considerations and overnight calls in post-training position. Parenthood did not associate with subspecialty career goals, but gender did. CONCLUSIONS Residents are less likely to report availability of parental benefits during residency training in 2019. Most residents, both those with children and those without, consider parent friendly characteristics important in post-training positions. Parenthood does not correlate with subspecialty career goals independent from gender.

Socially Inclusive Parenting Leaves and Parental Benefit Entitlements: Rethinking Care and Work Binaries

How can parental leave design be more socially inclusive? Should all parents be entitled to parental benefits or only those parents who are eligible based on a particular level of labour market participation? To think through questions of social inclusion in parental leave policy design, particularly issues related to entitlements to benefits, I make three arguments. First, aiming to extend Dobrotić and Blum’s work on entitlements to parental benefits, I argue that ‘mixed systems’ that include both citizenship‐based and employment‐based benefits are just and socially inclusive approaches to parental leaves and citizenship. Second, to build a robust conceptual scaffolding for a ‘mixed’ benefits approach, I argue that that we need to attend to the histories and relationalities of the concepts and conceptual narratives that implicitly or explicitly inform parental leave policies and scholarship. Third, and more broadly, I argue that a metanarrative of care and work binaries underpins most scholarship and public and policy discourses on care work and paid work and on social policies, including parental leave policies. In this article, I outline revisioned conceptual narratives of care and work relationalities, arguing that they can begin to chip away at this metanarrative and that this kind of un‐thinking and rethinking can help us to envi‐ sion parental leave beyond employment policy—as care and work policy. Specifically, I focus on conceptual narratives that combine (1) care and work intra‐connections, (2) ethics of care and justice, and (3) ‘social care,’ ‘caring with,’ transforma‐ tive social protection, and social citizenship. Methodologically and epistemologically, this article is guided by my reading of Margaret Somers’ genealogical and relational approach to concepts, conceptual narratives, and metanarratives, and it is written in a Global North socio‐economic context marked by the COVID‐19 pandemic and 21st century neoliberalism.

The Contextualized Inclusiveness of Parental Leave Benefits

This article builds on a recent operationalization of inclusiveness of parental leave benefits proposed by Ivana Dobrotić and Sonja Blum and complements it by developing indicators of contextualized inclusiveness. This contextualized approach sets the formal entitlement and eligibility rules of social rights to parental leave benefits in the relevant socio‐economic context of the country to which these rules apply. The aim is to shed light on the extent to which parts of the country’s population are actually excluded or are at risk of being excluded from access to parental leave at a given moment in time. This is strongly shaped by, among other factors, the structure of the population according to employment status, job tenure or type of contract. An important characteristic of the methodological approach adopted in this article is that the proposed contextualized indicators are based on easily and publicly available and internationally comparable data. This makes the approach easily applicable by wide audiences, academic and practice‐oriented ones alike. The proposed indicators are then applied to sixteen European countries and show a much more diversified and nuanced landscape of contextualized inclusiveness of parental leave entitlements in Europe than the comparison of formal inclusiveness done by Dobrotić and Blum suggested. This study also shows that higher formal inclusiveness of employment‐based parental leave benefits was more common in countries with higher shares of those social groups that, in case of less inclusive regulations, would not have access to parental benefits.

The principle of satisfyingthe living and social needs of the employeein the company's sources of lawwith respect to parenthood

The monograph, appreciated by specialists in the fields of social policy and labour law, introduces a new area of knowledge in the field of labour law and allows for an empirical assessment of the types of policies applied by enterprises in the area of parental benefits. The approach proposed by the authors allows us to assess the expected path of changes in the regulation of this sphere of employment relations. The combination of various research perspectives with the relevance of this research and its social significance can constitute a contribution to the development of legal and other social sciences and help in the practice of business management.

Parental benefits and offspring costs reflect parent–offspring conflict over the age of fledging among songbirds

Parent–offspring conflict has explained a variety of ecological phenomena across animal taxa, but its role in mediating when songbirds fledge remains controversial. Specifically, ecologists have long debated the influence of songbird parents on the age of fledging: Do parents manipulate offspring into fledging to optimize their own fitness or do offspring choose when to leave? To provide greater insight into parent–offspring conflict over fledging age in songbirds, we compared nesting and postfledging survival rates across 18 species from eight studies in the continental United States. For 12 species (67%), we found that fledging transitions offspring from comparatively safe nesting environments to more dangerous postfledging ones, resulting in a postfledging bottleneck. This raises an important question: as past research shows that offspring would benefit—improve postfledging survival—by staying in the nest longer: Why then do they fledge so early? Our findings suggest that parents manipulate offspring into fledging early for their own benefit, but at the cost of survival for each individual offspring, reflecting parent–offspring conflict. Early fledging incurred, on average, a 13.6% postfledging survival cost for each individual offspring, but parents benefitted through a 14.0% increase in the likelihood of raising at least one offspring to independence. These parental benefits were uneven across species—driven by an interaction between nest mortality risk and brood size—and predicted the age of fledging among species. Collectively, our results suggest that parent–offspring conflict and associated parental benefits explain variation in fledging age among songbird species and why postfledging bottlenecks occur.

Parental Leave and Intra-Regime Differences in a Liberal Country: the Case of Four Canadian Provinces

This paper compares access to parental leave benefits in the four largest Canadian provinces –Québec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia between 2000 and 2016, using quantitative data from the Employment Insurance Coverage Survey. We show that inequalities in the receipt of benefits mirror and reinforce the structure of income and gender inequalities. We argue that Alberta and Québec represent two regimes of parental benefits. In Alberta the take-up of parental benefits is low, and is closely related to income and gender. Conversely, the vast majority of mothers and fathers have access to parental benefits in Québec. We argue that Alberta is closer to a liberal regime of parental benefits, while Québec is closer to a social-democratic model.

Access to Social Protection by Immigrants, Emigrants and Resident Nationals in Serbia

Turbulent political events of the 1990s marked by the Yugoslav wars, protracted transition from socialism to capitalism, and unstable economic outlook since 2000, have contributed to the preservation of a Serbian welfare system focused on ‘old social risks’, also marked by an exclusionary social protection model that limits access to some benefits to migrants – both foreigners in Serbia and Serbians abroad. Access to most social protection benefits for foreigners residing and working in Serbia depends on the same criteria and requirements as those applied for resident nationals. As the Serbian welfare regime is based on the social insurance model, the entitlement for most social benefits in cash or in kind is based on the employment period and/or payment of compulsory social insurance contributions. However, foreigners remain excluded from accessing non-contributory benefits such as the parental benefits, child allowances or the guaranteed minimum resource scheme. Non-resident nationals have access to social benefits depending on whether the country they reside in has signed social security agreements with Serbia, but range of benefits varies depending on the country.