Implications for adult roles from differential styles of mother-infant bonding: an ethological study

Paid health and family leave: the Canadian experience in the global context

OBJECTIVES

Two thirds of Canadian adults participate in the workforce. Their health and that of their families can be markedly affected by the availability of paid sick leave, paid leave to care for family members' health and paid parental leave.

METHODS

We gathered data from all Canadian provinces and territories on these essential leave policies and compared Canadian policies with data collected on 186 United Nations (UN) countries.

RESULTS

While Canada pays sickness benefits for 15 weeks for serious illnesses, globally at least 90 countries provide benefits for at least 26 weeks or until recovery. Moreover, within Canada only Saskatchewan and Quebec guarantee job protection if sick leave lasts over 12 days. The federal government guarantees Canadian workers six weeks of paid leave to provide care or support to gravely ill family members. Only 39 countries guarantee such leave with pay. Most, but not all, provinces guarantee workers' job protection during compassionate care leave. Eligibility for job protection during parental leave varies across the country from having no restrictions to requiring at least one year of service.

CONCLUSION

Compared with Canada, many countries offer a longer duration of paid sick leave for employees and replace a higher percentage of wages lost. Internationally, Canada performs well in having policies that guarantee paid leave to care for dependants with serious illnesses, but it lags behind in the provision of paid leave to address the health needs of children or family members' with non-life-threatening conditions. Finally, while paid parental leave is of adequate duration, the wage replacement rate lowers its accessibility to families with limited means.

Socialization processes in primates: use of multivariate analyses II-Influence of sex on social development of captive rhesus monkeys

In a previous study, we demonstrated the importance of social interactions in the development of non-human primate infants. These results confirmed the social network concept. According to this concept, it is assumed that socialization processes would differ in various social environments. However, much variability remained to be explained. In the present study we investigated especially the influence of infants' gender on socialization processes. In relation to the previous results, the influence was tested within groups having the same social structure. At the Wisconsin Regional Primate Research Center, four mother-peer groups of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) were studied. Therefore no adult male model was available to infants. Twenty infants, including eight males, eight females and four prenatally DES-treated females, were the subjects of this study. We considered six comprehensive developmental parameters to account for the two main socialization processses, the acquisition of the social behavioral repertoire and the establishment of a network of social relationships. We analyzed the variability of these parameters using a new multivariate technique previously described in a companion paper. This new technique is derived from the Principal Components Analysis and Multivariate Analyses of Variance. The model used in this analysis included two intrinsic features of infants, sex and age and two variables related to the social organization of the groups, mother's rank and social group. This 4-variable-model significantly accounted for most of the variability of the developmental parameters. The results showed that the social group and the infant's sex were the most influential variables when infants initiated interactions: male and DES female infants displayed a greater behavioral diversity than non-treated female infants. When infants were recipients in interactions, social organization variables (social group and mother's rank, respectively) had the greatest influence on the socialization processes while infants' gender was less influential. In this case the effect of sex was confounded with the social group effect; male infants then differed from both kind of female infants in being looked at more frequently, in being contacted by a larger variety of partners and in receiving a greater variety of social behaviors. This new example of applying multivariate methods to the study of individual social development confirms the potential of this method to provide new insights into behavioral development.