Planning Your Parental Leave: Lessons From Experience
From parental leave to daycare, a conversation about the policies that shape early parenthood, and the gaps families still have to navigate.
Canada offers some of the world’s most generous parental leave policies, but the reality of raising a child is far more complicated than the brochure suggests.
Cara Stern sits down with Jasmine Steffler of Walkable Parenthood and Oh The Urbanity! to explore why Canada’s parental leave system is among the most generous in the world, yet still leaves many new parents struggling.
From confusing leave rules and income replacement gaps to the challenges of finding childcare, building community, and balancing finances during the first year of parenthood, they take a candid look at what Canada gets right, where it falls short, and why supporting families requires more than just time off.
If you enjoy the show and would like to support our work, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. The pod is also available on various audio-only platforms, including:
Below is an AI-generated transcript of the Missing Middle podcast, lightly edited.
Cara Stern: Since Canada expanded employment insurance parental leave from ten weeks to 35 weeks in 2000, and Quebec launched its own provincial parental insurance plan in 2006, the share of new mothers taking leave has consistently been around three quarters. Say what you will about Canada, but when it comes to pregnancy and parental leave, we do a lot right. Our policies are popular, they’re widely used, and they’re among the most generous in the world. But of course, that doesn’t mean they’re perfect.
Today we’re joined by Jasmine Steffler, who you might recognize from the YouTube channel Oh The Urbanity! and who now writes a Substack called Walkable Parenthood. She’s here to talk about her experience navigating parental leave, what surprised her along the way, and where she thinks Canada could be improved.
First of all, thanks so much for joining us. I’m so happy to have you, Jasmine.
Jasmine Steffler: Thanks for having me.
Cara Stern: What did you know about the parental leave policies before you got pregnant?
Jasmine Steffler: I generally knew you get about a year of maternity leave, but I had a lot of confusion around exactly what that looked like in terms of how many payments you got, how long you get payments, and how that fits with how much leave you can take from work.
The SparkNotes version in Canada: you can take up to 18 months of parental leave, but the payments only go up to about a year. You can choose to take beyond 12 months, but that is essentially unpaid.
That was one of my biggest confusions—how that worked beyond just generally figuring out personally when to take leave, when you’re financially stable enough, and when you feel like it’s a good time at work.
Cara Stern: Yeah, it’s a thing that wasn’t intuitive to me either. The fact that it’s like two separate systems where you’ve got your protected leave, which is one part of the system, and then you’ve got your employment insurance—or in Quebec, it’s their own program—but you’ve got basically employment insurance for parental leave over that period of time. Those are two separate things.
One piece of advice that I got was no matter how much time you’re planning to take over 12 months, always say you want to take 12 months so that you get that amount of money in those first 12 months, rather than spread it over 18, because it gives you the flexibility to then extend unpaid for up to six months. At least you don’t lose and leave money on the table if you decide to come back a little bit earlier than 18 months.
It’s not that simple of a system, which is a little frustrating, deciding when to take leave. What did you decide to do?
Jasmine Steffler: I ended up taking 14 months, which seemed like a good compromise between a little bit more than a year, but not the full amount of time because I just didn’t quite feel like I could justify being away from work that long. I think the financial strain would have been a bit too much for that amount of time.
Cara Stern: In Quebec, though, you guys have a better system in the sense of the income replacement part of it, right? Because I know in Ontario and in most provinces, you end up basically getting the same as what you’d get through the EI system. It’s capped at 55% of your salary up to somewhere around $60,000—it changes every year.
For a lot of people, especially if you’re a middle-class family, you’re probably taking a significant pay cut. No matter where you are [outside of Quebec], it’s going to be 55% at best; you’re going to lose 45% of your income. For a lot of people, it’s a lot more than that. For you, it was different in Quebec, right? They have a higher income replacement rate. Is that how it works?
Jasmine Steffler: Yeah, that’s right. That was a pleasant surprise when we were going through all this research.
Quebec has closer to a 65% income replacement rate. I think you get a higher percentage the first part of your leave, and then it goes down, so it averages to about 65%.
Comparing that to 55% in the rest of Canada is actually pretty significant when you think about what that would look like in terms of money in your bank. It gets better than that as your income increases because Quebec doesn’t have the same cap. In Quebec, your income can be up to $103,000 for the income ceiling, so you’ll get 65% of that if you make that much, which most of us don’t, but it’s a pretty big difference.
Cara Stern: That’s huge. I wonder how much that impacts how comfortable people are. I know that Quebec has, at least in eastern Canada, the highest fertility rate. I wonder how much of a role this plays. How much of this did you consider?
Jasmine Steffler: I think it was a pretty big consideration, just doing the calculations and figuring out the difference. It wasn’t only that, but it definitely made a big difference for imagining what our lifestyle would be like the year I’m off. It just seemed a bit more attainable than it would elsewhere. It wasn’t just that, though. In combination with that, knowing that Quebec has a pretty strong subsidized daycare system and looking ahead to things like that helped too.
