Utilizing Agent-Based Models to Explore the Effects of Maternal Care Trade-Offs in the U.S.

In this paper, we conduct a review of the existing literature on maternal care trade-offs. From our research, we found that allomaternal care arose as the main strategy used by mothers to combat these trade-offs. In industrialized societies, the increased prevalence of women in the work force has given rise to systemic maternal support in the form of maternity leave. We used the 2022 American Time Use Survey Data to simulate the effects of such policies, as well as marital status on women’s time allocation. We created dependent variables to measure the agents’ career advancement, wellbeing, and child wellbeing. Across all of our models, those who had an unmarried partner had better career advancement and child wellbeing, whereas those who were single had the highest maternal wellbeing. We used an agent-based model and ultimately concluded that, over the span of 10 years, 12 weeks of paid maternity leave was not enough to impact the agents’ long-term time allocation behavior.