Description: This paper is an excerpt from a book manuscript: Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers. Earning and Caring: ‘What government can do to reconcile motherhood, fatherhood, and employment’, New York, Russell Sage Publications. It was prepared as a presentation for the ‘Symposium on family policy in the United States and Canada’ at the University of Washington in 2002. One of the premises of the book is that the core elements of an earner/carer society -- ample parental time, gender equality, and family economic security -- should inform the design of specific public policy provisions that would support such an outcome. If society endorses an earner/carer framework as an “end vision”, then public provisions in support of that end vision need to be designed with its defining elements in mind. To that end, in this chapter, the authors lay out five principles of family leave policy design and four principles that would guide the design of policies related to working time. They then assess how the U.S. is currently faring relative to these policy design principles and, subsequently, how other industrialized countries are faring, drawing lessons along the way.