Cara Stern: Oh my gosh, your daycare system seems so much more robust than in Ontario. I know that here you end up calling all the daycares and having to basically follow up. Sometimes the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and it’s very frustrating, especially if you’re someone who isn’t comfortable calling and bugging people and saying, “Hey, I really need a spot, can you help me out?” Because I understand in Quebec it’s a centralized system, right?
Jasmine Steffler: Yes, exactly. It’s a pretty easy system and there are just so many more available spots. There’s still competition for your ideal spot, but it’s just not such a Hunger Games thing because there is more availability. It’s not rewarding the richest and most organized people as much as I think it is in other provinces.
Cara Stern: Yeah, and that’s kind of nice. It’s a much fairer system because a lot of people don’t know how to navigate the system, especially if it’s your first kid. With the first kid, you don’t have any sibling priority that a lot of people get when it’s their second or third kid. When it comes to the amount that you get, for me with the first kid, I was thinking about how we’ll just figure it out. I knew that I had, at the time, a top-up through work for the first four months. I think that is something that some people have—big companies often offer that. But a lot of Canadian employees work for small businesses and don’t have any top-up, so it’s a huge hit.
Once you experience one parental leave, you know exactly how dire the situation can be for your budget. There’s no way to avoid thinking about this when deciding whether to have another kid because it’s going to affect your income. I heard from a financial planner one time that if you are not going in the red during mat leave, that is a huge success. That’s all you’re aiming for, and a lot of people can’t even do that. It makes sense because the cost of living is really high and the amount you get is not that high.
Jasmine Steffler: It really disincentivizes middle- and lower-income people from having kids; it’s a huge barrier. Obviously, if you’re a bit better off, you have more capacity to have one partner be off for a year or two years, and it doesn’t hurt you that much. Maybe you’re reducing your investments or you’re not going on as many trips as you would normally. But for lower-and middle-income people, it actually can be a very big hit to your lifestyle. We are in the advantageous short-term position of not owning a home, not having a mortgage, and not having a car. If you do have those big, regular monthly expenses, it seems almost impossible if you’re a middle-income person.
Cara Stern: Yeah, I was thinking to ask you if you were one of the people who decided once you have a kid, you have to get a car, because I was like, that would be very off-brand for you guys. But I wondered about that because a lot of people feel like it is a necessity when you have a kid. I know that you have a Substack that talks about all the ways you get around the city without a car and what your experience is like. Can you tell a bit about what your experience has been with that?
Jasmine Steffler: Yeah, so we don’t have a strong opposition to ever getting a car, but we did want to see how long we can go and how it goes having a baby or a kid now without a car. There are some areas that can definitely be improved in Montreal. Montreal has pretty good transit, but they are really lacking on accessibility on the Metro. I don’t know the exact figure, but it seems like 10% or less of stations are accessible. I think Toronto is a lot higher, so that has been a challenge. It definitely makes us take the bus more than the Metro, which has been fine, it just limits your options in a way that full accessibility wouldn’t. If we want to go somewhere, we might walk to the closest Metro station, and that might be a 20 or 30-minute walk just to get the elevator, so it definitely adds some complications. Other than that, we do live in a walkable area, so we can do our day-to-day needs on foot, and it’s been mostly fine.
Cara Stern: How old was your baby when you first took him on a bike?
Jasmine Steffler: Technically the first time he was around eight months, but he was in a car seat in a cargo bike. When we really got him on it more often was when he was about 14 or 15 months. It was finally not winter in Montreal and he had good head and neck control. We have a bike seat for him now, which has been great for being able to do similar rides that we did before.
Cara Stern: Will you be taking him in the winter?
Jasmine Steffler: Good question. I think that’ll have to be a discussion for later, but we’re definitely a lot more cautious when we take him out. Maybe we’ll get there.
Cara Stern: I wanted to go back to the parental leave side of it because you spent a lot of time on parental leave. How did you find navigating and understanding not just the systems on how to collect the payments for it, but how did you integrate into the community of people who are also on parental leave? How did you find people who have kids the same age? What did you do?
Jasmine Steffler: I actually found it kind of challenging. In the first three to five months of having a baby, you’re so preoccupied with the baby, you’re spending so much time taking care of them, worrying about them, and googling things that your main focus isn’t really building community, even though it’s maybe the thing you most need.
By the time I was out of that sort of newborn period, then I was actively trying to find things. There are a good amount of community groups and classes to take here, but I found you have to put a decent amount of research into finding them. There wasn’t a good centralized place; it was a lot of patchwork finding things to do and people to meet. It took about a year to find a good group of people near me in my area. I found that was a bit of a challenge, especially not owning a car, because of how important it is to have people that are within walking distance or at least not super far so you can see them regularly. It makes it easier to keep in contact.
