Your position clearly includes the assumption that paid family leave supports children. That assumption is the very matter under debate here. Do you have evidence for your belief that paid family leave supports children, that it is a net benefit? You mentioned that your cursory searches were inconclusive. As a champion of empiricism, are you not bothered by the thought of harboring a belief (held, in fact, before the inconclusive research) that is not supported by evidence? Is this belief simply an article of faith for you? I don't doubt that having one or two parents home with a newborn will be good for the family. In any plausible alternative to PFL, this will still happen — employers do not expect mothers to deliver babies during lunch hour and then get back to work. (Or if they do, nothing in the California plan prevents this from continuing.) Perhaps the PFL plan results in parents staying home with newborns longer when they can collect 55% of their salary compared to when it was unpaid. That would be good, but I would like to see evidence that this actually happens. The paper which appears to support PFL actually has some damning evidence. It reveals that 31% of "low-quality job" workers (who presumably get more benefit from PFL than high-quality job workers) receive half their salary during family leave without even participating in the plan. And among those who participate, only 84% actually receive the 55% salary they were promised. As kzcondor pointed out, 73% of the low-quality job workers who didn't use the plan were satisfied with the length of their leave, and the plan made no difference in satisfaction for the others. The main disincentive, absent a PFL plan, for taking more unpaid time off to bond with a baby is the loss of income. So the main justification for PFL is financial: that it is paid family leave. If a typical career is 40 years, my calculations show that the worker will face a significant net financial loss, more than double the money contributed. Does taking money from parents support children?I support paid family leave, because I think part of the social contract is that we (civilized people) support children.