Tara’s husband is able to get Baby C settled down with a bottle of expressed breast milk, but her first day proves to be a long and busy one.

At three weeks old, a baby can nurse as frequently as every hour throughout the day and night. Tara fits in nursing Baby C when she can during the workday. She knows from experience with her first baby that once she is back at the office, she will have difficulty finding the time to pump.

Tara also feels lucky to be able to work from home for now.

But working from home, with a nursing baby, does have some occupational hazards.

Luckily, Baby C missed the laptop.

Tara’s job entails a lot of time on the phone and on Internet chat with clients around the country. When her husband has to step out one day (I later learned that this “errand” was to attend a funeral), things get chaotic.

Tara finds that some of her clients are stunned when they realize she is back at work when her baby is so young.

California is one of three states in the U.S. (along with Rhode Island and New Jersey) that have implemented paid-family-leave laws. A national-level program called The FAMILY Act has also been proposed by Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democratic senator from New York.

The existing state programs vary in the details, but they follow a basic insurance model: Employees (and in New Jersey, employers as well) pay regularly into a fund built onto the state’s temporary disability-insurance program. When workers take leave for births, adoptions, sick relatives, or their own illnesses, they are paid out at a percentage of their typical income.

Implemented in 2004, California’s program, called the Paid Family Leave Act (PFL), is the oldest of these programs. It is funded by employee contributions, and provides 55 percent of wage replacement for up to six weeks. 1.7 million California PFL claims were filed from 2004 to March 2015; the vast majority of these claims were made by new parents.

I ask Tara if her family could afford a leave in which only 55 percent of her income were replaced.

Prior to the passage of PFL, the California Chamber of Commerce put the bill at the top of its list of “job killer” legislation and convened other business groups to oppose the bill. The group warned of the “cost and burden for all California employers, especially small employers.” A spokesperson for the CalChamber estimated that the law would cost California employers $2.5 billion a year.

So far, these predictions have not materialized. A 2011 study looked at the business impacts of the first six years of the California PFL program. About 90 percent of firms surveyed reported that the law had neutral or positive effect on “productivity, profit, morale, and costs.” The study noted the “surprising” finding that “small firms reported even fewer problems than large firms.” The California study also found that use of PFL had “a positive effect on [workers’] ability to arrange child care” and that it “doubled the median duration of breastfeeding for all new mothers who used it.”