Infants whose mothers received paid family leave showed greater brain activity in their first three months, a new study suggests.

In the fall of 2021, Democrats pushed to establish a national paid leave program under the Build Back Better Act, an initiative that would guarantee paid family and sick leave to US workers. The bill faltered in the Senate before eventually being shelved when it failed to garner enough votes.

Without a paid leave policy, the US maintains its position as the only industrialized nation that doesn’t guarantee this aid to its citizens. Nearly 80% of US workers do not receive paid leave through their employer, leaving them, when having children, to choose between earning a paycheck or bonding with their newborns.

This lack of paid leave has profound consequences for both new mothers and their babies, according to developmental psychologists, including Natalie Brito, assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhart School. To explore this impact, Brito studied a diverse sample of families in New York City to examine links between paid leave and electrical activity in infant brains at the age of three months.

As reported in Child Development, the findings show that infants with increased activity of higher-frequency brain waves were 7.39 times more likely to have mothers with paid leave.

Here, Brito talks about about the state of maternity in the US, the benefits of paid leave, and the adverse impacts faced by those without it: