Introduction

This chapter analyses leave policy developments in Mexico, up to 2018, looking at the transition from a system based on Maternity Leave to a broader approach related to childhood and labour policies. Maternity Leave was anchored in the Mexican Constitution as early as 1917, in the context of the Mexican Revolution that transformed the country's culture and government. A century later fathers came to the fore with the introduction of Paternity Leave in 2012. The recent changes illustrate how the dual-earner/dual-carer model along with social policies supporting a caring fatherhood are spreading to Mexico as well as to the rest of Latin America.

We aim to identify structural conditioning factors, obstacles and challenges to improving leave policies in Mexico. We also review the proposals that have been generated during the last five years. Given the emerging research on leave policies in Latin America, an additional purpose is to integrate the specific features and challenges from this region into the international academic debate.

The chapter starts with a section introducing the context of leave policies in the Latin American region. We then present some basic information on Mexico and an overview of the development of leave policies, including a description of the legislative initiatives presented in the Congress of the Union ( Congreso de la Unión , the Federal Chamber of Deputies and Senate) between 2012 and mid-2017, which were designed to extend leave and increase co-responsibility between men and women for the care of children. We discuss structural impediments and challenges to improving leave policies in Mexico, some of which have been pointed out by international organisations, such as the informal economy, funding and the growth, complexity and fragmentation of ECEC services. We conclude by identifying the need to link leave and ECEC policies, in order to focus efforts not just on parents’ co-responsibility and equality but also on children's wellbeing. These policies can also act as pull factors for the formalisation of informal employment, so that the associated costs could then be reformulated as social investments.

The spread of the social politics of parenthood to Latin America

Research on the cultural and institutional construction of motherhood, fatherhood and the relationship between working parents, the labour market and social policies has spread all over the world.