On my first day as a neonatal intensive care nurse at Rose Medical Center, I watched another nurse perform what could have been a complicated maneuver: repositioning a premature infant no bigger than her hand. In the adult critical care world I came from, moving a patient was a two-or three-person job. But this nurse lifted the baby’s head one way and then gently rotated their body another, all while putting them right back down again in one simple motion, as if there was nothing to it.
It honestly was the most magical thing, and yet I was immediately terrified. These premature infants were impossibly small, often weighing less than 2 pounds. Their bones, their lungs, their tiny noses required a kind of care that was equal parts gentleness and confidence. You could not rush it, and you could not afford to get it wrong.
That memory has echoed for me the past month. On Dec. 2, Colorado’s Family and Medical Leave Insurance, or FAMLI, program launched the nation’s first neonatal care leave, a paid benefit for parents with babies receiving intensive care from birth.
Creating this required the same blend of delicacy and confidence neonatal nurses learn at the bedside. And it meets families at a moment when they, too, are being asked to navigate something both fragile and overwhelming.
Across the country, neonatal complications and preterm births are rising. In Colorado, preterm births increased 15.7% from 2014 to 2023, and in 2023, more than 5,900 babies were born early. Families with a newborn in intensive care don’t only face a medical crisis — they face a financial one, too.
The medical crisis is obvious. Parents spend long hours beside humming machines, learning how to read monitors, understand oxygen needs and preparing for potential specialized care once their infant can go home.
The financial emergency is just as real, and increasingly common. Intensive care stays can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and those costs are rising faster than wages.
Health care costs, unpredictable insurance and the broader affordability pressures faced throughout the country mean that any single unexpected medical event threatens not only a family’s savings, but their housing, their credit and their long-term stability. Losing a paycheck can turn a medical emergency into a generational setback.
Of course, paid leave can’t prevent medical emergencies. But FAMLI is working to prevent a loss of income that makes those emergencies worse.
Colorado’s new neonatal care leave offers up to 12 weeks of paid time off during a baby’s hospital stay. This is separate from the 12 weeks parents receive for bonding once their child comes home.
The distinction is important. Caring for a medically fragile infant is not the same as bonding with a healthy newborn. One requires rest and recovery; the other requires training, vigilance and a kind of emotional endurance that no new parent imagines needing.
What I’ve seen, and what neonatal experts have always reinforced, is that the time spent in the intensive care unit learning how to care for a medically fragile infant is every bit as essential as the time families need once their baby comes home. Without paid leave that supports both moments, families are forced into impossible trade-offs: return to work before they’re recovered and ready, or risk losing the job they rely on.
It is a significant adjustment process, and many return to work carrying a weight they’ve had no time to lift. For employers already navigating the ripple effects of life’s everyday emergencies, parents forced to choose between being at the hospital or at work often return exhausted and less able to contribute fully.
Yet across the country, studies show that parents who take paid family leave return to work at significantly higher rates, reinforcing what Colorado has long believed: When families are supported, employers benefit too.
By giving families a simple way to remain connected to their jobs during a crisis, and giving employers a workforce that returns ready and whole, Colorado is strengthening its labor market in the most practical way possible: by keeping experienced workers in the jobs they’re trained to do.
In Colorado, we believe healthy families and healthy workplaces aren’t competing priorities. They reinforce each other. And they shape Colorado’s future in ways we are only beginning to see.
Neonatal care leave fills one of the largest gaps in the paid-leave landscape. It meets a real, rising need — and reflects the kind of clarity, compassion and steady leadership that makes Colorado a state to watch.
Just like that neonatal nurse who moved a baby with a motion so easily it felt like magic, Colorado is showing what it looks like to do something delicate, something new and something profoundly impactful, with confidence and without hesitation.
Tracy Marshall, of Littleton, is the division director at Colorado Family and Medical Leave Insurance.
The Colorado Sun is a nonpartisan news organization, and the opinions of columnists and editorial writers do not reflect the opinions of the newsroom. Read our ethics policy for more on The Sun’s opinion policy. Learn how to submit a column. Reach the opinion editor at opinion@coloradosun.com.
Follow Colorado Sun Opinion on Facebook.