Real-Life Math
You're a research psychologist at a large university. You perform
research and publish your findings in scholarly journals. Although your main
area of study is child development, you've been concentrating on social issues
involving child welfare -- child care, early childhood intervention services
and parental leave in the event of birth or adoption.
A local Congressman
wants help in his quest to get paid maternity leave passed into law. One way
you can help is to provide some data regarding the ways in which other countries
handle parental leave.
You come across a table comparing the lengths
of time and funding of parental leaves in Sweden and Germany.
Sweden's
system provides 480 days (approximately 16 months) of paid parental leave
per child. Parents receive 80 percent of their salary for 390 days (13 months),
up to a ceiling of $98 per day.
New parents in Germany can take up to
14 months of paid parental leave and receive 67 percent of their income.
You
want to find out how these systems would translate into a real person's income
in the U.S. Would such arrangements make it feasible for a new parent to stay
home with his or her baby for the first year of the child's life?
Imagine
a new mother who earns $42,000 a year as a librarian. How much
would she be paid during her one-year maternity leave in Sweden? How much
would she earn over the course of her child's first year if she was in Germany?