By: Vicki Salemi, New York Post

When Ava Sloane of Hoboken, NJ, took a fully paid, five-month leave of absence from work last November, she did it guilt-free.

The manager at global professional-services firm Deloitte left to transition her 94-year-old ailing mother with dementia into a new nursing home in Florida. “Every time there was a crisis, it threw us into chaos dealing with things long-distance, or needing to fly down.”

Mentioning she was “torn between managing this and working well,” Sloane tapped into her employer’s family leave policy, which expanded last fall: up to 16 weeks of paid time off on a rolling calendar year (beginning when the first day of leave is taken) encompassing the parent celebrating the arrival of a new child to caring for a spouse or significant other to supporting aging parents.

Sloane’s supervisor approached her and suggested pursuing it. It was a total win-win. “How can it not be a good arrangement?” Sloane says. “To spend time helping my mom and helping her caregiver. That time off was amazingly precious. My mother’s memory was going — this was the last time she would remember me.”

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