I'm a dad (of three) and I am not convinced that time spent at the very start of their lives is as significant as that later in their lives (note the "as", I am not saying it has no value!) when you can really nurture their passions, knowledge, etc.
I did spend a lot of time with my children in their earliest days because it was the right thing to do, but I don't feel either they or I particularly gained from it (than if I'd spent a bit less, say). Do I feel the time I spend with them now they're older pays serious dividend for their futures? Absolutely.
I own a company and can spend an above average amount of time with my children.. but are companies or the government going to support the majority of parents spending prolonged periods of times with older children? Sadly I can't see it happening, but I think that's a more important task than having two parents on tap for a newborn. All purely IMHO, of course.
I think this is missing the point of equal parental leave and how it creates equality - it's for the mum just as much as the dad, so she can now get a bit of her life back earlier.
I took 3 months leave (wish it was more) when my daughter was born, spread out through the year a month at a time. I loved each month for different reasons and I know each month helped me understand what my wife was dealing with better and the slog of looking after a baby as well as the fun bits, and it helped her understand me better too - she really missed our daughter when she did a month's work and saw how going to work every day wasn't such great a holiday from childcare as she thought!
These policies have definitively contributed to a big social change. And while it looks on the surface like this is about "fairness for dad", on a macro level the changes mostly benefit women who want to both have kids and a career.
It's no longer a bigger risk for companies to hire late 20-s women compared to late 20-s men - both will go on leave if they get kids.
At my job, I also see way more dads staying home with sick kids or going to "planning day" or similar, compared to when I was growing up.
Maybe. As a new father, though, back to the office from parental leave, I'm not pumping breast milk in the lactation room. 3 times per work day, ~40-45 minutes a pop. This is something my wife is actively dealing with today and it causes her a lot of stress, due to the fact that she's essentially MIA on the job despite the fact that everyone is aware of what's going on and she has full support. The perception that she's not pulling her weight is potentially there, and she struggles with it herself because she also feels like she isn't pulling her weight. It's all really complicated and we'll never truly have equality here, I don't think.
> It's no longer a bigger risk for companies to hire late 20-s women compared to late 20-s men - both will go on leave if they get kids
True. But now it is a risk to hire people in certain age groups in general. Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?
Surely whether it's "their most economically productive age" would depend heavily on how many children they have and how much parental leave they are allowed.
We know that people in most developed countries aren't even hitting replacement rate, so I don't think that 6 months of leave is going to break the bank.
In my experience, employees who are bad employees and blame it on time commitment to their children have usually been bad employees to begin with. I have a child, spend upwards of 4 hours a day with them on average, and work at a FAANG, while hitting promotion tracks more quickly than my colleagues without children. I know a bunch of people doing the same.
> Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?
Not for a good company. I've had several employees go on maternity and paternity leave. I've given them respect, and time, and money, in order to make this time of their lives as unstressful as possible.
I've done it because it's the right thing, but these people remember being treated well. They've come back to work and done very well. They feel safer knowing that their day job explicitly supports their families.
The time someone needs off work to care for a new family is a drop in the bucket compared with a whole career, or even a few good years spent at one company. Optimize for the humans, and for the long term.
So you had good people that you wanted to get back? Great. A lot of us employ people who are just average and cannot afford to pay them multiple thousands while they are on leave, paying someone else to cover them, and then they could always decide to leave anyway.
Or you have a small business. Not every company is a 10,000 headcount multinational. Over 90% of small business employ fewer than 20 people and small businesses make up 30% of the economy.
Realistically, 1 person missing from a small business can mean 10% of their workforce is gone - and due to the size of the company they may not have people to cover the missing staff.
There's plenty of small business owners who are perfectly capable of managing the risk of losing staff for whatever reason without it sinking the company. Many business run at a big loss when starting up, never mind razor thin margins. The ones that survive manage their investors, debts, cashflow and staff risk properly.
If you run a business on the assumption that you're going to have all your current employees working for you continuously for the foreseeable future, you're going to have a bad time.
It would at least least disperse the risk from "don't hire women of a certain age" to "don't hire people of a certain age" which I think is a win on the margin.
* Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?*
No. The only real way to avoid this is to just not hire folks who can birth or father children. You'd be mostly safe hiring folks over 45 (Though men over 45 would be more risky than women). This probably isn't a good strategy for an employer.
Marriage doesn't lend itself to children: Having sex does. Having a stable relationship does. Adoption does. On the other hand, lots of married folks don't have children, on purpose or by circumstance. There is no real way to sort folks out.
I think it also establishes a connection between the dad and the kids that makes the dad a better parent down the road. At least spending a lot of time with my infants did change me enough to be a much better parent for the rest of the journey.
I very much agree with this. Having an extended amount of time where I was 100% responsible for my daughter made me feel very different compared to the time spent jointly looking after her. I hope it's made me a better parent.
Absolutely - and I love the change, in case that wasn't clear.
But I think the motivation was about equality for the sexes - and specifically, making it easier for women to work. The rest is just a bonus. A very nice bonus.
I'm a dad in Norway too, and I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Getting on with their life? It's the time with your kids that's the bit of the life that's more valuable.
Likewise, trying to measure how beneficial it is for the kids sort of misses the point. I'm sure it can be beneficial, but whether they draw lasting benefits from it or not, they value it there and then.
You do get deeply attuned to your babies as a parent - at least, we did. You got uncannily good at guessing what they want, what they feel, from practice and from the biological connection that they are like you in so many subtle ways most people aren't. And of course, two parents will understand their babies in slightly different ways. They're very capable of appreciating this.
I'm an American who received several months of paid paternity leave when each my children were born (my company is an exception to the rule here in the US). It's not just about the child that is born, it's about your partner as well as your other children. The introduction of a new child is a huge shift for everyone in a family and being there to support your partner during that time makes a huge difference if you spend that time well.
But the biggest benefit of all was in the lives of my older children. When a new baby comes along, their mother is almost entirely occupied caring for the newborn (my wife wanted to exclusively breastfeed our children, so that is a lot of why it played out this way), so having me there to spend time with them each day during those first few months and take them places and reinforce the fact that they are loved just as much as ever was immensely important. I've seen so many older siblings change, develop resentment, begin misbehaving during that transition period. My kids all handled it extremely well and I think I played a role in that.
I sincerely believe every father should have paid time off when a child is born. It's not about one person in the family, it's about how the entire process of bringing a new person into the home affects everyone.
In Norway we get the paternity leave after the mother goes back to work. It is just the man for 4 months. When baby gets sick/teeths then it must be the man that is there with baby 24/7. You are describing a support role. The Norwegian model forces the father into the primary role.
But the biggest benefit of all was in the lives of my older children.
That's how it seemed to me, too. When my second child was born, I was working for Facebook so I got a nice chunk of paternity leave. My wife was breastfeeding, so she was basically with the baby all the time. The most helpful use of my time often wasn't to be the second parent in the same room as the baby, it was to go do something else with our 2-year-old so that he could still do fun stuff that the baby wasn't ready for, and so that at least my wife only had to deal with one kid at a time.
I think you miss the biggest point. This will have a significant impact on the wages of women. As suddenly women are not longer at a disadvantage when companies need to decide who to hire for a certain position.
That's only true if men actually take the leave, which in a large percentage of cases is not going to happen. The unspoken truth about leave is, you can forget about that promotion you were angling for if you take a couple of months of leave, for whatever reason. So men by and large won't take it, especially when they find themselves under pressure to earn more and provide. I did take my 6 weeks in the US though when we had our son 16 years ago, but only because he wouldn't sleep and the first few months were very rough, so career plans were put on hold.
Also, women will still leave the workplace in droves to care for newborns and the young. That's just what a lot of them prefer to do, and I think it's the right ordering of priorities, for both parents. There's really no way to properly rear young children if both parents have full-time jobs and actually try to advance their careers at the same time.
That having been said, I'm glad this is being introduced. In difficult cases like ours, for instance, this would have been huge help, for reasons not entirely related to work.
A man and a woman can decide that whats best for them is that he not take leave, but for the benefit other people he should take parental leave.
Even if he enjoys working, even if the mother has decided she wants to stay home, even if they need opportunity that work brings (such as the opportunity to get promotions). Even if there are a hundred reasons for a man to not want to take leave, even if taking leave is worse for him, his partner and child, he must take leave so that other people who he may never meet have an advantage.
Yes, encouraging a few weeks off work is good for the family, but forcing someone to take 7 months off of work is massively disruptive. Not even to speak of the disruption on small businesses, that may not be able to accommodate a person leaving for that period of time. If you run a business of 10 people, a single person is 10% of your workforce, and just due to the size you may not have staff to cover the missing expertise.
Forced long-term paternity leave is a system, that explicitly harms the outcomes of one group (working fathers) to provide benefits to others (working mothers, and non-working people in general).
Who is sneering? You can take 2 months off, you can take 2 years off. Take time off for children, sickness, holidays. Its none of my business.
What I am against is the government enforcing someone who must take time off from work, that may not be in their best interests.
I support your right to chose to take time off, and I support your right to not take time off too. I don't support the government telling you, you must take 7 months off at the cost of your career, because you taking time off helps others.
This big point and the big point that you can also be there for you partner. And the big point that you might, as a father, develop a tighter bond with the kid then you would otherwise.
I think you're right in that women's disadvantage decreases, but I don't think it vanishes entirely. As an example, consider the problems many women experience during pregnancy, which is likely to affect their performance at work.
Not to downplay the importance of your fathering and nurturing your child's passions at all-
My understanding of the research around personality development is that something like 80% (BS statistic I know) of the personality is formed in the first 5 years of development. The early few years are when we get conditioned with the core emotional programming: "I am safe" vs. "I am at risk" - "I am lovable" vs. "I am unlovable." etc. which plays a huge role down the line in lifestyle, relationships, and life in general.
Probably not a big deal whether it's the father or mother at the young age, but having adults around to be available to the emotional needs of the young child seems to be extremely important. Maybe easier to split the "full time job" of parenting in this critical period?
If you want to nerd out, check out "Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self - The Neurobiology of Emotional Development" by Allan Schore
80% of the personality is formed in the first 5 years of development.
There's just a huge difference between a 3-month-old baby, who can't recognize faces yet and spends most of the day sleeping and eating, and a 3-year-old child who is running, jumping, telling stories, making friends, and learning to read. For a 3-month-old baby, I doubt that parents do much more than a random babysitter. For a 3-year-old child, there is a clear difference.
My understanding is that the baby, equipped with only instincts / biological hardware, is hyper-aware of the raw emotional communication of their caregiver.
It's this really raw, basic emotional experience which shapes our "core" understanding of ourselves and the world we live in.
"Healthy" attachment in this early stage comes from the caregiver being able to regulate the emotions of the baby. If the baby doesn't feel connected to the caregiver - such as if when the baby cries they don't receiving loving reassurance of their safety - then they form a dysfunctional template for social attachments and poor emotional regulation ability.
If the random babysitter has consistent and parent-like loving connection with the baby then maybe you're right, but I doubt that's the case.
This is really wrong. My baby already recognised and was soothed by my voice and e.g. quieted in my arms much faster than the grandmother's at 2 months.
Research apparently indicates that being loved in your first year is key to your development.
We hope for "a 3-year-old child who is running, jumping, telling stories, making friends, and learning to read."
It could also be biting, jumping off of tables, hiding poo, poking holes in drywall, poking both ends of the dog, hitting sleeping parents with tools, and learning to scribble in books.
Children are haughty, disdainful, quick to anger, envious, curious, self-seeking, lazy, fickle, timid, intemperate, untruthful, secretive; they laugh and weep readily; the most trivial subjects give them immoderate delight or bitter distress; they wish not to be hurt, but they like hurting others: they are men already. – La Bruyere, Characters (1687)
Hey, good question. My gut says to go reference that book I mentioned and make a guess for you. The author talks about the different stages of attachment and how it affects the forming brain. I'll try when I get home tonight.
I view it from a totally different perspective -- I took 2 months off at the start (and my wife left her job a while before that). Since we had no hired helper (nanny or doula) during that time and had limited grandparents help, it was mostly the 2 of us baby-caring during the first 2 months. It was both rewarding and exhausting, and we both agree that it was the most physically-intense time of our lives, to the point where I don't know how either of us would survive without the other person also being there.
I honestly don't know how parents who have to go back to work do it (especially in a family where one parent goes back to work very soon). There's so much work for the mother that without the father also being there, it seems to me it would create a major rift in the relationship when it comes to understanding what the other person is going through. I theorize that the father not being there (and being at work) during those early months is a foundation of the collapse of a spousal relationship years down the road, for many couples.
I'm guessing that most people have (or create) a support network. Their parents might move closer, they join parenting groups etc. so that there are people to watch the babies, give you help etc.
Of course there are people who don't have that but that is a sad state whether you have children or not.
My wife took her FMLA (unpaid) leave directly after pregnancy, then I took my (company benefit, paid) 16 weeks after that- with a two week overlap so that I was comfortable with all the work necessary. It meant that the kid spent the first half a year of his life with a parent providing care every moment, which was great, something that I am so grateful for, and something that I wish every parent could have an opportunity to have.
While I agree that the benefits of involved parents are most notable for kids at an older age, I think that the effect on the parent is largest at the beginning. Humans don't demonstrate their love by providing care, they provide care that turns into love. It is in the unrequited acts of service like changing diapers, feeding (bottle or breast), and rocking to sleep that build the parents feelings for the kid.
That sounds like a good idea and what I think would be better for everyone. Of course, then it's a case of avoiding the temptation of taking it too early(!) :)
It might not be significant to a baby, but it surely is significant for the mother (presuming dad helps her, and not just sits around the house), and less stressed-out mothers are in turn good for babies and the family in general.
I mean, I also think it's significant for the baby & dad. But even ignoring that.. holy shit does the mother need support.
Maybe some moms don't, maybe they happen to have an easy baby.. have parents closeby to easily help.
But other mothers have a terribly difficult time, post-natal depression.. you name it. Having the dad around for support means everything during that time- I can speak from experience.
I've learned over the last few years that much of the parenting that parents do is far removed anything that can be seen. Anything that you can conclude is a direct function of your influence amounts to a very very low percentage of your actual influence. Not that I disagree with the importance of influence in the later bits, but so much of what a child is learning for the first time is all the subtle stuff you don't realize you're doing. How you and your spouse resolve conflict, and you and the child resolve conflict, and you deal with your own emotions, facial cues, body language, regular language, music taste etc
When kids a smal it is more the parents that enjoy the time with them. One, because it is just simply great. And because the workload caused by small kids is distributed between both parents. Because kids are stress. But yes, once they grow older, time with them gets more fun, simply becasue you can do more with them then just feeding and changing diapers. Which I did, a lot.
Agree. I spent five months home with a small toddler of around a year of age. He did get very attached to me, but let's face it, their needs at that stage are very simple. Actually, I think he got much more out of kindie subsequently, getting to play with and be around other kids and adults much more.
The experience of paternity leave is quite intense. It's not all fun. E.g. long nights when baby is sick or teething and the baby's mum has to go to work the next day so she has to sleep and the long night goes straight into a difficult day.
As someone that thought I spent a lot of time with my baby before starting pappperm it was an awakening - but also a wonderful bonding experience.
Yes time as a baby is important. Dad's shouldn't have to wait until their kids grow up before they get to know them.
Or what about the mother damaged by the birth not able to take care of the baby so the father is doing it all for the first month(s), both day and night?
In a dark humoured way, and beyond the essential need to create an unbreakable bond beyond infant & parent, you can be replaced and better optimised by an iterated Roomba. :)
But with each passing day/year the desire/need to spend time with your kids should grow.
Our kids are teenagers now>
And I agree that it feels like an hour spent with them today provide all of us more value than an hour spent with them as infants/toddlers.
Both are important, but I think I’m less replaceable today than yesterday.
It is so hard to know the effect on the children. But the effect on your spouse of having someone else around to help? The first couple of months are tough!
When we had our first child (in Sweden), we could divide the time (13 months total) freely between the two of us. Then we got some extra money if each of us took more than 30% of that time. I think they stopped with the money bonus, but it was really great for us.