Cara Stern: Yeah, I always thought about when I was on parental leave that there was this ratio between how much you liked them and how close they lived, and that just has to be a happy ratio. As long as they live nearby, if they’re decent enough people, you spend time with them, even though sometimes the only thing you have in common is being a mom. But sometimes that’s all you need when you’re on parental leave and trying to find your people. It can be tough, right?
Jasmine Steffler: Yes, exactly. Getting that human interaction regularly can be pretty important because it can be pretty isolating if you don’t have that, especially if you don’t have family or a pre-built network right around you.
Cara Stern: Oh yeah, because you live far from your family, so I guess you had to kind of build that community where you are. It’s a tough thing.
I know in Ontario, one of the things they offer is EarlyON, where they have these programs where you can go and drop in and get to meet other people who are on parental leave. That was a huge benefit to me when I was off because I was able to find the local ones and talk to people there. It’s scary because you’re talking to people and you’re also trying to navigate going out with your kid for the first time—how do I go on my own and navigate sometimes through stairs and things like that? It can be a challenge, but it’s such a nice thing that the government finances, and I’m so grateful for it.
I always tell everyone who’s going on parental leave, look for your local EarlyON if you’re in Ontario because they’re all over the place and they’re all individually run, so they’re a little bit different. If you don’t like the one you go to, try another one. When it comes to going on parental leave, what’s something you wish you understood before you went?
Jasmine Steffler: I think beyond understanding the basics of how much money you’re entitled to, how much leave you can take, and figuring out what works best for you, like not just assuming that you have to take only 12 months or only 18 months, it’s pretty idiosyncratic. You have to be honest with yourself about how long you really want to spend with a baby. It’s rewarding, but it can be really hard, and it’s a very different type of job.
Cara Stern: Yeah, and it’s okay to not know that ahead of time. Some people think that they will enjoy it a lot more than they actually do, so I guess that’s where the flexibility comes in of being able to change it. I really appreciate that they don’t lock you into a certain amount of time when you take parental leave.
Jasmine Steffler: And then beyond that, thinking beyond one year or 18 months of leave and thinking about what infrastructure, services, and things exist around you to support you. More of us are living more individualistic lives, and that’s become more normal than it was in the past. We need community groups more than ever.
Also, thinking about services—for example, we knew that we would have $9 a day subsidized daycare, which is almost unbelievable that that’s a thing. That was a big help for us and allowed us to not be struggling so much after the year of leave.
Cara Stern: Yeah. Childcare used to be such a big expense, and I know it was before this program came in. I started my first kid in daycare right as the program came in. Our deposit was $2,300 for the month, and then what we actually paid was more like $1,000 a month, and it just went down from there. Now it’s around $450, and if you can access the spaces, it’s such a benefit. It’s amazing what it does.
What ends up happening is that the year off is probably the most significant cost in the early years because of the loss of income, the loss of momentum at work, and sometimes losing connections if you take too long off. I was reading about what kinds of things have worked for helping people feel more comfortable having as many kids as they’d like to, and what I found was that extending how long they’re off doesn’t always work beyond a year. About a year seems to be the sweet point. Some countries tried doing two years and three years and then pulled it back to 18 months because they didn’t find it made a big difference. But what makes a big difference is that income replacement, because without it, it just makes it impossible to make ends meet, especially in such a high cost of living country.
Jasmine Steffler: You need to have already decided you want to have kids, and then you’re going to figure out how to make it work. But if you’re someone on the fence and you’re not sure, our programs don’t necessarily do enough to make it look super appealing.
Cara Stern: You recently took a trip with your kid. You said kid, I still think he’s a baby. He’s only three weeks older than mine, and mine is still a baby, so yours is still a baby. What was that like?
Jasmine Steffler: It was different than traveling before a kid, but it was better than we thought it would be. It takes more prep work, just like you do at home, and you have to temper your expectations a little bit. You expect to cover less of the city every day, but it is entirely doable. I don’t know how much harder it gets when we’re fully in toddler mode, but it’s entirely doable with an 18-month-old.
Cara Stern: So that’s awesome. Yeah, I guess it’ll be different to see as they change. There’s always something new that’s great and something new that’s horrible—that’s my experience, anyways. I only have a four-year-old. I don’t know if it changes as they get older, but as something changes, I’m like, “I’m so sad this phase is over,” and also, “Thank goodness that phase is over.” Everything’s bittersweet.
Jasmine Steffler: For sure.
Cara Stern: Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate you taking the time to come here today.
Jasmine Steffler: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Cara Stern: Thank you, everyone, for watching and listening. And thanks so much to our producer, Meredith Martin, and our editor, Sean Foreman.
If you have any questions about putting a baby on a bike, send them our way: [email protected].
We’ll see you next time.
Additional Reading/Listening that Helped Inform the Episode:
The effect of leave policies on increasing fertility: a systematic review
Does Parental Leave Affect Fertility and Return-to-Work? Evidence from a “True Natural Experiment”
The Daily — Fertility and baby names, 2024
Brought to you by the Missing Middle Initiative