PAID LEAVE

There’s a saying in Spanish that many parents use: “el golpe avisa.” The rough translation is, “The pain will warn you.” It comes from the idea that children do not often learn their lesson until they actually hurt themselves.

This saying has been repeating in my head since the start of the news cycle about COVID-19, and when I read Miami-Dade County Commissioner Daniella Levine Cava’s March 8 op-ed, “Paid sick leave in Miami-Dade could help contain spread of the coronavirus.”

As a parenting, education and child development expert, I am frustrated and disheartened that this topic only comes to mind when “the pain” arrives.

I look back at my work since 2014 and see how often I have advocated for paid family and medical leave as a preventive measure to multiple pain points for families of young children and for families sandwiched between helping their elderly parents and their children, whose members may need time away from work to care for their own serious medical condition or that of a loved one, not just the arrival of a new child.

Now we are scrambling for answers when we could have already had paid family and medical leave in play and families would not have to choose between their family’s health and their financial security.

There are many humane, common-sense laws that need to be in place. Paid family leave and universal childcare can improve our nation’s families. Yet we are all just waiting for “el golpe avise.”

– Lina Acosta Sandaal,

founder, Stop Parenting Alone,

Miami