We are now having our second child (now in Norway), and while the father quota is great, they now require the mother to be "in activity" (i.e. working) if the father is to have anything more than his quota. This feels like an unnecessary restriction, which we didn't have in Sweden.
This should be the norm in all of the developed world! As a freelancer I took a self-funded three-month break (it just finished) when our third child was born and it has been amazing. I wish that I'd been in a position to do the same for my other two children too.
Firstly, we're trying hard to close the gender pay gap. Giving fathers the same amount of free time as the mothers goes a long way here.
Secondly, it's fantastic for the father-baby bond and it makes both life and work as a young parent so much easier.
Thirdly, the cost is not large. Businesses are already absorbing the lost productivity caused by the fathers being exhausted. This formalizes it.
> Thirdly, the cost is not large. Businesses are already absorbing the lost productivity caused by the fathers being exhausted. This formalizes it.
In our project management course we learned a rule of thumb that for new parents you have ~25-30% less FTE available during the first year of the child's life (due to care for sick children, getting sick themselves, being exhausted from lack of sleep etc.)
This seems like a sound argument for avoiding hiring people who might become parents soon. 30% less output for the same amount of pay seems like a bad deal for an employer.
> Thirdly, the cost is not large. Businesses are already absorbing the lost productivity caused by the fathers being exhausted. This formalizes it.
Exactly! And in both Norway and Sweden you can be part time on leave. For some time I had 25% leave, which meant that I was working, but could go early when tired from a long night of baby cries or stay at home one day when my wife needed to get something else done. And this time I will be on 80–90% leave, which means I am at home, but can pass by the office once a week to catch up with my students.
That 90% is ideal! My wife owns a business with > 100 employees, that's basically what she did during her pregnancy leave. Having me home made that possible (or at least easier, she's breastfeeding.. and that takes a crazy effort to get going).
It make sense to have such restriction if the goal is the break the culture that allow/force women to spend time raising the child and allow/force men to spend time at work in order to support the child.
I'm a US male who's 1 month into my 6 months fully-paid paternity leave with our first child.
My wife has roughly 4.5 months between banked PTO and FMLA/disability leave.
I'm sitting at home right now watching/changing/feeding our baby while my wife is out at doctor's appointments taking care of her health. Having the flexibility to practice a modicum of self-care without neglecting the health and happiness of our child has been such a huge boon to our family.
If anyone has any questions about the experience, feel free to ask.
What happens to your responsibilities at work while you are out? And are you totally cut off from work while you are out or are you occasionally responding to mails? Also are you more of an individual contributor or have a leadership role?
I was/am an IC on a medium-sized team. I had a project I was the primary contributor for within that team that I've handed off to my teammates to continue (after writing up documentation and doing some knowledge transfer).
I occasionally log in to read my email to keep up-to-date with happenings among the team, but I haven't needed to respond to anything since I went out.
Our team made an effort in the last year to reduce some of the silo-ization of knowledge and increase our 'lottery factor', and I think those efforts have helped make sure that the team was prepared for one of us going out on leave. At the very least, nobody has called me up saying "hey, your systems are on fire!", so that's been nice.
It's been a pretty amazing workplace benefit to have. My wife and I remark to each other on a daily basis about how lucky we are to be able to be home together to take care of the baby. We're planning on having at least one more child and I can't see myself working for a company that doesn't have a similar leave policy.
If I could afford it, absolutely. In reality, my mortgage and other financial commitments would likely have necessitated me going back to work.
What we likely would have done instead is staggered my wife's medical leave with a shorter chunk of my own PTO rather than both of us being home at the same time, and put the baby into childcare earlier than we're currently planning on doing.
If you dont have the money to take 6 times off, who is giving you the money to do so?
The basic economic question of giving someone money is that you are taking it from someone else. Is it childless employees? Is it taxes? Is it the unemployed?
Your question makes it sound like he's stealing from someone by taking paid time off to be with his child. In reality, the money is coming from a corporation, who presumably has already costed the risk and is willing to accept it.
Moreover money is not zero-sum. The way you talk about it, there's only a finite number of dollars in the US and he's stealing some from someone else. This is not even remotely how our economy works. And frankly that's a crazy idea that could be applied to all kinds of things. For example, by working you're stealing money from your employer who could easily spend that money on himself. How dare you work?
> In reality, the money is coming from a corporation, who presumably has already costed the risk and is willing to accept it.
Then his salary, and the salary of all the employees have been lowered to provide the benefit. That means employees without kids pay for the parents.
> Moreover money is not zero-sum.
A handout is definitely zero-sum. But even if it isn't, the entire benefit of that handout is captured by the receiver, not by the giver. So its an even worse reason for an employer to give parental leave.
Making the claim that parental leave is zero-sum assumes that I'd be working at full productivity for those 6 months, which based on my current sleep schedule even without work obligations, I definitely wouldn't be.
My employer can either pay me for 6 months of work and get a substandard work product while I suffer sleep deprivation, or they can pay me for 6 months of leave and get me back recharged and ready to work at the end of that leave, when my child is sleeping through the night.
Or perhaps they use the benefit to attract better competence? Higher pay vs a more secure work life balance is of course the decision to make here, and seems like op of this thread made a decision. What are you trying to proove?
In my case, I get a paycheck from my employer as usual. I'm not sure how the specifics work; my employer might pay a premium to a private insurance firm and receive reimbursement from the firm when employees go out on leave so that they're not paying salaries of people who aren't working for them. But at any rate, the cost of providing this leave is similar to other non-mandatory benefits provided by a company (like health insurance), which gets rolled into the cost of doing business and likely gets passed on to our customers.
My wife's leave comes from our state's short-term disability insurance program, which I believe draws its funds from state taxes.
In Germany it is the parents who get the leave and they can freely decide who takes the 12 months of it. Even better yet: If they decide to split they get an extra of two months, so 14 in total.
Yeah that's a pattern you see in most places with any kind of shared pool. The father takes a small, frequently the legal minimum time, and the mother takes the rest. Ultimately it kind of makes the most sense because it is the woman that's gone through the most work of giving birth and is a natural food source for the kid but it does perpetuate the issue of women's careers being set back by having a kid.
When they have that much freedom, can you really call it "perpetuating the issue" instead of "doing what they want"? It's not an issue for the women who prefer to do it, or they wouldn't be doing it.
It's not entirely a choice it's socially usually seen as weird for the guy to take more than the minimum or some small portion above that in many of these places. And even if it is a completely free choice (when do those ever exist?) the impact to women's careers extend beyond the setback from leaving the workforce for several months because they're still expected to do more of the labor of child rearing.
edit: To expand ultimately societies and governments need women to have kids, as of now they're the only ones who can after all so I think eliminating as many downsides as possible to that is something that should be done.
It's an issue for everyone. When you can expect any younger woman to suddenly take a year off they become a larger hiring risk compared to men. Equalizing the parental leave time changes things also for those without children.
In the new system in Finland, both parents get 6.6 months, of which they can give up to 69 days to the other parent. But in other words we can also say that both parents get 4.3 months, and then there is 4.6 months that they can divide between themselves.
In Czechia, there is similar approach to paid parental leave, but it is up to 36 months.
I think that this is much better to left it to parents to decide how to split that based on their personal preferences, than to force equal split in all cases.
Generally, the parents work in different places of course.
As parental leave is a legal right (not given by the employers), employers simply have to comply with the parents' wishes. In the past employers often frowned upon men taking parental leave, but the younger generation has absolutely normalized this behavior.
It should also be noted that during leave, the government picks up (part of) your regular paycheck - so you don't cost your employer anything while you're not there. (except administration overhead etc)
The parental leave doesn't have to be taken in one block and you can also convert it into 'parental part-time'. A somewhat common pattern that double-earning professional parents choose nowadays that I've seen with some of my team members is something like:
1. simultaneous leave for both partners in the 1-2 months after birth
2. leave of one partner for a few months after that while the other partner works full-time
3. a few months of simultaneous part-time (e.g. 3/days week) where on any given day, one partner is at home
4. full-time work of both partners for a while once the kid is old enough for day-care
5. another month or so of simultaneous parental leave after 1-1.5 years that's used for a vacation.
In the tech worker's paradise that is California, I'm preparing for my generous two weeks of paternity leave. My co-worker, having not been employed at the company for a year yet, is preparing to burn all four days of his vacation time because he's not entitled to paternity leave yet.
As a tech worker in California, your income is triple to that of a Finnish tech worker. You can easily take unpaid time off for your paternity leave, perhaps even quit your job for a year, and still get out ahead.
Tech isn't a carve-out where there are fewer protections from the state. I pointed out that I was a tech worker in California because we normally get better protections than most Americans. In this case, even for the well-protected California tech workers, there are few legal protections, if any. For other Americans it will be just as bad.
If you've been with your company for less than a year, you are legally entitled to zero days of paternity leave and if you take unpaid time off, your job is not protected.
1. Cost of living in the bay area (capital of tech jobs) is a lot higher too. 2. Many companies aren't used to the idea of unpaid time off, and negotiating for one can be difficult. 3. Quitting for a year sounds fine until the end of that year, when the stress of job hunting rises. The interview process for most tech companies, even in 2020, is obnoxious at best, and you could be a rockstar engineer and still have trouble landing a job offer for months if luck is not on your side.
There are a lot of workplaces that will simply not allow someone to take months of unpaid time off work. A woman will be eligible for some medical time off (generally unpaid) - but the father (or non-birthing parent) generally cannot take time. The main exception I see to this in most employee handbooks is time off for adoption.
Now, this is talking in general and not about tech per se, so if someone is really lucky they work at somewhere that doesn't expect them to do work every week to keep their job.
It's hard to be enthusiastic about American labor practices hearing anecdotes like this. I think my quality of life would improve by immigrating to a country that provides the benefits like healthcare and childcare as a right. This is because even though I would likely take a salary cut of over 50%, I would have access to the sorts of intangible life experiences that are difficult or impossible to price. For example, raising my child for the first year of their life, living for another decade.
Spain is progressively doing this. Starting 2021, men and women will have the paid same parental leave of 16 + 2 weeks (non-transferable).
The main reason is fight against the discrimination from employers who think hiring women is inconvenient because they can go on parental leave for very long.
Good job Finland! Fellow Nordic here (Norwegian) and a dad. The father quota here in Norway made a huge social change. It really helped make it socially acceptable for dads to spend more time with their children.
I noticed for my two sons how much of a difference it makes being around your kids when they are young. You cannot cannot substitute short time with "quality time." The amount of time you are there matters a lot to small kids.
I think it is healthy for children to have both a mother and father who is actively present in their lives. You need a gender equality oriented society for that. If women are offered poor pay and opportunities it encourages women to stay home the whole time while men do all the work. That is bad for both parties. Men see little of their kids and kids don't get the experience with dad that they benefit from.
Meanwhile the mother may get a lot more time with the kids but she also suffers from having no career or independence. The relationship also suffers as one does not have a work life experience and child caring experience to share and talk about.
"Globally, paternity leave can increase fathers’ involvement within families and this has benefits for the children, the co-parent, the father himself, the economy and society."
It's definitely good for the dads. Quality time with my baby is huge; I can tell how she is bonding with me with each moment we spend together, and I despair that I don't get these extended leaves the Finns have.
I clap back hard on that when people do it to me. No, I am not babysitting, I'm parenting. Thankfully, it seems to be happening less and less over time.
> I think it is healthy for children to have both a mother and father who is actively present in their lives.
Not sure how literally this was meant (and a lot of the rest of the thread assuming a mother/father) but studies show kids do just as well with two parents of any gender.
Inclusion is as simple as saying "parents" instead of "mother and father." If you'll read my post again you'll see the wording did include those groups. Maybe examine why you have such a violent knee jerk reaction to these groups being mentioned.
My comment was far from "violent" and knee jerk and had nothing to do with the groups in question. It was a parody of the woke virtue signalling that is trying to shame others for every possible perceived slight no matter the rarity of the edge case.
At least 5 percent of the population is not a super rare edge case, and even if it was people who are edge cases still deserve recognition. Nobody was getting shamed either, it was just a consideration. If we had it your way we'd all be perpetually censored from bringing anything up that didn't immediately pertain to 99% of people. When someone says a wheelchair ramp should be built somewhere is your response that they should stop virtue signalling about edge cases and shaming the "normal" people, or is this response reserved for LGBT concerns?
Please cite the studies. It seems at least impossible that babies of a male-male couple could do as well as those where the baby is raised by its biological mother even only because of the advantages of breastfeeding.
Please cite the studies on breastfeeding. Most show very little long term benefit (meaning, excluding upset stomachs in the first year of life and similar).
Such newspaper articles are of limited use because they don't cite the studies they refer to. No one's gonna buy the author's book to verify her statements.
You also have to consider that women are sometimes bullied into breastfeeding even when it's very hard for them and that is the author's main message. Otherwise she still thinks that "breast is best": "Breastfeeding seems to improve digestion in the first year, lowers rashes for infants and is especially important for preterm babies. It also seems likely that it has some impact on reducing ear infections in young children and lowers the risk of breast cancer for the mother."
That was not at all as conclusive as I was expecting, for several reasons:
* it's study not studies
* it refers strictly to educational performance
* it's likely detecting something else entirely: "The researchers found that same-sex parents are often wealthier, older and more educated than the typical different-sex couple. Same-sex couples often have to use expensive fertility treatments to have a child, meaning they are very motivated to become parents and tend to have a high level of wealth. This is likely to be a key reason their children perform well in school, the economists found" [...] "When the economists controlled for income and wealth, there were a much smaller gap between the test scores of children of same-sex parents and children different-sex parents, although children of homosexual couples still had slightly higher scores."
This has turned into a time sink with no upside for me. I've looked at some of the articles you posted which are pretty low quality. They seem more concerned about winning some USA-only political points than discussing the topic in an objective manner.
If you're making the effort of linking to studies that support a specific statement, please link to the actual studies and not opinion articles about them.
In any case, I would not expect kids with same sex parents to do worse in school or have noticeable psychological issues, which is what these studies were looking for - these are pretty heavy issues after all.
But I would expect that they are slightly worse for subtler reasons: maybe they're a bit more prone to infections in the first years because they weren't breast-fed, maybe they're distressed in school because they're being subtly bullied (mentioned in one article, btw) and so on. Remember that the original claim was "they're no worse", not that they're not much worse. I agree that they're probably not much worse, but a male-female couple has thousands and thousands of years of social support and nature on its side. Of course it's going to be in some ways better.
Yeah the system where parents can split the time sounds great but it kind of inevitably winds up with woman taking that majority of the time because ultimately it really makes sense if you have a zero-sum amount of hours to share for the woman to take most of it because she is the natural food source for the kid and has gone through the actual trauma of giving birth and ideally gets time to recover from that.
> I noticed for my two sons how much of a difference it makes being around your kids when they are young. You cannot cannot substitute short time with "quality time." The amount of time you are there matters a lot to small kids.
I agree as well, but not so much in the ages of 0-6 months. The biggest bonding for me when I was on parental leave was definitely with my older children, who I was now the primary caregiver. That time was really special and meaningful to all of us.
Don’t get me wrong. I love holding my new born, but (for me) it wasn’t the same type of bonding experience.
> The father quota here in Norway made a huge social change. It really helped make it socially acceptable for dads to spend more time with their children.
If the parental leave policy were taken away, would parents take more or less time to spend with their kids than before the policy took place?
Independence is the most important value in Norway. So probably one reason I mention it ;-) We value the independence of everyone. Independence of young people to make their own choices. Independence of women to marry or divorce regardless of what she wants.
> What is so wrong with being dependent on your spouse when raising children together that it should even come up as a consideration?
Seems obviously bad to me. Should your spouse leave you or die, and you are totally dependent on him, that would suck. But that was not really what I was thinking of but rather the ability to be financially independent later in life because you actually had a career.
> Raising children well is hard enough and time consuming enough as it is. Why try to make it harder by also trying to make sure neither parent is dependent on the other?
I think you misunderstand what I said, or thing about this in a very different way from me.
