Benefit Will Reduce Financial Stress for Colorado Parents
For years, Nathalie and her spouse had dreamed of welcoming a child into their family — and in February 2021, the call finally came: they had been chosen to adopt a baby born that same week.
But joy quickly collided with uncertainty: their newborn daughter had medical complications at birth. She spent her first month in a neonatal care unit, followed by weekly specialist appointments for another six months.
Like so many others, Nathalie assumed she’d be able to take time away from work — but she didn’t qualify for her company’s limited family leave policy. When she asked whether her job could at least be held for her if she took unpaid leave, the answer was just as devastating: no.
Suddenly, the moment she had spent years preparing for came with an impossible choice. As Nathalie put it, “In order to take care of the new baby in my family, I had to quit my job.”
Her experience is exactly why Colorado created Neonatal Care Leave.
A National Problem, A Colorado Solution
Across the U.S., preterm birth rates and intensive care admissions have been rising. Colorado has faced an 11.2% increase in preterm births since 2016, and in 2023, over 5,900 babies here were born early. In those moments, parents face two emergencies at once: their child’s medical crisis, and a financial one.
For many, FAMLI Bonding Leave has offered precious time — but it isn’t built for the time parents need to spend with their baby in intensive care. Instead of being at home to recover, parents find themselves surrounded by machines, listening to monitors while learning medical terminology and specialized care techniques they never heard of, let alone expected.
According to healthcare transformation expert and neonatal nurse Brigid Jones, those learning moments make the difference between an infant who recovers and a parent ready to go back to work — or not.
“Having a baby in intensive care is a really scary experience,” Brigid told us recently. “And there's a really different kind of a journey parents are going to go through. In the beginning, it's pretty scary because your infant may be attached to different wires, and there's different alarms going off. But then, once they’re home, it’s just as scary, because you don’t have these machines telling you what’s wrong, or how to help.”
Somehow, amidst this fear, parents have been expected to choose when to take time off to be with their baby — even though both during and after intensive care are crucially important times.
“There's this big struggle for parents that are able to — or planning to — return to work,” Brigid told us recently. “It’s important that parents are there during their infant’s hospital stay, learning how to care for them, learning how their infant's not so scary. But it's also important to have time when they go home — because they don't have the hospital equipment there, telling them what their babies are trying to say.”
Whichever choice parents make, Brigid says, they’re still at a disadvantage.
“It’s so difficult to be present for those experiences, and then also be able to return to work as a whole person,” she said. “It’s a grief process.”
How Neonatal Care Leave Works
Thankfully, Colorado parents no longer have to make that impossible choice. Instead of stacking crises, they can now stack support: paid intensive-care leave when it matters most, followed by dedicated, paid bonding time once everyone is safely home.
With Neonatal Care Leave, parents whose infants receive intensive care may be eligible for up to 12 weeks of paid leave during their baby’s hospital stay. Then, once their baby is discharged, families may be eligible to take 12 additional weeks of paid time off through FAMLI Bonding Leave.
Doing so is simple: families can apply for both Neonatal Care Leave and Bonding in the My FAMLI+ portal at the same time. Neonatal Care Leave can start as soon as an admission document is uploaded and approved. Then, once their stay in neonatal care ends, parents let FAMLI know, so their Bonding Leave can immediately begin.
With this simple process, parents gain a clear path to the time they deserve to learn their baby’s unique needs, adjust to the pace of neonatal care, and use those skills at home with confidence. And when parents have the space to focus on their child’s health, the outcomes ripple far beyond the neonatal unit.
Health and Economic Outcomes
Research consistently shows that when parents can take paid leave for the arrival of a vulnerable baby, infant health improves.
Something as simple as kangaroo care — extended skin-to-skin contact between parent and child — stabilizes an infant’s breathing, heart rate, temperature, and stress levels. But the benefits don’t stop at health. For families like Nathalie’s, paid neonatal leave would mean keeping the job they’ve built their life around, instead of walking away from it during the hardest moment they’ve ever faced.
And not only would they keep it — research shows how parents who are supported during a crisis return to work steadier, more settled, and able to contribute fully, rather than having to work with the weight of an emergency they had to carry alone.
Healthy families and healthy workplaces aren’t separate goals; they reinforce each other. This is the Colorado approach — a solution that works for everyone impacted by neonatal intensive care.
By offering a dedicated leave type for neonatal care, Colorado is addressing a major gap in the national paid leave landscape. We’re setting a new standard that reflects what’s possible when states recognize “time to care” as a public and economic value. Turns out, supporting families is good for business, good for babies, and good for the future we’re all building together.