With the system we have in Norway with leave for both parents and both parents having a career, we are able help each other out MORE! Child raising is LESS work for my wife because I can help her out. Meanwhile I would have less stressful work life because my wife also has a job and can help out the family financially.
It seems to me like we are making life easier for both of us. It is hard for me to grasp how you conclude that this will make things harder.
Your logic seems to be that depriving my wife of any career or financial security she is forced to stay with me. That is some pretty screwed up logic. I want my wife to be with me because she wants to not because she cannot survive without me.
And for children it is better. I know what Norway was like in the old days where the mom stayed home and the dad worked. By not involving the dad, and only have him provide financial security, a lot of men back in old Norway were big assholes. They ran away from their family responsibilities.
You don't see modern Norwegian dads do this. Families may be divorced but dads still participate in child raring. They have been their from the start and child raring is seen as a shared responsibility. There are a lot more divorced families in modern Norway but there are a lot more dads taking responsibility and looking after their kids.
They take turns through the week picking up kids at school. They stay part of the week with their dad. It means mom gets more spare time to live her life. And ultimately you get happier families because people live together because they want to, not because they have to.
>Should your spouse leave you or die, and you are totally dependent on him, that would suck.
A) Don't have children with someone that is going to leave you, B) life insurance.
>But that was not really what I was thinking of but rather the ability to be financially independent later in life because you actually had a career.
Why is that desirable? Would society not be a better place if many more people were dedicated to helping their communities rather than making money for corporations?
>With the system we have in Norway with leave for both parents
To be clear, I'm not opposed to the idea of family leave for fathers.
>Your logic seems to be that depriving my wife of any career or financial security she is forced to stay with me.
Choosing to marry someone and have children with them is a permanent choice, and one that should not be done flippantly if you want what is best for your children. I don't understand why you think it is beneficial to optimize for enabling spouses to divorce. It seems to me that it would be a better idea to optimize for having people marry and have children with someone that they are very unlikely to want to divorce later.
>I want my wife to be with me because she wants to not because she cannot survive without me.
If you want what is best for your children, you should pick a spouse that would not consider divorce except in the most extreme circumstances, and you yourself should not consider divorce except in the most extreme circumstances.
>And for children it is better.
It sounds like what really changed in Norway is that fathers have changed their attitude toward child rearing. That, I think, is unambiguously positive for children, but seems to me to be entirely orthogonal to having both parents be independent. Parents can be sole financial providers and still take a very active role in raising the children. That is more about the attitude of the parent than anything. If you believe it is not your job to rear children, you are going to do it poorly whether you work 60 hours per week or 0.
A society where fathers are used to and expected to participate more actively in child raring will also care more about their children IMHO. Such a society is hard to build without gender equality and independence for women.
I don’t see low divorce numbers as a direct goal. I view happy families as the goal. Lower divorce numbers will follow from that.
If you optimize for low divorce numbers you simply force women to stay in unhappy marriages.
You seem to advocate a sort of 1950s style family life. I don’t think that is good for anyone.
>A society where fathers are used to and expected to participate more actively in child raring will also care more about their children IMHO. Such a society is hard to build without gender equality and independence for women.
I don't see why that should be so. Men need to think that it's important for their children's growth for them to be heavily involved in raising them, but I don't see why that should necessitate women being financially independent or achieving "gender equality", whatever that means. For example, if men believe that there are some critical aspects of child raising that simply cannot be done correctly by women, I think men would take a more active role in order to make sure they're able to provide their needed input, but I would guess those sorts of beliefs are contrary to "gender equality". I could actually see it making things worse to tell men that women are as capable of all aspects of child rearing as are men, because then why can't the woman just do it all?
>I don’t see low divorce numbers as a direct goal.
I don't either. The goal is a stable and happy society full of adults who were raised in stable and happy homes. Low divorce numbers are an essential element of achieving that.
>If you optimize for low divorce numbers you simply force women to stay in unhappy marriages.
That depends on how you try to lower the divorce rate, I suppose. If you make divorce a crime punishable by death and change nothing else, ya that's what you're going to end up with. If on the other hand you encourage people to avoid lifestyle choices that are associated with divorce, you will end up with fewer divorces and happier marriages.
>You seem to advocate a sort of 1950s style family life. I don’t think that is good for anyone.
Women reported being happier back then, so it seems like it was good for them at least. Who do you think that wasn't good for, and why?
I agree, I was wondering what kind of incentives governments could create to motivate parents to stay together...
The current systems are not just suboptimal, but actively harmful - they make parents enemies, in case of divorce often one "wins" and the other "loses" (depending on the legal system, either the higher-earning parent wins by not really having to pay any child support, or the lower-earning parent wins by earning huge child support + alimony on top). A better system would penalize both parents, thus motivate them to cooperate to maintain the family unit.
The other issue is, this would have to be balanced out by the fact that sometimes, it's likely better for parents to split/divorce... obviously in case one of them is violent, but even in other cases, they might just not be a good fit, in terms of interests, lifestyle, personality, ... and splitting gives each of them the opportunity to find someone better fitting, and lead happier lives (which should likely carry over to a more positive influence on their kids).
I think shared custody by default does part of this, it keeps both parents in the kids' lives.
Edit: I'm not a lawyer, so my comment "depending on the legal system" above is only based on anecdotal evidence from friends and/or media... the "not having to pay child support" is an example from Slovenia, the "huge child support + alimony" is based on some examples from the US.
I really do not understand the premise of your question. Yes, there is nothing wrong with one of the spouses being a home maker that is dependent on the monetary support of the professional spouse if this is what they want. But to turn your question around, what is so wrong with having other options!?
Of course at the end being in a relationship and having kids is a partnership and people should rely on one another, nobody ever argues against that. But when people want, they should have the option to do it in a new way, especially if that leads to more opportunities and happiness.
I agree that nothing's wrong with making the choice to be a stay at home mother (or father), especially when children are very young and not at school. But as a society we have organised ourselves in such a way that this choice is economically and socially much harder to make than it used to be and in my view much harder to make than it should be.
One of the problems in particular is that it is far too hard for people to come back to the workplace after taking a 5 or 6 year career break to look after children while they're young. People know this and it too often forces them into one of two paths - give up on their career entirely, or go back to work much sooner than they wanted to.
>But as a society we have organised ourselves in such a way that this choice is economically and socially much harder to make than it used to be and in my view much harder to make than it should be.
Sounds to me like we should make a conscious effort to reverse the changes that have been made lately, then, and also take a hard look at the motives of the people that have pushed us in that direction.
>One of the problems in particular is that it is far too hard for people to come back to the workplace after taking a 5 or 6 year career break to look after children while they're young.
I don't see how that is a problem. It takes a lot of work to maintain a desirable society, and I would guess most of it is not done at the behest of a corporation.
The difficulty of coming back from a career break is a problem because it turns something which needn't be a binary or one off choice (stay at home with children vs work) into a binary and irreversible choice. And I'd bet that those who feel forced into that choice choose career over staying at home with their children more often than the other way around as a result.
>And I'd bet that those who feel forced into that choice choose career over staying at home with their children more often than the other way around as a result.
Perhaps, I don't know the numbers, but either way, that is not the way it's always been, and it's clear that many people for a long time have been actively trying to increase the number that pick that option. We should carefully look in to who those people are and what motivates them, and then ask ourselves if we want our people taking their lead.
What is wrong with having other options is that there is a cost associated with maintaining those other options, and the children will be paying it one way or another.
Raising children well is enormously time consuming and difficult. Parents who want to do a good job don't have the luxury of abundant time and energy. Any effort spent maintaining these other options is done at the expense of the children.
This is a generic defeatist premise. Yes, if we do not try to make the world a more pleasant place to live in, the world indeed will not be a more pleasant place. And yes, poor people (and right now even middle class people) do not have the luxury to have the choice I depicted, or many other choices. But it is worthwhile to have our institutions try to change work culture for the better, exactly so that these options become feasible, both for the middle class and for the even less lucky.
Or to rephrase it in your way: there are costs to maintaining these other options, and I am happy to see that there are governments trying (and occasionally succeeding) to pay these costs.
The government can't pay those costs unless you are suggesting some kind of communal child raising situation rather than having children raised by their parents. Raising children well requires a lot of time and effort. I don't think it's defeatist to acknowledge that. If you want to try to improve that, find some way to raise children without needing so much of their parents' time and energy and without sacrificing quality.
- daycare (including fancy stuff like daycare on your work's campus where you can join your kid in between work activitie)s is a great idea that has already been tested
- it is perfectly reasonable for the extended family to help with child-rearing, especially in location where there is a history of that
- It seems crazy to me to suggest we change the ways we raise children, without suggesting changes to the ways careers progress. Even without my hippy suggestions about idealistic version of childcare, a comparatively trivial thing to do is to realign employee and employer incentives. And there are governments that do that successfully. This is why I am calling your comments "defeatist".
Stop projecting your view of the world on everyone: yes, your view is consistent and reasonable, if the homemaker is happy with the arangement, but it is not the only possible way to have a healthy family.
Daycare, the act of handing your infants and toddlers over to minimum wage workers who do not care about your children on an individual basis and who are also supposed to be taking care of several other children, is not a great idea, or even a good idea. It's a bad idea. For any decent parent, it would be a last resort before giving the children up for adoption.
Yes of course it's great when the extended family can help. That doesn't happen much in the modern world. It would be great if it did though.
>a comparatively trivial thing to do is to realign employee and employer incentives. And there are governments that do that successfully.
What does that mean? I think it's defeatist to want so many people slaving away for corporate masters rather than spending time with their families.
>Stop projecting your view of the world on everyone
I don't know what that means. I'm not going to stop advocating that people make lifestyle choices that I think are best, because as a father of a young child, my child is going to grow up in a world populated by the children that are the result of the lifestyle choices people are making today, and I would prefer for him to be surrounded by people that have been raised as well as possible.
>but it is not the only possible way to have a healthy family.
It is by far the best way to ensure you have a healthy family that we know of.
I do not know where you are coming from, but our surroundings must be extremely different. This is why I am saying you should not project your assumptions on everyone.
Why do you assume that daycare staff are minimal wage workers as opposed to well paid professionals that know more about intellectual enrichment and child psychology than the average parent?
Why are you assuming a career means "slaving away for corporate masters" as opposed to a myriad of ways one can work to enrich the world around them while at the same time being paid (academia, small business, art/design work, community work, the vast majority of lifestyle business, social purpose work, solving intellectually interesting technical problems, etc)? There are people that love their creative jobs, and we should not pretend they are unicorns or that they have to sacrifice their child's upbringing.
What you describe sounds borderline selfish to me. I get you are trying to suggest something good, but a person can make the world better (and even be paid for it) without compromising how much they care for their child.
Maybe I am talking like that because I am privileged and have an easy life. But then why not advocate that our communities try to make more people's lives easier?
>Why do you assume that daycare staff are minimal wage workers as opposed to well paid professionals that know more about intellectual enrichment and child psychology than the average parent?
I didn't assume it, I looked up what they tend to get paid and what qualifications are typically required to have that job. They tend to get paid around minimum wage, and they typically only need a high school diploma.
>Why are you assuming a career means "slaving away for corporate masters" as opposed to a myriad of ways one can work to enrich the world around them while at the same time being paid (academia, small business, art/design work, community work, the vast majority of lifestyle business, social purpose work, solving intellectually interesting technical problems, etc)?
Because that's what most people do.
>There are people that love their creative jobs, and we should not pretend they are unicorns or that they have to sacrifice their child's upbringing.
I'm sure there are some people like that, but the vast majority of children do not have two parents that fit in that category.
>What you describe sounds borderline selfish to me.
It is explicitly so.
>I get you are trying to suggest something good, but a person can make the world better (and even be paid for it) without compromising how much they care for their child.
Maybe some can. Most people aren't going to make the world better through their corporate job, and are going to compromise on how much care they give their children in order to do it. It doesn't make much sense to set society's expectations so that they only really work for exceptional people. They will do fine. They need to work for regular people.
>But then why not advocate that our communities try to make more people's lives easier?
I do advocate that. Raising children well so that they are not a problem for other people later in life is part of it. Encouraging stay at home parents to work to build their community once their children are old enough not to need full time care, rather than going back to being a corporate drone, is another thing I advocate.
If you want both parents to be independent, then (for the vast majority of people who are not very wealthy) of course both need to be employed or able to quickly become employed. Do you need a source for that?
Both of those take time, and that's time taken away from the children, which parents do not have in abundance. Do you need a source for that?
> both need to be employed or able to quickly become employed
Not particularly 'quickly', really.
Keeping it so both parents are able to be employed only requires corporate culture changes, and minor ones at that. The cost is very small and does not hurt children.
Most people don't have enough in savings to last more than half of a year without a job. I'd call that "quickly".
You could try to stop corporations from preferentially hiring people who have recent relevant experience, but I am not going to hold my breath on that.
A preference is fine, if it's in proportion to how much experience from the last couple years is actually worth over experience from 7 years ago. So maybe $5k less in initial salary.
The preference for someone having zero gaps in employment is extremely overrated, and giving many more people gaps in employment to disrupt that idea is great.
New Zealand is currently at 22, but moving to 26 weeks paid parental leave for babies born from July 1, 2020.
The paid parental leave is up to the parents to decide the split between them.
I think it is a great idea for fathers to be encouraged more to take a share of the paid parental leave.
This could go some small way in helping remedy income disparity between genders.
I was deployed and/or travelling a lot when our boys were young.
Another poster questioned the value of time with infants as opposed to when they are older.
I do think bonding with infants and toddlers is super important for both parent and child.
But it can also feel like a robotic and laborious grind.
As my boys enter high school, I most enjoy our ritualised time together during daily school drop offs and pick ups.
Engaging with them, guiding them on their own journey, and observing how far they have come.
I have few regrets, but one of them is not spending more time wth my kids when they were younger, which probably feeds the extra effort in recent years to spend more time with them as they grow into young men.
You can’t get time back. Make the most of every minute.
Another step towards equality pay (so the risk of moms and dads leaving on parental is the same).
This is not obvious, but after you think about it it makes a lot of sense.
> Neighbouring Sweden has Europe's most generous system of parental leave with 240 days each after a baby's birth
That's working days or what? In Latvia (Estonia neighbour) you may get 12 months (60% of money calculated from amount BEFORE taxes) or 18 months (43,75%). And dad can leave, too.
I'm glad this exists. When I had my kids I worked white collar jobs for large wealthy corporations, and I got exactly zero days each time. This attitude change is a step in the right direction. The problem is the people who in my opinion who need this the most (the working classes) are the ones least likely to get it (at least here in America).
With the current direction of US politics, as a US citizen, I find myself increasingly entertaining the thought of becoming an ex-pat.
Top countries I've thought about have been the Nordic countries - Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, Iceland and have considered the Netherlands as well.
They seem to have reasonable blended economies with social policies that make (more) sense.
No country/systems is perfect and I'm always willing to try something new for a time.
I am in the same boat (pun intended). Just the cost of delivery without complications (>$10,000 on average in the US [0]) makes the prospect of having a child in a country with socialized healthcare economically sensible. Think of how much that $10,000 could be worth if invested in the stock market instead of in a healthcare plan's yearly revenue.
Submitter here. I'm a British chap living in the Netherlands. You might want to read my comment [1] about what happens after you have a baby over here; it triggered quite a lot of discussion...
It's months. Amazing for employees and terrifying for employers. Someone I know took a new job somewhere, only to let them know a week or so after being there that his wife was about to have their child and he was going to be gone for the next 14 months.
They were not going to be able to fire him without repercussions. He was not required to let them know during the interview.
They just employed someone for a full time job because they needed to spend €x on someone to do Y work
Now they don't have to pay that money, which is fine, but they then need to find someone on a 14 month contract that will do it for the same salary as the person they just employed.
Then at the end of it they are left with paying an overlap from the contractor to someone new
First, a little nitpicking: one of the parents can take at most 12 months off, so there is no "14 month contract".
Second, the whole thing can be way more complex. In Germany a mother has her job secured for the moment she announces to be pregnant to until the child is 3 years old. So one could decide that will take the Elterngeld for 12 months but actually just go back to work 18 months, and the employer has no way of stopping it.
Third and final point: NONE OF THIS MATTERS! Trying to find the "fairness" in this is nothing but some incredibly naive exercise. Like most things in life, salaries are not determined by the amount of value produced but rather by market value of labor. Risks when dealing with labor force should be already priced in.
Sure, and the policy is good, but there is still an impact on the company. Most situations that will be a large company which can easily cope, but in small companies struggling to survive is can have an locally detrimental effect (despite the company benefiting from the policy as a whole)
What makes you think that the small companies are struggling to survive? And from all of the policies in Germany that exist to "protect" the employees (minimum wage, employer share of pension contribution, health insurance, etc) what makes you think that this particular policy deserves such special concern?
You can hire a replacement on a 14-month contract.
If your company can deal with an employee getting hit by a bus / winning the lottery and quitting, then it can deal with an employee taking maternity/paternity leave.
Noone is demanding that. If the company can't get it done without the person taking parental leave they simply have to sink or swim.
Like with any other law regulating worker benefits and worker safety. But companies know that starting out and have to plan and act accordingly. That's the cost of doing business.
It's only the "cost of doing business" because of man made arbitrary laws. It doesn't have to be the cost of doing business. Why do you claim "noone is demanding that", when in the next sentence you just shrug it off as "they'll just have to sink, whatever". If the alternative for the business is to go out of business, it is "demanding".
Businesses are not at fault for their employees getting pregnant, so why should they have to shoulder the risk? If society wants to protect mothers, society should pay up, not the individual businesses.
Are you saying people shouldn't run childcare facilities? Or only huge childcare facilities are allowed, which certainly wasn't the intention of the laws for maternal leave?
> If the alternative for the business is to go out of business, it is "demanding".
Then don't hire employees in a region/country that has good employee protection laws/regulations. If businesses want to operate in such a region/country they will have to comply with ALL the laws and regulations there. If they don't, they should operate in a (in this respect at least) third-world country like the US.
> Businesses are not at fault for their employees getting pregnant, so why should they have to shoulder the risk?
Reproduction is integral to society. I businesses don't want to have that "risk" they should only hire people old enough that they can be sure they're barren/impotent but then they're discriminating in their hiring process AND get employees that are already relatively close to retirement (i.e. not a good idea).
> If society wants to protect mothers, society should pay up, not the individual businesses.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave#Europe_and_Cent... -> Germany since it would to me if I had children. 14 weeks maternity leave with full pay, 14 months parental leave with up to 67% or the maximum (1800€ per month according §2 (1) BEEG) specified by the law. In Germany this monetary responsibility is mixed (social security AND employer).
> Are you saying people shouldn't run childcare facilities? Or only huge childcare facilities are allowed, which certainly wasn't the intention of the laws for maternal leave?
???, this was never part of my argument. Going back to your comment I originally replied to, many many businesses and branches of business have difficulty hiring people but that doesn't really matter here.
"Then don't hire employees in a region/country that has good employee protection laws/regulations."
Not very practical for childcare facilities?
" If businesses want to operate in such a region/country they will have to comply with ALL the laws and regulations there"
The point is that laws can be changed. Here in Germany especially, we are very aware that laws are not automatically good. We went through this period of time where a lot of bad laws were in place.
"they should only hire people old enough that they can be sure they're barren/impotent"
Or, you know, men? Which is exactly what the feminists governments want to avoid, but they bring it about with their paternity laws. Also, what you suggest is technically illegal in most Western countries (discrimination).
Sorry, but I get the impression you haven't really thought much about these issues yet.
"14 months parental leave with up to 67% or the maximum"
Yes, the government pays mothers, but it doesn't compensate businesses for the losses they incur when women they hired leave for motherhood. They just have "punishing" laws like the job position has to be kept open in case the mother wants to return. That is a punishment for businesses, who are not at fault for women having children.
"this was never part of my argument."
You just dismiss it if certain types of businesses struggle. I explicitly mentioned childcare facilities because I have experienced the problem firsthand.
The point is that laws can have unintended consequences. And those don't go away by simply saying "the business should just go bankrupt or operate in another country".
"many many businesses and branches of business have difficulty hiring people but that doesn't really matter here."
Of course it matters, it means the cost of hiring women is even higher, because replacing them is expensive.
What about the case where the guy leaves because is cool in software engineering to change jobs very often? or because now language X is cool and the guy wants to add that on the CV and not your old boring language Y.
In any case your employee can leave so make sure you are not dead because most of the value is in this person head. Though you might as always make a counter offer and pay him much more if he is so valuable.
In Norway you also don't have to pay their salary... Makes hiring a fixed term replacement a little easier and often the replacement turns out to be a good fit and if you want to grow you now have a four person company.
14 months, but it is a little bit more complicated than what OP implies.
The mother gets 14 weeks (6 weeks before due date, 8 after) that is the "proper" leave and is mandatory for the mother.
After that, one or both parents can choose to take a leave where the government pays you 2/3 of your net salary, capped at 2000 EUR. If only one parent takes then it is limited to 12 month and it is extend to 14 months in case both parents decided to take it.
In my opinion, the best protection is to have valuable skills. I personally see no good reason for employment protection. I live in Germany, however, as a freelancer I get no protection at all. Why do some people deserve it, and others don't? What makes an "employee"?
I can understand having to "insure" against the risk of becoming too specialized. Like if you work for one company for years or decades, it might be difficult to find employment elsewhere. However, that insurance should be factored into the contracts "employees" are willing to accept. Likewise as a freelancer, I have to ask for a certain minimum amount of money to cover my risks.
Even for employees the protection might have downsides. They are stuck with inefficient coworkers who can't be fired.If you are young, you'll have to leave before people who are older. And employees might stick to jobs where they are not doing their best for too long. And overall, creation of business is hampered, which hurts everybody.
Never fail to mark a net gain for humanity as financially ineffective obstacle. You know there exist some middle ground between dysfunctional socialism and brutal capitalism? Those places are comparably a paradise for common folks like most of us.
To be treated with respect like a human being and having overall a good life is still a privilege in 21st century.
> You know there exist some middle ground between dysfunctional socialism and brutal capitalism?
This is so far from the point of my comment, it really illustrates how people will view and comment based on the their preconceptions and worldviews before any attempt at rational thought.
I am not saying that the social program is bad. What I did try to point out is that there is no real "giving" of anything. That is all. We cool?
What do you mean by "taking double in taxes"? Yes, parents also pay taxes, although usually less than single people because of the "split income". It is still a net transfer of money from single people to parents. (Not only for parental leave, also schools for example, or even free childcare in many places).
I mean that literally. OP said that the govt pays up to 20000 EUR in Elterngeld, and I can show you tax returns where I paid almost double that in a single year.
I don't get what is so difficult or controversial about my statement here. Whether Elterngeld or "free" childcare, there is no "giving" by the government of anything, that is all.
I don't understand your logic. You would have paid those high taxes regardless of Elterngeld. You didn't pay those high taxes because you received Elterngeld. Therefore, if you receive Elterngeld, you receive it from other people.
Yes, the government doesn't "give" money, it redistributes it. Some other people are paying for your Elterngeld. Even if in your head you assume that it is paid from the taxes you paid, the money you received for Elterngeld is now missing for other things, they are a loss for the rest of society.
I think we are in agreement for most of the things. I am glad to see we agree that the money from the Govt is not "given" to the people. This was the point of my first comment.
I just want to disabuse you from this idea you seem to hold that the money I received is from "other people".
It is not. It is from the Government. Sure it was taken from all of society via taxes, but once it is taken it is no longer yours or mine to determine what to do with it.
There is no point in trying to argue who-paid-for-what in this redistribution made by the Government. If there were a choice for tax payers to say where they want their taxes to go, sure let's go and talk about "Who is paying for my wife's Elterngeld". But there is no such rational and efficient resource allocation method in any Big Welfare State, is there? There is no way to pull apart who is "me and my family" and who is "the rest of society", is there?
There is just - like you said - one big redistribution of wealth driven by bureaucrats who are (allegedly) working in the best interests of the people. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
I think you can certainly say that some people benefit more than others from the "redistribution", even if you don't account for every single spending. There are certainly people who pay more than they receive.
In the case of family support, it is clear the non-parents receive less than parents. If there are no things (or fewer) things that non-parents benefit from that parents don't benefit from, then it is a net loss for non-parents. (Non-parents could for example benefit more from government sponsored care of the elderly, which might in part be taken care off by children of parents).
I don't want to keep repeating myself, but it seems you are either venting your frustration for feeling like you are not getting back what you put in (you probably aren't) or completely missing the point of what I was saying up-thread.
So, let me try different words: of course this redistribution is uneven. The point of socio-political programs is never to be "fair", no matter how much they say it is. So stop worrying about it.
No. My comment was just an ironic way of saying that there is nothing "given" by and from the Government. Whatever is "given" is actually taken from someone else and redistributed. I thought that was clear already.
I’m curious what what happen if someone wanted to have ten kids and abused this system, and the mother didn’t work.
At a gut I feel like I’d be less likely to have kids, not more, if I felt like I was burdening other people by accepting benefits like this. I have no worries as an American having as many kids as I want because I make a good salary, can afford them, and won’t take more than a weeks, maybe two weeks time off, as my wife, despite being just as qualified for software engineering as me, wants to stay at home and raise children. Heck, I won’t even be “overburdening” the school system as my wife is home schooling them, despite living in a “good” school district.
Being charitable I’d hazard the point of this is to encourage population growth, but I suspect it’s playing out more like “have two kids and that’s as many as you should have”, and any more would introduce strong social pressure to stop.
Maybe it’ll work out that lots more Finns will be born, I’m curious to see how it goes in twenty years.
> I’m curious what what happen if someone wanted to have ten kids and abused this system, and the mother didn’t work.
Don't take this the wrong way, but that is such an American way of thinking. You guys are so preoccupied with thinking about somebody getting something they don't deserve that you forget about thinking about what is good for everybody else.
Consider this, Nordic countries have generous public services in all walks of life. If we applied American logic to Nordic countries we should expect the following outcomes:
1. Nobody works, because unemployment benefits are so generous.
2. Everybody is on never ending education, because education is next to free.
3. Everybody has 10 kids because of long parental leaves.
4. Everybody is sick and unhealthy because nobody cares about their health because hey health care is free.
Of course no Nordic countries is anything like this. We have the highest work participation rate in the world (more than supposedly hard working Japanese). Nordic people are quite healthy and live long. Most people just have 2 kids. The average birth rate is something like 1.7 to 1.8 in Nordics. In other words we are under replacement.
So our system definitely helps getting more kids as countries with less generous services have much lower birth rates. Look e.g. at developed asian countries how terrible their birth rates are. Yet the generous system does not lead to some abundance of kids.
Let us get real. Having kids is a lot of work. I love my kids to bits but I don't want more than two. I also enjoy my work and other things. So does my wife. Why would we want tons of kids? Some weirdos probably do, but so what? Why should not I and other Norwegian benefit from a great system because a couple of oddballs exist than abuse the system?
Put some trust in your fellow man. People are not all selfish and self centered assholes ready to take, take and take whatever they can get their hands on.
It is amazing how Europeans like to make fun of Americans for their supposed ignorance of political matters, yet they manage to boast this kind of non-sense that GP wrote. Elternzeit can be for up to 14 months, but it comes with lots of restrictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22247242 It is not some kind of "cash-for-kids" system that turns wombs into goldmines. Even Kindergeld (~220EUR/month for every child until they are 18) is not really profitable.
As to your gut feel: once you get used to the idea that the Welfare State is something that you can not opt out of and how strong it is at leveling out society, I am sure you wont feel like you are "burdening other people". After I moved here and started leaving 43% of my paycheck to the government, 14% to income-based (not actuarial risk based) health insurance and paying 19% for VAT and seeing how little I was keeping of that "good software engineer income", I started worrying less about my burden and more about how I could get some of my fair share back.
> ...“have two kids and that’s as many as you should have”, and any more would introduce strong social pressure to stop.
I live in Denmark (but I suppose it's somewhat similar in Finland), there is very little social stigma to recieving support from the state.
Because such support is everywhere: child care is supported, parents are given money for each child under 18, when you turn 18 you get educational support, university is free (in fact you get educational support), when graduating you get unemployment support the next month while looking for a job.
I don't think we think of receiving benefits as burdening others, it's more a matter of solidarity. Most people more or less pay off the cost they incur to the state through taxes. So accepting benefits isn't shameful.
Note. it is possible to not get benefits, my little brother said no to educational support during highschool (while he was living at home). It was ~200 USD/month -- but he is a special case, most 18 yearolds do not say no to free money :)
(My little brother later did accept educational support during university ~1k USD / month).
Sweden has an even more generous system and our birth rates are below 2, so... I'm not worried for Finland.
The thing is, kids are damned expensive today. When you are not working, you are forgoing "normal" salary. The mother will get ~80% of the pre-pregnancy salary, up to a limit which is not very high. There are afaik no "virtual salary increases" here, at all. We even have "barnbidrag" and "flerbarnstillägg" meaning you get a small amount of money per month per child, and that amount goes UP with more kids. So if you have 7 kids you get even more money per child than if you would have 2 kids. Still nobody has 7 kids to "make money", because its still a loosing proposition. There is a template about how much a kid costs here until theyre 18, and its about $104,000.
Sure, you could stay at home and being poor for 10 years or so but how much fun is that really? =)
The goal is probably more to reach equal pay/opportunity as opposed to any population growth agenda.
When I was in the EU, I knew a woman who had 4 kids, each ~1/1.5 year appart. So she would have a kid, be out 6 month, go back to work for 6 month, have another kid, rinse and repeat 4 times :) .
It was a total nightmare for her employer because they couldn't let her go, and they couldn't hire anyone permanently to do her job. They could only use short term contractors who would stay 6 months (barely enough time to get up to speed) and then leave. I don't know if she was "abusing" the system, I mean, it was her right by law to do that, but after popping the 4th one she left work to be a stay at home mom. I don't know how well her employer took it :)
Makes sense. Having kids is one thing, but what if she got hit by a bus. You should never be that dependent on any one person. And there are many lines of work where having the employee take some time off helps with making sure that they're doing their work properly and not hiding something. You just have to plan for it.
I don't believe it was that simple. Technically the full time position existed and hiring someone else would have required finding long term budget for another one. It was in a country were firing people is very difficult when they're on a permanent position so when you hire, you have to be sure you can make it work.
Not sure that this was the real intent. Germany was notorious for having many stay at home mothers.
So women had to chose between family and career, which partly explains the low birth rate.
Actually it is still the case because school finishes around 2 pm, so many parents (often the mother) have to work part time because of that.
An indirect consequence maybe a decrease of the gender salary gap, but I doubt this was the main purpose...
Could you imagine if you had a really important job you needed doing and the person you hired pulled this.
Honestly I'd probably "Expand the team" of people doing the job to two, get the not-a-replacement up to speed and just chalk it up to the cost of doing business that people can play the system like this.
Perhaps it makes more sense when viewed from the perspective of the child?
Every child has the right to spend time with their parents. Every child has the right to an education. And so on. You should not be given less parental time just because you were born with nine siblings. It's not your choice.
I believe the "unwashed masses having lots of children and draining the wellfare systems" is a quite popular far right anti-immigration trope. And while that may even be true somewhere, as long as it remains individual cases, the economic impact on society is still net positive as long as those kids get an education and a job.
According to statistics increased education leads to lower number of child births (and later). At least from what I've read.
So it's all connected, free school and good social support.
As a parent you can never make a profit from it anyhow. There are of course people who don't know how to work and actually don't want to contribute. But they are far apart.
Having both parents be economically unproductive for an extended period of time is clearly not a tenable arrangement in the long term. But the long term, in this case, is measured in tens of generations. In the short term, most developed societies are more than wealthy enough to shoulder such a burden. People would still probably get looked at weird for having tons of kids, but that already happens anyway.
Seems a bit bizarre seeing that mothers in most cases will need to spend more time with their babies. After all, there are certain things like breastfeeding that only a mother can do.
Hmm, a quick search tells me that roughly half of all babies are breastfed after 6 months in the US. Seems acceptable to cater for potential needs of half the population (assuming numbers are the same obviously).
I was home with my kid when he turned 1 until he was 1.5 using this system in Sweden. Being a guy, I didn't breastfeed him. Kid still appear functional.
> After all, there are certain things like breastfeeding
Mother's can and do express milk to be fed to babies in bottles; the fact that a baby is on breastmilk doesn't require the mother to be with them 24/7, and formula is a thing that exists.
I would assume that there is some kind of maternal bond, so that it would be best for the mother to primarily be exposed to the newborn at least in the first 6-12 months. I doubt sucking on a plastic bottle would assist with the maternal bond. What do you think?
It does, though. A lot of skin-to-skin contact is vital for new babies. Both parents should have lots of skin-to-skin contact, face time, and direct caregiving exposure with baby.
The method of milk delivery is not as important as being with the baby.
Funny when you are on paternity leave and the with your baby 24seven you develop a similar bond. Oh and babies love bottles nearly as much as breasts. (I think breastfeeding is really important in the first few months important and mine was 100% breastfed until 5 months but towards the end of the first year the benefits in a country with clean drinking water are minimal.)
Formula that adjusts formulation every day by detecting the chemical balance of the baby during nursing does not exist yet (ever? It’s an interesting biology challenge).
I dont think a lot of people claim that the mother isnt most important for, at the very leasy, the first 6 months and up to 12 months. I took my leave at about 14-15 months age, and that was more or less perfect in my mind.
There is pretty much exactly one thing that only a mother can do once the baby has been born, and you just named it.
For many reasons, a mother might not be willing or able to breastfeed her child or to do so exclusively, so you'd need additional feeding arrangements in those situations.
Even if the mother is breastfeeding, in practice she might appreciate being able to express some of her milk and have the father feed the baby sometimes.
Things could be much more even with early years childcare than they are in many places at the moment, and in my experience there are a lot of mothers and a lot of fathers who wish it were so.
I'm not sure what the point of this is, you can post any studies you want but that wont change the fact that plenty of people wont breastfeed for one reason or another
Looks like you guys have reached a deadlock :) It's not all about IQ though. Breastmilk works way better than formula for general health, it helps the baby fight infections and build a good immune system.
I recently read a book by a swedish immunologist on breastfeeding and atleast according to that author that is not really true. Breastmilk does help to fight infections but it does not help to build a good immune system. If anything, the opposite is true since less infections gives the immune system less practice. Some animals can transfer parts of the mothers immune system via breastmilk, humans can not. And even the temporary protection against infections from breastmilk is very limited. If you live in a country without good quality drinking water breastmilk is great though.
>Seems a bit bizarre seeing that mothers in most cases will need to spend more time with their babies
And in those cases the mother needs extreme support. Like a father around to help her out with all the little things constantly and to give her a break.
It seems fairly bizarre that you think caring for a newborn is a 1 person job no problem!
Would make more sense to point out how ridiculously short maternity leave is in many places. Like the US isn't it a couple of weeks or something and not even paid?
I noticed when visiting the US that breastfeeding was not very normal. Like they don't even teach it in a standard hospital.
Finnish moms are getting longer maternity leave than most countries in the world with this system. If other countries can manage with their short maternity leaves, I am sure Finnish mothers can manage too.
I mean I agree with you in principle that moms are needed for longer time than dads, but too often such questions are raised in an a disingenuous fashion to push back against gender equality.
What we do in Norway is that moms get some extra time at work for things like pumping. I believe the first year you get something like 1-2 hours at work for breast feeding.
As a dad I was feeding my child milk which had been pumped earlier.
> I noticed when visiting the US that breastfeeding was not very normal. Like they don't even teach it in a standard hospital.
On the contrary, that was one of the first things they teach after giving birth (apart from diaper changing). They also stressed heavily on the importance of nursing and set us up with a lactation consultant if we needed help in the future.
It's working fine in practice and in my circle of friends almost every father took at least two months off.
Those months can be taken at any time in the first year and normally overlap the mother's parental leave, so the husband can help her and spend time with his baby.
Yes so mom has work of feeding and pumping and dad just gets to feed. Completely unequal
That and half the benefit of breastfeeding comes from direct suckling. I will never understand dads who want to feed their kid so much that they make mom pump. Fathers have been close to their children for millennia before we decided in the last century that they need to feed their newborns too. Its okay if you and mom are not the same... Your baby certainly doesnt see you that way
Wow impressive. In Canada as a Dad I can get, I think, 6 months of paid leave. Although the pay is covered by Employment Insurance and it only covers so much (like 55% of your salary up to $600/wk)
I ended up just taking four weeks vacation for my first kid and it made all the difference. I strongly believe that giving flexible and generous vacation time to all parents/guardians will have a positive impact on society. The challenge is that these impacts are hard to measure with a spreadsheet.
Quebec goes beyond the Canadian norm in this area, though still nowhere near some European countries: https://www.educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/maternity-paternity-a... (EI premiums are lower here, because a separate QPIP payroll deduction funds the more generous paid leave benefits described at this link in lieu of the corresponding federal ones.)
We also have $8.25/child/day government-subsidized daycare.
I worked for a company based in the valley a while back.
They announced their paid parental leave policy one year to much fanfare.
That was handy as we were having my second child.
I filled out the paperwork for the parental leave and .... they told me I didn't qualify because I didn't live in California... so unpaid leave for me it was.
Government policy is the only way to go with this stuff. Otherwise it will be a benefit only available to a few.
I'm among the ones who think that the most efficient way to lower gender pay gap is to promote longer leaves (parental or not) among men. 'favouring' one gender with 'benefits' for things like caring for family is only reinforcing established roles.
Where does the money come from? I'm an American and so I'm less familiar with other countries policies. I get that mandating a very generous family leave policy is wonderful for parents and good for society. To me it seems it's gotta be tough for small business owners though. A business of lets say 8 employees simply cannot afford a paid six month leave without it impacting its performance. How is that handled in those countries?
That being said, I'm inclined to proposals here which fund it through Social Security or a Social Security like system, which would level the playing field between small and large businesses.
In most of Europe, the company doesn't pay anything, so it isn't tough for it. Every worker contributes a percentage for the Social Security, so basically the cost gets diluted among all tax payers.
> If all it’s competitors have to, what’s the difference?
Because it tips the scale in favor of large companies vs. small. Small firm cashflow is lumpy, large firm cashflow is smooth, and payrolls need to be met.
> Edge cases like this are irrelevant,
17% percent of the work force is employed by firms with fewer than 20 employees, 27% by firms with 50 or fewer.
Without knowing anything about it, I'm inclined to think that it's a combination of Finland's offshore oil drilling income of at least $5.23 billion and their tax rate of 51.6%:
Other more democratic socialism leaning countries redistribute income tax from the wealthy to fund the needs of the general population, but the US just gives that money to people who are already rich. Supposedly this raises all incomes, but incomes have not risen appreciably since the mid 1970s:
The discussion surrounding parental leave is one of the reasons I like contracting. I get paid hourly and get to set my own working conditions and benefits. If I ever get a baby, I can take as much leave as I want to make sure my wife and baby are taken care of. I don't have to lobby the government or beg my employer in order to get time off.
And to answer the question that is going to be asked: "But then you don't get paid?". Correct, but when I do work my pay is around double to triple, so I can take a whole lot of parental leave before it becomes financially irresponsible.
You're projecting your personal situation on to hundreds of millions of people with dramatically different situations. Government policies should be designed to work as well as possible for as many people as possible, not for the minority who stand out because of their high incomes or high demand skills.
It’s the difference between you making good choices individually or the government forcing “good” choices that might not be best for you as an individual.
Excellent- maternity leave isn't just about physically recovering, it's about the child and parent as well. It only makes sense that both parents should get the same time with their kid.
Great job Finland! This is very important for strengthening the family.
As a dad, if I were to choose, I'd rather spend a larger chunk of time with my kid from 2 and up. That is a very good period of time when the kid forms important habits and through games lots of things can be taught. This is actually a goal of mine, I want to save enough and take a few years off from work (or maybe find a part-time gig) and spend some good quality time with my kid.
That’s really cool. It sets strong incentives for men to spend those 6 months with their children, but still leaves the the freedom to not take the leave (and basically forfeit 6 months of free “vacation”).
I’m incredibly grateful for the combined 4 months I got to spend full time with my two children and can only recommend taking the time if you can.
I don't know what it's like in the Nordic countries but here in the US I walk down the street with a 4 year old on my shoulders to work every day to drop her off at school. The women I pass on the street and in the halls beam at her when she greets them and sometimes they exchange a few words. The men? They don't notice her: she's edited out of their minds eye like she doesn't exist, even if she cries "HULLOOO! My name is ___ what's yours?" to them except on rare occasions.
Men who don't have the experience of caring for a child even for a short while cannot make good decisions about what's normative of a civilization. Good policies will not be enacted if men do not "see" children.
I'm a dad of 3, and I do acknowledge other people's children with a wave or hello. But prior to becoming a father, I felt very nervous about doing so, because so few men do give children attention (outside of family members) that I worried that parents would wonder if I had bad intentions.
But hey, fellow men, guess how we break down that stigma? It's by having a lot of normal, everyday guys acknowledge children's existence in friendly, wholesome ways -- even if it's just a wave or a quick greeting.
If a greater percentage of men would do this, then there would be far less nervousness about undeserved, incorrect assumptions.
Well, in Austria you can get up to three years paid leave and freely choose between parents, so not sure if the article is correct. Question is how much the payment is, we get less the longer we take it.
Alternatively you can also take a year (also with +2 months if both parents use it) and get 80% of your previous salary.
When I’ll have a baby I‘ll have to breastfeed, after having carried him for nine months, and having him exit through my private parts.
Give me my extended, non trasferrable maternal leave!
Edit: since some people are misunderstanding my point: extending the paternal leave costs money. I would rather prefer those money being spent on more maternal leave.
Money is limited and the government decides how to distribute it. The difference between spending it on B and taking it away from A is, to me, absolutely unsubstantial.
That’s quite a stretch. And it shows how limited your comprehension of the topic is.
Clearly, the money that goes to starving children comes from a different Department, and they are on different budgets. You just cannot move money like that.
And I still think that rather than giving a silly paternal leave, a longer maternal leave would be much more desirable.
I know I'm going to be downvoted and already regret deciding to share this but...
I've never understood parental leave. If I want to go on a vacation, I have to plan for that and save time to use for it. If you want to have a child, you should have to plan to save your time to take and spend with the child or be in a financial place where one parent can quit their job to stay with the child. It's not like you go to sleep one night and wake up to find a baby next to you that was delivered by a stork. My fiance and I plan to try to have a child once we're married in May but it's something we will save our time off for during the early days of its life because we are choosing to try and have a child.
If a company wants to offer this as a benefit, that's awesome, but I don't understand why governments need to create law to make it a mandatory thing. Having a child is a choice.
Governments have an interest in how the children grow up. Now there is some "whatever that means" encoded in the above. However it is generally noted that children with a good relationship with both parents tend to do better in life than those with only one parent. Thus there is an interest in ensuring that relationship exists if possible.
I would rephrase that as "society has an interest in how the children grow up" so that the reader is clear that it's not a third party, but themselves that is benefited by having fellow citizens that grow up in stable families.
> it's not a third party, but themselves that is benefited by having fellow citizens that grow up in stable families.
This is something that I think can help to build common ground between working people, whether they are family oriented conservatives or economic progressives in the US.
By reducing the economic stress our current system places on working families through guaranteed benefits (parental leave, education, healthcare), we can actually promote the well-being of families in general, which is a goal shared by people across the political spectrum.
Everyone benefits from the reduction of crime and other social ills that often have their origin in unstable families.
Because most people can't go on a 6 month vacation no matter what the circumstance. And this is a much more critical event to another persons development than going to see Macchu Picchu.
And I'm saying this as someone with no kids, but I did have the displeasure of growing up with my family overseas at various wars throughout my childhood.
Government could give a credit for that 6 months paternity vacation to be paid from future income. Not saying it is a great idea, but it’s possible to make paternity leave self paid.
Can you explain this? Its hard for me to imagine how letting someone through a border could cost more than providing healthcare and education to an individual for 18+ years.
If a government really wants the increase the tax base, how could you possibly find a better ROI than letting skilled working age people immigrate?
It's not easy to establish any single country as a preferred destination for skilled, working-age folks with pro-social, modern cultural values (as opposed to Third-World $#!+hole ones). It requires very high standards of good government, low corruption, strong economic growth etc. Canada can achieve this with relative ease, as can (potentially) other Anglosphere countries. Northern European countries as well, with their "socialism w/ Scandinavian characteristics". Other places, it's very much a crapshoot. But if you can just make more people, you're set even if your country has terrible policies.
Because it's not about individuals making good or bad decisions, but about building a good, equal society. And importantly this means caring for children as a collective society.
Both of my parents worked full time and my mother went back to work very shortly after having me. I was plenty cared for without my parents sitting at home with me for weeks or months.
Pretty much all of my friends with kids the women went back to work within a few weeks and the men didn't take time off.
I can't see how sitting at home with a child that will have no memories of you sitting at home with them, that will sleep half the day and cry the other half, for 12 weeks (U.S. FMLA) or 14 months (apparently Germany) will make any significant difference in the child's adult life.
"Pretty much all of my friends with kids the women went back to work within a few weeks and the men didn't take time off."
Yes, but statistically, PPD, surgery, year-long health problems, etc. are common among women. And we have also recently uncovered that PPD also can occur to men despite having not given birth.
It's great that all of those parents raised perfectly healthy children and weren't dealing with the NICU, post-partum depression/issues and everything else that can happen.
I strongly dislike the idea of any government-mandated paternal leave. Staying home from work is not free, and the cost of it comes out of my salary.
I personally want some paternal leave even with its costs, but I'd prefer that negotiation to stay between me and my employer. I don't want some bottom threshold set by a third party.
You are paid in Nordic countries during the leave, so that is a non-issue. Sure indirectly you are paying through your taxes.
But for society as a whole this makes financial sense. In Nordic countries we have the worlds highest female labour participation rate. That is a lot of extra tax dollars.
It also means higher birth rate which benefits the economy. Look at asian countries with birth rates around 1.2 which where slow at adopting these kinds of systems. Nordic countries are more like 1.8.
Over time such a low birth rate will be a huge financial burden for a country. Any taxes you saved from not having paternal leave will be lost in taxes to pay for caring for a huge elderly population.
>Staying home from work is not free, and the cost of it comes out of my salary
So does every other aspect of caring for people (police, fire, education).
>but I'd prefer that negotiation to stay between me and my employer
Hey that works great if you are one of those people that is invaluable to your company, or can easily negotiate and move into a better job. Do you know how that would go for 99.9% of people?
"Hey boss, I'm pregnant, isn't that great! Can I have 12 months paid off so I can take care of my family?"
"Erm, how about 3 days?"
"Ok I see how this goes, fine how about 2 weeks?"
"No forget it, you're fired. I'll just hire someone who isn't having a baby to replace you. Good luck!"
so is this implying they deserve the same time off? let's be honest the Mums did all the heavy lifting here, i'm ok with them having more time off their body did go through a massive change.
Disagreed. Child bearing is only an initial factor; after the baby is out it goes away. The problem is breastfeeding, but there are ways around that (and some mothers, for a variety of reasons or impediments, don't breastfeed; in that case it's completely moot).
So minus breastfeeding, the asymmetry has a large component of "it was always done like this", plus the mistaken idea some employers have that the leave is some sort of "vacation".
As a new father: quality time with my baby is a huge deal and it's unfair that society expects the mom to do all the work (and spend all that time). I think this should be a concern for all fathers; I find my friends who don't prioritize this and dump it on the mother are behaving in an insensitive way. They get to work on "real stuff" and interact with other adults -- even commuting to work can feel like a respite from caring for a newborn -- and when they get home they don't understand why the mother is burned out and grumpy: "but you stayed at home while I worked, why are you so tired and upset?"
A counterpoint: A friend of mine had a kid a year ago and he found it impossible to take care of the baby when he tried being the caretaker while the mom was away (can't breastfeed, milk in a bottle is not the same). The experience has convinced him equal parental leave is a terrible idea.
Counter counter point: I am a father. Took 5 months off. Baby was breastfed. How? Mom was pumping milk at work, after her lunch break. We put it in the freezer. I was waking it up and giving it with a bottle to my daughter. Diapers/food and so on can be taken care by both genders. It is not easy. Actually, at the end, I was looking forward to going back to work and sending my daughter to daycare, once she was 1 year old. It is possible though, and helped me grow up in a sense that I wouldn't have it I didn't go through it.
It also helped us as a couple because I could understand what mom was going through in earlier months and also mom could understand that I am not useless at home and I can take care of our daughter.
With my first child, I took 12 weeks leave, and helped feed the baby using the bottle, and this arrangement worked out great. He didn't care whether it was bottle or breast, was just happy to eat, and still preferred his relationship with his mom more than with me. Oh yes, that's a thing by the way that seems to get lost in these discussions.
With my other 2 kids, they REFUSED the bottle and would ONLY breastfeed. This produced some rather complex scheduling gymnastics that favored my work time over their mother's.
I guess the problem I have with this whole subject is... we really need to restrict the scope of what we even CARE about, when talking about these things. What the Nordic countries have done for parental leave? Awesome. Give people the choice and let them make it.
What happens after that -- even if the long term result is some remaining inequality? -- is not something you or I have a right to change because the opportunity has been given, and reality took over after that. It'd be a bit like complaining about the waves on the beach. I mean sure, you can... but it won't change anything because the ocean won't listen to you. Neither will a baby satisfy the mandates of an ideology over its own wants/needs. If baby decides it only wants mama, well... you'll have to manage. And that has consequences, whether you want to accept that there are or not.
> [the baby] still preferred his relationship with his mom more than with me. Oh yes, that's a thing by the way that seems to get lost in these discussions.
It doesn't get lost. Yes, babies are closer to their mothers. But they are also closer to fathers that interact with them more often than to fathers who interact with them more briefly, all other things equal. And fathers who take more care of their babies also help the mothers not get overwhelmed while at the same time getting to spend more quality time with their babies.
It doesn't have to mean the baby will prefer the father to the mother, which like you said, is unlikely.
To sum up:
- The mom wins, by not being overwhelmed and not being relegated to a housekeeping/babysitting role (if she doesn't want it).
- The father wins, by being more involved in the raising of his kids, and enjoying more time together with them.
- The baby also wins by getting to know his/her father better at an early and fundamental stage.
> helped me grow up in a sense that I wouldn't have it I didn't go through it.
I can certainly relate to this point. My little one has just started nursery and my partner gone back to work. As her companies flexible working is pretty inflexible she works every other weekend (and over January more than that) which means I've suddenly started taking care of the little one on my own much more than I have done until recently.
It's been pretty eye opening if I'm honest. It was way too easy to consider maternity leave a nice long holiday. I wish I'd have had the experience earlier as it would have changed my view on things considerably.
> Baby was breastfed. How? Mom was pumping milk at work, after her lunch break. We put it in the freezer. I was waking it up and giving it with a bottle to my daughter.
This isn't breastfeeding, unfortunately. Your baby was fed breast-milk, but not breastfed. Not a value judgement, but a father feeding a baby from a bottle isn't exactly the same thing developmentally.
This is very condescending. I’m gonna assume the partner nursed the other times she was with the child, like at night. While we can be overly pedantic about the fact that during the day, the baby was bottle fed with breast milk, people have enough stress around breastfeeding as it is; am i doing it right? Does it still count if I pump during the day? Etc etc.
It's not meant to be condescending, and I've updated my comment slightly to try to clarify that. Thanks for pointing out the tone.
I don't think it's overly pedantic in a conversation about fathers spending time as a primary care taker. I think it's actually fairly on topic.
As I understand it (not a doctor), there is a decent bit more going on with breastfeeding than simply the mechanics of delivering milk. Is there a trade-off being made by bottle feeding a baby? Almost definitely. Is it worth it? Sounds like a topic of conversation we could have.
Mothers breastfeed when they can and can pump milk for the times when they can't. Baby still gets the nutritional benefits of breast milk and bonding time with each parent.
Your argument is the same as saying I didn't eat a nourishing home-cooked meal because I heated up last night's leftovers for lunch today. It's still way better than fast food.
> Your argument is the same as saying I didn't eat a nourishing home-cooked meal because I heated up last night's leftovers for lunch today.
Not exactly. My argument is more akin to saying that leftovers aren't the same thing as having a home cooked meal at the dinner table with your family. There is much more going on at a family table than simply nourishing your body.
So because your friend wasn't willing to put in the effort to learn how to be a good parent (no one is born knowing this stuff), no man should have to opportunity to do so?
> mistaken idea some employers have that the leave is some sort of "vacation"
I don't think employers think or care that it's a "vacation" (the experience of the person taking the leave) but rather that it's "paid time off" (the experience of the business paying the leave).
I think it's worth pointing out that in the midst of this brave new world - where every woman is supposedly a kick-ass world-beating entrepreneur if only the damned patriarchy would get off her back - there are plenty of women that have zero interest in having a career, and see the point of their existence as being to have children and be a mother to them; and the erosion of wages as a consequence of womens' entry into the workplace has actually taken away the choice of being a full-time mum for many, by forcing them to work.
> and the erosion of wages as a consequence of womens' entry into the workplace has actually taken away the choice of being a full-time mum for many, by forcing them to work.
I don't buy this narrative, sorry.
Also, of course women who want to stay at home taking care of the babies while the father is less involved in child-rearing are perfectly welcome to do it. It's just that I think it's unfair that society expects this to be the norm.
edit: I also think you're conflating "women who want to have a career and be entrepreneurs" with "mothers and fathers who want to share the load (and joy) of being parents". It's not necessary for the mother to want to be an entrepreneur for this; it's just necessary for the father to take his share of the load.
I think you may have missed their point, as there's not much to "buy". I hadn't considered it before, and it strikes me as interesting. I believe what they're saying is that women being introduced into the work force en-masse, and therefore nearly doubling the working population, has driven down wages. The lower wages made it harder for a single bread-winner to support a family, which then makes it more difficult, or impossible, to have a stay at home mother. I'd love to see some data on this.
Well, you have to buy that the data actually supports this (which your last sentence implies it's not a given) and there's the implication that women voluntarily entering into the workforce have somehow made things worse for other women; that's the implied "narrative". And of course, that women in the workforce are a major factor in lowering wages, and that there are no ways to stop the erosion of wages without driving women away from the workforce. As you can see, there are many narratives at play here that you can either buy into or not.
The comment of the person I was replying to also completely ignored the question of whether fathers actually want to take a more active part in the raising of their children, and whether society supports this decision.
> Well, you have to buy that the data actually supports this (which your last sentence implies it's not a given)
Got it, so you're saying you don't think the mass influx of new workers drove down wages? It seems like a pretty straight forward argument. Would love to hear your thoughts that contradict it.
> ... and there's the implication that women voluntarily entering into the workforce have somehow made things worse for other women; that's the implied "narrative".
That would be the outcome if this were true, wouldn't it? I don't think they're suggesting any kind of intent, but if their premise is correct, it would in fact have made life harder for single income households.
> ... there are no ways to stop the erosion of wages without driving women away from the workforce. As you can see, there are many narratives at play here that you can either buy into or not.
I didn't see this in the comment you responded to.
> so you're saying you don't think the mass influx of new workers drove down wages? It seems like a pretty straight forward argument.
It seems straightforward but it actually isn't. It's not self-evident that women entering the workforce must automatically drive down wages. Maybe other interconnected factors enter into play and cancel it out. Maybe they drive wages slightly lower, but other major factors dwarf this (as someone mentioned in another comment). Maybe... there is no data to support it; like you said, you'd "love" to see the data.
> I didn't see this in the comment you responded to.
I can be mistaken, and the original poster can clarify what they meant, but unfortunately I do see it.
But hang on - you painted a picture of the burnt out tired mother that can't wait to get back to work, away from the drudgery of motherhood. I'm saying that's not a fair representation of many womens' priorities. I could even take it a step further and say that for many women, emancipation in terms of employment has destroyed their chances of having what would really make them happy (a family life) due to the need to put education, building a career etc. ahead of finding a partner and having children. To be provocative I could say women have swapped (or had swapped for them) marriage to a husband for marriage to their employer. Wasn't feminism supposed to be about unshackling women?
There are still stay at home moms, either cause they like it, for children or because it makes economical sense. And there were always women who had to work. At every single point in history.
And to be flippant, it is easier to swap employer when things go wrong, abusive or violent. And practically, ability to earn money do improve this aspect significantly.
It makes things better if husband dies or get sick too.
Also, if the husband is working 12 hours a day in two jobs, you don't get much familly with him either. He kind of becomes wallet.
I didn't bring feminism into this, mind you. I'm also talking about my priorities and rights as a father. I didn't mention and wasn't thinking about feminism or women's rights, though of course those are related topics. Did you notice this?
Emancipation is emancipation. If being "shackled" to a job/employer is destroying someone's chances at a happy life, that's a problem with capitalism at large. I don't see why it has to be about motherhood or parenthood, and not about a blood-sucking system.
The implication that (some? most? many?) women had stay-at-home motherhood "swapped for them" for a career/education is the underlying tone that I dislike in your narrative (and which user seneca "doesn't see" in your post). "Had it swapped for them" is pretty insulting wording, come to think of it.
> Wasn't feminism supposed to be about unshackling women?
The erosion of wages has many causes, not just women having more equal opportunity in the workforce. I’d argue wages have been much more affected by the accumulation of wealth into the top of the food chain.
And that aside, what’s the alternative? Relegate women to work only as teachers and secretaries because some of them want to be stay at home moms?
> And that aside, what’s the alternative? Relegate women to work only as teachers and secretaries because some of them want to be stay at home moms?
I was just pointing out that along with the women who cannot wait to get back to work there are also plenty that are perfectly happy to give up work forever - for some having a child and especially the early years are the most meaningful thing that happens in their entire life. I think it's worth making this point because we have this pro-career consensus that perhaps mainly caters to and benefits a small group of highly exceptional people at the top, and which is not necessarily good for society. This is the paradoxical nature of the thing: attempt to emancipate women; in reality end up making them work like dogs for 40 years and (for many soon it seems) die childless.
> This is the paradoxical nature of the thing: attempt to emancipate women; in reality end up making them work like dogs for 40 years and (for many soon it seems) die childless.
This is begging the question. Nothing you've said has shown this is the reality.
Again, plenty of men want to work like dogs. Some of these provisions now have an element of coercing men not to work as hard. Punishing ambition is now ok?
Men who are ambitious and want to work a lot don't refer to work as "work like a dog". That is expression used by people who are resentful. Even you used that expression to make women working sound undesirable.
And of course, "plenty of men" is massively different then "all men". There are still many men who have jobs they don't like, bosses that hate or who mistreat them and more hours and stress in work that they would like. Other men having jobs they like changes nothing on that.
I'm not so sure a lot of women had the choice of being full-time mothers and have good living standards. My mother worked, and so did her mother, and both households required both parents working to make ends meet.
I'm also not sure there has been wage erosion. Since I've been alive, wages have only been going up. However, cost of living has also been going up, and at a faster rate than wages. So while I don't have any source to support my hunch, I'd guess the problem is that living is more expensive than it ever was, not that women entered the workforce.
There are plenty of men that have zero interest in having a career! Most people get jobs because they have to. Or at the very least, they would choose a shorter work week if they could.
If wages erode, that's a failing of capitalism, not of the idea that more people should have more options. You could restrict supply by having people not work completely at random and get the same effect on wages. I don't know what the best way to fix things is, but making employment based on gender is a dumb way to do it.
> Child bearing is only an initial factor; after the baby is out it goes away.
The effects of spending 9 months in the body of the mother never go away. No more profound experience is imaginable. Nothing else that happens to a human being will ever come close. So, vitally important as fathers are, the asymmetry is fundamental and permanent.
(I'm talking about the typical developmental experience here; I know there are exceptions.)
Yes, pregnancy is a unique experience. For some women it goes away magically after birth; others have lasting physical and mental changes. Whether this is the most profound experience imaginable in human existence is arguable, though I'm inclined to think it's pretty powerful.
However, the "asymmetry" of pregnancy and child birth is neither fundamental nor permanent for the issue under discussion: sharing the load in child raising more equally, and fathers getting to spend more time with their babies. After breastfeeding is over, fathers are perfectly capable of raising a kid without a mother. It's not magic.
I'm talking about the experience for the baby, and what this means for bonding with mother vs. father. It's not symmetrical or interchangeable. It can't be. Of course that doesn't mean that fathers shouldn't raise children or anything like that.
Why did you selectively quote me to exclude the part where I mentioned breastfeeding?
Besides, some women don't produce milk either, or not enough of it. Bonding with a parent is not exclusive to breastfeeding, either (though of course it helps!).
As long as we're being perfectly honest, it seems if you had bothered to read at least the next sentence it would have better qualified you for answering the post and spared you from making a snarky but wrong reply.
All this besides the obviously wrong equivalence you make between child bearing and breast feeding.
The ability to bear children is pretty closely linked with the ability to feed them. It's interesting you find that (and my pointing out your terrible opening statement) 'obviously wrong'.
Closely but not inextricably so. Some mothers can't breastfeed (and some don't want to, as historically happened with some aristocracies). Some babies don't like it (my mother told me I rejected it after 1 month, and fed exclusively on formula after this). Some mothers pump milk and store it in a bottle for caretakers to give the baby. Some babies drink formula. All of this makes your alleged equivalence obviously wrong.
Please don't use child bearing (something that happens before) as an excuse to avoid child raising (something that happens after).
Fathers can take care of babies in the absence of mothers.
If months of parental leave are granted to mothers but not to fathers (something not decided by who has the womb), we should expect to see motherhood being more damaging to a career than fatherhood.
If parental leave is offered equally to mothers and fathers, we should expect the disparity to shrink, though probably not disappear entirely as the womb thing does still remain.
" though probably not disappear entirely as the womb thing does still remain."
The implication that gender, family, and children begin and end with mechanical differences like 'womb' is really reductionist. That we are trying to make things fairer for people is a good thing, but it's become so dogmatic we can't consider other ways of looking at it ... is bad.
My prediction is that in 500 years, no matter what we do, we will still see quite substantial gender differentiation, particularly with respect to early childhood.
I assume the health insurance costs of actually having a baby are quite non-trivial. Of course men tend to get e.g. heart attacks and the like, especially as they age, so I suppose it all balances out in the end.
Yeah, plus (I think) insurers just quote a price per employee, not a price per man/woman etc. So maybe it's easier to "price" the cost of hiring a woman (maternity leave) than a man (heart attacks or whatever)...
We could also stop pressuring women to conform to male standards of behavior and economic performance and instead celebrate the fact that they alone are able to perform the sacred work of growing and nurturing new human life. Then the “problem” that policies like this are trying to fix simply ceases to exist.
"Sacred"? It of course has lots of satisfactions -- why would you have babies otherwise? -- but it's also energy draining and it can drive mothers to exhaustion and a feeling of isolation that can lead to depression.
And it's also bad for the fathers. Why wouldn't you want to spend more time with your kid? You made him/her, after all.
This is a framework to give both, father and mother, a choice. Nobody is pressured to take it, but they are able to if they want. That's the differences.
Effectively it does away a implicit pressure that the mother needs to be home and the father needs to work, i.e., the contrary you suggest. Celebration does nothing to help any side of this, if facing reality when bringing up a child.
Such improvements for equal chances allow to do that though.
As said, nobody is forced too, if they do want to keep the "old fashioned roles", for whatever reason, sensible or not, they may still do so.
The broader issue is that having/raising children doesn't fit with the otherwise fairly materialistic value system our society has.
Childless women earn just as much as men. Forcing fathers to take family leave does fix the asymmetry between parents (mothers vs fathers), but will exacerbate the difference between parents and non-parents by penalizing not just mothers, but also fathers for having children, vs. non-parents who don't (need to) have a career break.
I think that no discussion/policy about parental leave is complete without some kind of incentive for people to have kids (or a discussion about whether we should encourage that at all or not - looks like it might be sensible in Western countries).
It also penalizes non-fathers because employers assume the possibility of you having children, and that has an effect on your pay, even if you never have children.
As a non-father, you have no way to say "I don't want paternity leave" and negotiate a better salary instead.
You can make implicit inferences... e.g. younger people (below 25) are less likely to be parents anytime soon.
Also, there could be post-hiring pressures, motivating employees to not have kids in order to continue their stellar career trajectory (this probably already happens, and I think it's something that should be addressed by some kind of government-provided incentives... I was thinking something like tax-breaks or even tax-rewards for parents, or possibly public housing).
> I think that no discussion/policy about parental leave is complete without some kind of incentive for people to have kids
The simplest way to incentive more kids is to make housing cheap. The biggest downside to most people considering children is the cost of family formation. And by far the biggest component of that is the cost of housing.
Western governments are doing quite the opposite of promoting kids. They're actively pursuing policies that constrict the supply of housing. These favor older post-childrearing homeowners at the expense of young potential families. Abolish zoning and land-use restrictions in metros like San Francisco and New York, and watch fertility rates boom as property prices collapse.
Remembering conclusions from studies done in the past, the fathers in Finland that takes up on the offer and use similar amount of parental leave are going to suffer more in terms of decreased wages and loss of career progress compare to mothers.
People who do not conform to gender expected behavior usually get punished by society, even if politically the same society want the opposite to happen. Giving people the choice to break conformity is still a positive move, and in the long term culture might change enough that taking parental leave (and sick days) won't have a negative effect on both career and wages.
an interesting story from japan:
they have 1 year parental leave for men and women. but just 8% of men actually took it compared with 82% for women. the reason is the same across the planet: they would be left behind at work.
compare this with the former communist country of Romania, today an EU country: 126 days for women, 5 days for men. income during those times is payed for by the state (80%).
societal discrimination against women is deep, and the law can certainly help, but it's only part of the problem. in some places a huge overhaul of society needs to happen. my fear is that the forces that want to keep society as-is are usually much stronger than the ones that want change.
> compare this with the former communist country of Romania, today an EU country: 126 days for women, 5 days for men. income during those times is payed for by the state (80%).
sorry, that was "maternity leave", not "raising a child leave". for "raising a child" it's a maximum of 2 years, granted you've worked for 12 full months before, right?
When my 1st daughter was born, I got exactly 2 days off using my own vacation days. We were a small team at a printing company and each person had a "specialization". If I wasn't there, it was a large part of the company effectively shut down until I returned (it was a lot of pressure and I am glad to not be there anymore).
At a different company (much much larger) I was able to take 2 weeks (out of 3 the company provides) of vacation when my son was born and I am two months away from my third and final child where I expect to do the same. I wish I was able to spend more time with them (and my recovering Wife from the caesarean) but as the primary income for our household we wouldn't be able to survive on things like FMLA. It is very disappointing seeing how modern the rest of the world is in terms of healthcare, maternity/paternity leave, education, etc...
As an American, I find it hard to be patriotic about my country when my fellow citizens can’t muster up the political will to ensure any paid parental leave for most people.
Edit: changed parental leave to paid parental leave
I get that you genuinely care about the issue, but please don't take a thread like this veering into generic political flamebait. Parenting and child-rearing are emotional topics to begin with, so this pretty much guarantees a toxic cocktail.
I'm not opposed to paid parental leave, but it's not equitable at all. It benefits the rich the most, and may even punish the poor. For example, there's no reason a senior investment banker should be paid high 6 figures to take care of their kids. They should have more than enough money saved up themselves to take unpaid time off. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable will have are even harder time finding full time employment as companies will have less incentive to grant it to them. Something like a guaranteed $500 a week for 20 weeks from the government makes a lot more sense.
In European countries that do have paid parental leave, the system is funded by state and has attached a couple of constraints. One of those is that the payments to parents are capped. So, a person earning high salary won't get it in full during parental leave. Usually it's something like max. twice the average salary or something similar.
Another rule (in Sweden at least) is that a company when interviewing a new person is not allowed to ask about family planning. You can't ask if a woman is pregnant or planning to get kids soon. You are not allowed to fire someone that is pregnant and planning paid parental leave. This goes for both father and mother.
In general you as a father is expected to go on parental leave at minimum 3 months, if not 240 days. If you don't, people will look funny at you.
It’s the same in the US states with paid parental leave. If you want wealth redistribution, then use marginal tax rates, but don’t complicate the benefits by making people qualify for them.
Well, there is a big election coming up. You can find out who is on the ballot, where they stand on this issue and pass the info along to the people in your area.
If someone isn't planning on having kids, they might not think it affects them, so be prepared to convince them otherwise, too.
I do all of that, and will continue to do so. I can't even convince people that have been negatively impacted by the lack of parental leave to go out and vote. I also only live in states that mandate at least some parental leave.
when you say "increased parental leave", childfree people tend to hear "more money out of my pocket". I'm not sure how you would go about convincing them this is a good thing.
But... we are doing this. The President brought it up during the State of the Union.
> The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) requires large organizations to offer employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a new child, sick relative or their own illness. Although a growing number of states have passed or are considering paid family leave laws, there is no nationwide equivalent.
Yes, I mean paid parental leave, not just parental leave. FMLA doesn't even apply to employers with less than 50 people. There's a handful of states that offer paid parental leave, and even those have many caveats. It's 2020, I bet it will be at least another 4 to 6 years before we have a federal law, and even that will be a couple decades behind other progressive countries.
> under this bill, 2.1 million civilian federal workers also will be able to take paid leave to care for a new baby after birth, adoption or the start of foster care
Currently it's PAID leave for federal workers only, but it's a start.
Contact your senator and tell them it's important to you.
Yes, I have. But time and time again, my fellow voters (and non voters) have shown that they don't quite care as much about things like paid parental leave as much as they do taxes, gun rights, national "security" and military engagements, restricting abortion rights etc.
I listed those things because those are the things I see being prominently debated. Also, all of the states with paid parental leave, and other laws good for the general public such as assisted suicide and marijuana legalization, are in Democrat states, for what it’s worth.
But at the end of the day, the root obstacle is voter non participation from those that would benefit the most, and voters who absolutely will not accept higher taxes, especially for any type of wealth redistribution such as paid parental leave, healthcare, education, etc.
To even use FMLA you must have worked for the employer for at least a year, at least one of the major restrictions. For example if you have your baby a couple days before your 1 year work anniversary and your employer does not offer parental leave, you are pretty much forced to quit just to be able to take care of your baby for 3 months. FMLA is not the solution for everyone.
Is paid paternal leave viewed as a good thing by most voters (or voters represented by the larger part of the electoral college/senate seats)? That can be viewed as a factor that erodes the remains of traditional family.
"to get fathers to spend time with their children"
I'm all for fathers spending time with their children, but this kind of framing annoys me.
The feminist narrative, which governments seem to swallow, is that fathers don't want to spend time with their children, and force mothers out of their careers.
The reality is probably that it is primarily a financial issue. Fathers spending more time with their children means less money for the family, in most cases. Not only is the compensation usually lower than the salary, many dads also fear disadvantages in the job when they stay away for too long, which would also result in less money for the family.
And yes, there are also reasons why it is expected primarily of fathers to provide for the family. It is not just an arbitrary social construct.
> The feminist narrative, which governments seem to swallow, is that fathers don't want to spend time with their children, and force mothers out of their careers.
I think that is all in your head because you are so anti feminism.
Look we have been through this in Norway for years now. Reality is that many men felt uncomfortable making that choice because there was an expectation in society that staying home with your child was a mothers job and a silly indulgence for men.
Once we made part of the leave reserved for men, they suddenly had a simply argument for the boss "sorry man, we got to take it or we loose it."
It reduced the stigma for men to stay home with the child. It also changed how bosses viewed it. You could say it was a bit of clever social engineering.
> The reality is probably that it is primarily a financial issue. Fathers spending more time with their children means less money for the family, in most cases.
When you get full pay during leave as in most Nordic countries, that is not the issue. The issue was the stigma attached to men being home.
There are not many countries where you get full pay. Full pay makes it a different matter.
And again, I am all for fathers taking time off to spend with their kids. I just think the narrative is harmful.
Harmful to women, actually, who tend to be forced out of their motherhood privileges by well-meaning laws.
As for "fathers feeling uncomfortable", I am not buying it. That is just in people's head and could be remedied with a little propaganda (some TV shows telling people it's fine to take time off as a father). Finances on the other hand are a real world issue.
Seriously, you would forego spending time with your children because it makes you uncomfortable that society might frown upon it? There are no real repercussions, just a mild feeling of uneasiness?
Think whatever you want but the statistics is very clear on this. When time got reserved just for men it significantly increased the number of dads taking parental leave and who extended it.
For countries who have tried this it is very popular and it has been considered a success.
Parents really like it.
It is not just “mild uneasiness” For many countries it has significant career repercussions to prioritize family. I know many Nordics who while living in the US who experience that they are not taken serious by their boss if they priority family.
You can even find plenty of Americans living in Nordics who can attest to this. If you prioritize family you are considered as not taking your career serious.
I mean American bosses freak out when people are away for more than 1-2 weeks.
"It is not just “mild uneasiness” For many countries it has significant career repercussions to prioritize family."
Yeah, that is exactly the worry about "finances" that I mentioned. Why are you hellbent on disagreeing with me?
I also get the notion that the repercussions may now be less for women because when you hire men, you will now also risk losing them to parenthood. But parental leave is just a small dent. The bigger impact is that women will tend to work only part time or not at all once they have children.
Also, as for the alleged "frowning": doesn't it contradict your theory that fathers actually did take parental leave when they were given time allotted especially for them? Imo it rather confirms my theory, that the reason fathers rarely do it is because it is a female privilege that mothers would have to give up (or would be forced to give up by such new laws). The frowning by society must have still been in place, but the mother privilege was not, because she had no claim on that period of parental leave (it was only for fathers).
A lot can be achieved when your country floats on oil. The Government Pension Fund Global, aka the Oil Fund, was worth about $195,000 per Norwegian citizen in 2018.
If others had this kind of safety net they might behave in a similar manner.
Petrostates can afford a lot of leisure time for their citizens.
Massive, continual, and ongoing failure to capture any significant part of the outgoing and diminishing value of the ground under our feet for the future needs of citizens, thereby reducing the wealth of our country as a whole so a few people can capture all the benefit of that lost stored wealth, rather than merely almost all of it?
It's not just oil—anything non-renewable coming out of the ground ought to pay into a trust fund like Norway's. We had a huge amount of it—oil, coal, minerals—and still have quite a bit, but we can't even figure out how to have anything resembling an OECD-standard healthcare system so I reckon a fix for that's not gonna enter the public debate for decades yet, if ever, meanwhile the stored value in our physical country itself drops every day.
US per capita production is 1/10th that of Norway. I would gladly take 1/10th the paid leave given in the article (164 days), which GP failed to notice was for oil-less Finland anyway.
That’s equivalent of someone saying they can’t afford time off for kids because they already spend all their money... when it turns out they just don’t want to give up some luxuries: it’s just setting priorities.
Also Finland has a similar population to Oregon - although it would be more fun to compare it against say Texas for purposes of oil production and the point being made!
"The US has cemented its status as a net exporter in world oil markets, a sharp reversal from past years that could affect its ties to foreign allies.
The top oil producer and consumer exported 89,000 more barrels of crude oil and refined petroleum products a day than it imported in September [2019], the first full month of a positive oil trade balance since the 1940s, the Energy Information Administration said Friday. Imports exceeded exports by 12m barrels a day a decade ago."
This is a recent development, September 2019, and is a very small volume relative to the US population/economy. There's little to no oil surplus in the US and thus it is not a petrostate.
What about when your country (like mine) is a technological superpower and allows the super rich to keep all of the wealth generated by our greatest minds locked up? We could do the same if we had the courage.
The stupidity of people these days. This was literally an article about Finland and paternal leave. A country which has no oil. Literally EVERY single Nordic country has this kind of system. Not just Norway.
And Norway had this BEFORE we had any oil.
Never mind the whole inconsistency in your rant. Why do you think the oil fund is so F...ing huge? Because we DON'T spend a lot of oil money. We save it.
Please don't respond to a bad comment with a worse one. It helps nothing—it only makes the thread worse yet.
The last thing we need here is nationalistic flamewar, and when it comes to flamewar, the second escalation is often the turning point and therefore the thing most to be avoided.
This comment starts off fine. Sharing personal experience is nearly always ok and interesting and good HN material. But please don't go the way of your last paragraph here. Escalations like "if you are not emotionally autistic" and "he is likely a broken individual" are guaranteed to activate someone, and that way lies flamewar—completely needlessly.
When you post to HN, you're broadcasting to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of readers. It feels like a small and intimate conversation, which has a lot of advantages, but on this point that feeling is misleading.
At no point did the poster wish (or anyone arguing for gender equality) for a kid to have identical relationships with parents. It is about each gender being able to invest as much time as the other (if they so chose), thereby making sure each relationship has the potential to reach the same depth (barely present father has been a trope for a very long time) and does not force one gender to sacrifice their carriers over the other (because getting children often boils down to that, and the numbers backing that up are contested by nobody).
In other words, you chose to attack a straw-man, and it is important for the discussion that you don't. Whenever I see a man doing that I assume that he is likely not very interested in hearing about problems others do experience.
> Personally, I find that this "gender equality" push winds up being extraordinarily anti-woman in effect, and whenever I see a man preaching it, I assume that he is likely a broken individual in his relationship with the fairer sex, certainly someone that I would care to keep far away from my daughters.
You could try getting to know people, instead of making broad assumptions. They might surprise you, and you might start wondering why you're in such a rush to assume things about them anyway.
The problem in contemporary culture is that we are not even allowed to have this conversation. To state the obvious fact that men and women are different and have different strengths and weaknesses (in general, as a sex) is tantamount to heresy, I guess because gender roles are associated with perceived past injustices.
> Personally, I find that this "gender equality" push winds up being extraordinarily anti-woman in effect, and whenever I see a man preaching it, I assume that he is likely a broken individual in his relationship with the fairer sex, certainly someone that I would care to keep far away from my daughters.
It is still unclear to me how forcing both parents to work full-time jobs is beneficial for anyone other than corporations. Parents today work more and spend less time with their kids than probably any period of time other than the early Industrial Revolution. This was not the case prior to opening up the work force en masse for women.
> The problem in contemporary culture is that we are not even allowed to have this conversation
So what type of conversation are you having right now? We have word in swedish for using that type of "arguing", it is "offerkofta". I dont think it is a good word for it in english, but starting a discussion in an open forum saying something and then stating you are not "ALLOWED" to discuss what you are discussing is just a way of victimizing oneself and make it more or less impossible for other people to argue against. If I argue against you can always call me politically correct or stating that I just dont see behind the propaganda. "Offerkofta" by the way is literally "putting on the victim cardigan".
This is a mostly anonymous forum which is slightly more open to controversial ideas than the average media outlet. Any person openly questioning the effectiveness of treating men and women as exact equals is usually treated as some sort of ultra conservative or fringe figure in the media.
People in general have a hard time understanding the idea that there are different scales of value. The old Einstein quote about a fish judging itself to be stupid because it can’t climb a tree is relevant here.
I’m also referring to American society. I don’t know how Sweden is.
As I said earlier, you have your right to an opinion, and can express it freely. If it feels awkward for you to not being agreed with or people not liking your views is not the same as someone not allowing you to have that opinion. So feel free to say and argue whatever you want, but people not liking what you say or people thinking you are having a strange opinion and rather not discussing with you have nothing to do with not allowing you to express that opinon. Saying that you are not allowed to have an opinion kills conversations.
The largest news Network in the US ran this story from multiple angles including yours, and even has a panel.
If you really need someone to pander to this perspective, American society is full of people loudly discussing it. It is obviously so.
So either you are angry that your local discourse doesn't treat this topic kindly, or you were just making a rhetorical jab that wasn't meant to be taken literally.
In either case it doesn't seem very fair to do, imo.
Not agreeing is not the same as not allowing. I think this is a false logic. I see a lot of people mistaken freedom of speech with some god-given right of being listened to.
And saying that "you are not allowed to have this conversation" is like saying: "If you argue against me you are part of the problem". So it is a good way of just throwing out an argument and killing conversation.
The original post was downvoted into oblivion in part because it explicitly broke HN rules and argued that people whom disagreed with him were autistic.
That's not a conversation. That's being deliberately inflammatory.
> It is still unclear to me how forcing both parents to work full-time jobs is beneficial for anyone other than corporations.
The point of these measures is not letting/forcing both parents to work. It's to make both genders equals in the eye of the capitalist employer. So, depending on the job and remuneration of the parents, maybe just one can work. And this working parent can be the mother.
In theory, yes, but unless the cost of supporting a family can be done with one job (as it used to be), then this is kind of a moot point. Both parents can choose to work part-time, but typically that means they'll be in poverty.
Well that depends on the social class and the country where the family lives in. But yeah, what you say is true for too many families even in the richest countries.
So, you extrapolate how the world works from your personal experiences? On top of that calls people who dont agree with you autistic and men who are into "gender equality" being broken individuals? Wow, you are really open-minded and up for discussion.
There's a lot that can go wrong for a family that can at least be softened if the mother has a career that she can go back to if she ends up needing to support the family, and in our economy, that pretty much means going back to work at least part-time within a few years of giving birth.
The friend I worry about the most: mom of 4 who had her first child a year after getting married straight out of college, and has never lived on her own or worked a job that could support even a young single woman, much less a family. I trust that her husband, being a well-paid financial planner, has a big life insurance policy and very good disability insurance, but what if he gets a wild hair and runs off? She was our high school valedictorian and had good grades in college, but would be absolutely lost if she had to support her kids, even with the relatively meager child support she'd get.
Having been forced to become a single dad over the last few years - your view is wrong in my opinion. But I will admit I had a similar view before my own experience. The thing is, society teaches boys/men to be self-focused and work-focused, and we subconsciously derive our own self worth from being good at those things. But that is not biological, I am pretty convinced of that now. If you were to single parent your children, you would see quite quickly you can develop a very similar relationship that a mother traditionally has. It's just a matter of spending less time on yourself and work, and more time on your children and the running of the family. Then those stronger bonds just develop naturally (and are the silver lining of my own experience).
You're projecting your own experience as if it's a universal truth for other fathers, but it simply isn't. You may even be an outlier amongst new fathers in developed nations.
> And, to put this delicately, but as something that needs to be stated because it's true and important for the discussion: she has a different relationship with our children precisely because she is their mother. The two of us are not interchangeable. There are a million ways this is true. I'm an attentive and a loving father, but the sound of a crying baby is something that I can compartmentalize when I need to. On my wife, though, it is an unbearable sound with physiological effects even. (One that she uses when pumping milk, for example.)
This is a subtle twist you've made to the argument. No one is saying that all relationships a child has are precisely equal. What they're saying is that families should have access to equal leave for both parents when a child comes into their family.
There are many reasons why this might be true. But it also has the nice knock-on effect of not giving sexist employers the opportunity to say "women are more expensive/less productive than men."
> If you are not emotionally autistic,
This little jab is probably why you got downvoted. Please don't make up nonsense about medical conditions or use the autistic spectrum as your synonym for dysfunction. It's not only unfair and uncivil, it's factually incorrect.
> Personally, I find that this "gender equality" push winds up being extraordinarily anti-woman in effect, and whenever I see a man preaching it,
If your argument is, "men shouldn't push an agenda onto women's rights movements" then I'm all for that message. Of course, what you're actually doing is holding a very narrow definition of "woman" and "femininity" and assuming that rights and options granted to women who don't fit that mold come at the cost of your specific image of women. Rights and freedoms are not obviously a zero sum game.
> I assume that he is likely a broken individual in his relationship with the fairer sex, certainly someone that I would care to keep far away from my daughters.
So either you're implying that all people who support broader definitions of women's rights are sexual deviants likely to molest your children, or implying that you are afraid that these freethinking individuals might put ideas into your daughter's head that will make them less friendly to your extremely narrow view of femininity.
Since clearly the former would get you flagged and banned, and we have an imperative to communicate charitably on Hacker News (and of course statistically the most likely source of child abuse is a relative, making your claim wildly implausible), I choose to wish you the best of luck getting over your reactionary fears of letting your daughters choose their own paths in life. I suspect they will thrive even if you try to stifle them.
But will they force Dads to take it? As a Dad who had two kids, I would much rather pay for childcare than take paternity leave. Would someone like me be held back artificially to promote equality?
EDIT: Not a freak, don't care for the infant stage. Happy to dote when they start to turn into people.
It is just that the days get wasted if you don't take them. So you would be stupid not to do it.
> Not a freak, don't care for the infant stage. Happy to dote when they start to turn into people.
That is kind of a selfish attitude. The early stage is a lot of work, but why should you skip the work while your wife has to do it all?
I remember back in that time. I was quite happy to go back to work the first weeks, because I found it quite exhausting with the first child. Work was super relaxing in comparison.
I think it is only fair and square that one shares the load. I had my parental leave when my kids were 8 months or so. I actually forget exactly the time. But it was quit manageable by then and while a fair amount of work it was also a rewarding experience.
> Would someone like me be held back artificially to promote equality?
What about your wife's career. Isn't she held back if she had to spend all the time taking care of the kids? Why should she not be given similar opportunities as you?
Speaking only for my personal situation, my partner is a stay at home parent. They have no career, do not want a career, and only want to be a full time parent (which I fully support). I use my resources to enable that, and make their life as easy as possible (hired help around the house, childcare, etc).
You can still enable them in ways that don't involve working at a formal job. Doing chores, dealing with household issues, that kind of thing. Having a kid generally means that there's a lot of stressful work to do around the house, and you would be in the right position to deal with that.
The kids build their connection to you in weird ways, smell, touch etc. Avoiding that 100% until they speak could have weird effects in their attachment (said without any actual proof).
It's of course your choice, but just saying that that choice could end up biting you or the kid in the end.
No it's not fun hanging around kids all the time, but it takes a lot of not fun moments to get to the good parts.
Being indoors all the time or having to care for a child 24/7 can be extremely isolating even in the best circumstances (where one isn't dealing with recovering from giving birth).
>Being indoors all the time or having to care for a child 24/7 can be extremely isolating
This doesn't jibe with my experience at all. My wife is quite enjoying being at home with the baby, and gets to spend as much time outdoors as she cares for, even in the harsh Canadian winter.
Sure there are some sleepless nights (for both of us), but I'm not sure where this idea comes from that caring for a baby is a 24/7 slog. Close friends of ours had 3 children in 4.5 years, and even they don't talk like it's utter drudgery. I guess YMMV.
"This doesn't jibe with my experience at all. My wife is quite enjoying being at home with the baby, and gets to spend as much time outdoors as she cares for, even in the harsh Canadian winter."
But that isn't true for all mothers. If a mother needs to socialize with other adults, or wants to chill with a drink with her friends, or go to a book club, etc. having a child that she must be solely responsible for 24/7 can be extremely mentally unhealthy. Maybe try Mother of all Podcasts? It's about comedian mothers talking about motherhood and being a comedian.
Yes, and I am indicating that, to the idea that 24/7 childcare indoors to be the optimal case for women as according to one's own lives, I am arguing that may not be the case due to social isolation.
I find it puzzling that someone would choose to embark on the paternity experience, but be very selective about what to experience. Life is not just what we like, and understanding that makes us more balanced individuals. One might think you're spoiled and incapable of dealing with adversity.
Life is what you make of it. You call it spoiled, I call it privilege constructed from skill, determination, and luck.
I’ve had enough adversity for one lifetime, my soul is weary, and refuse to submit to any additional unnecessary suffering. Without knowing my life, you’re not qualified to comment on it. I’m simply sharing my perspective having had my own kids and paternity leave offered.
But kids dont really require one parent for the rest of that parents' life? So they then resume a non-existing career, or do they just stay home when the kids are in school etc? Living in Sweden this has always seemed a bit weird to me, since "stay at home parent" basically doesnt exist here, unless you are (involuntarily) unemployed.
In my experience from spending several years in Japan where a lot of women opt out of continuing their career after getting married/having a child: a lot of time is spent socializing with other housewives. But the harsh economic realities mean that more and more women have to work to keep the household afloat, whether they want to or not.
> Speaking only for my personal situation, my partner is a stay at home parent.
Of course everybody's situation is different. My wife is actually currently at home as well. But you cannot advocate a system that just works for you.
You got to have a system that benefits the population at large. Many women want a career and independence and many men would enjoy spending more time with their children.
They should be given a chance to do that.
You also have to consider that when a lot of people do like you guys, you keep promoting gender inequality. Men like you working long hours naturally get valued. Bosses come to expect men to be more dependable and flexible workers because they have no obligations at home.
Women in contrast hit a glass ceiling because a company will expect that she will not have the same flexibility as a man. Men will be prioritized in career advancements and get higher salaries.
Hence you get stuck in this gender pattern. Women end up staying home because they simply cannot compete salary-wise with men.
I am not blaming you. I am just pointing out that if too many people make the kind of choices you make, it really holds back women's advancement in the workplace.
> I use my resources to enable that, and make their life as easy as possible (hired help around the house, childcare, etc).
Sounds great, but keep in mind there is a downside to this. It promotes the view that every parent is available for long work hours, because "hey just pay some help." For people with less fancy jobs that is not a simple option. One has to think of what role models one are. I find it somewhat disturbing when these higher powered women brag about being back at work the day after birth. It signals to everyone further down the chain that they are lazy asses if they don't do the same. Reality is that these are women with large amounts of resources who can hire a lot of help and don't have physically demanding jobs.
I don't expect you to agree with me, because it is probably not in your culture to think like this. But at least in Scandinavia where both independence and solidarity are considered important values, we do think a lot about being good role models and showing solidarity with others.
E.g. in Norwegian neighborhoods of all income levels people participate in "dugnad" which is a communal work together thing. Everybody clean up and fix up their neighborhood. The rich could have hired people to do it. But it is considered an important value even among rich Norwegians to physically contribute like this and be like everybody else once in a while.
It affects the children you raise. I notice children from countries where rich people hire a lot of help are exceptionally spoiled.
Do you think women will ever be able to compete on a level footing with men in the labor market/workplace if enough men prioritize status, wealth, and their career above being primarily a father? Honest question, not intended to be incendiary. You propose in this thread about culture changing, but what if it doesn't because of the drive for status? To seek status and wealth are core human values. You can’t squeeze the humanity out of people with policy.
Valuing those who value their career above all else isn't gender inequality; that's valuing a work ethic, not a specific gender (women also make the choice to prioritize a career above being a mother at all). You as an individual have a choice not to prioritize your work above all else, but you should not then be penalizing those with public policy who don't in the name of equality.
> The early stage is a lot of work, but why should you skip the work while your wife has to do it all?
> What about your wife's career. Isn't she held back if she had to spend all the time taking care of the kids? Why should she not be given similar opportunities as you?
He is working, and perhaps his wife prefers caring for their child to working a job. If it's working for them, why criticize? Why is it wrong for this couple to distribute the work in the way that optimizes for their happiness?
>The early stage is a lot of work, but why should you skip the work while your wife has to do it all?
"Skip the work"? He literally said he's working..a job. Unfortunately, in the society we've built it is considered the most important work, since it pays the bills and enables the ability to start a family.
I agree it's important that both people share the burden of parenthood, but let's not swing it so far the other way that your sole source of income isn't considered "work".
But this is why the paternity leave is being offered. So that your 'sole source of income' is not stopped while you can do the 'work' and share equally in the workload of rearing the child that YOU decided you wanted.
The original commenter is insinuating that even with this facility he will prefer to go to his 'real work' esp when the kid is small and the child-rearing work is not satisfactory enough and that frankly is quite selfish.
My partner and I agreed ahead of time how the workload would be divided. Is the problem that you take issue with how it's divided? Why must the workload be shared equally?
Nobody forces the moms either (though I do understand that dads don't breast-feed every 3 hours without sleep).
The point is that this means the "she will be off for X months" becomes less of a biological parts thing against women and more of a life-stage thing. Though the ageism might still strike here, as people plan to have kids later in their lives.
> Happy to dote when they start to turn into people.
Also specifically for the leave itself, a significant part of my paternity leave was just partner support by picking up everything else that was previously shared including shopping, cooking, laundry. Otherwise, it was just about generally being awake without worrying about the clock.
This all came to highlight when I went back to work after 3 months away, the transition to a 9-5 schedule was bad for everyone involved.
In the UK the mother is required to take minimum 2 weeks off work (4 weeks for factory workers) and employers commit a criminal offence if they 'allow' the mother to work during this period (ie it's stricter than simply banning employers from asking).
I'm not a big "babies" guy either. I'd love if you could delay this leave till they were older. But are you really telling me you'd rather go to work and pay for child care than take 7 months off, fully paid, and be at home? You could take the leave, pay for child care and go hiking every day if you wanted...
I can't speak for how they do it in Finland, but at least in Norway you can take the paternity leave over a period of 3 years. I think most people take it out in full, but a lot of self-employed people do that in order to keep things running.
That's really smart. I get the health impacts are different for women, but I never saw the point of spending time with new borns, compared to 18-36month olds.
No, the point is to offer an incentive. Even the mother may not take any of her leave if she wants. But by providing an incentive, you do change how most men consider normal for raising the kids.
> Not a freak, don't care for the infant stage. Happy to dote when they start to turn into people.
It seems like you may not care, but that infant stage is the most critical for bonding and attachment. You're potentially sacrificing your ability to have a strong or deep relationship with your children in the long-term, regardless of how present you are later on. But as I said, perhaps you're making that tradeoff knowingly.
My in-laws were with us for 6 months after our little girl was born. My wife and I took over almost everything childcare related to be with her except for things like cooking meals and catch up naps during the day sometimes. Some parents do want to spend time with their children you know!
Some people have no support such that you describe, and are entirely out of pocket for childcare costs because they have no family to rely on (either due to apathy, or death). If your spouse is a stay at home parent, none of these costs are tax deductible (US centric).
I am aware of that. My wife was working part time and had to take vacation days to stay home. I was working full time for FAANG and had to take vacation days for paternity leave, too. I stayed home for 3 weeks, the most I could take. There was no such thing as paternity/maternity leaves prior to 2016 I believe even for big tech companies. I remembered Microsoft was one of the 1st to offer such thing in 2017.
I don't think they'd ever force anyone to take time off if they don't want to. They'd give you the right to take time off to be with your kids, but if you don't want to take them up on that offer, then that will always be your prerogative.
How much would it take to get you to perform a temporary job you don’t want? The same compensation as for a job you do enjoy? Or more? Or is there no amount you’d take?
For example, having two kids, there is literally no amount of compensation or benefits you could provide as an employer or nation state to convince me to have more.
> No, after. I want them to thrive, but they're not at an age yet where I can fully appreciate time with them.
You know that first 3 years of our lives are most forming on our deeper personalities. How people are calm, energized, focused, or somehow broken... they have started developing personalities while still in the womb. That they have no verbal way to express themselves doesn't mean anything. They do appreciate every second with their parents. They are building the foundations of their personalities for the rest of their lives.
You being absent (and seemingly pretty cold/distant personality) doesn't work work well with your claimed intent for them to thrive. Unless you mean that they will be one of these uber-competitive, never-happy but probably wealthy types which are mostly just sad stories once you know them well. If that's the case, you are probably well on course, and unfortunately they are too...
Parenting is time when 'me' focus changes to 'it' focus, it being the kid. For me and my wife, the transition was automatic and smooth, nobody needn't to tell us anything. I've been given plenty as a child and now I am giving back to next generation. Without thinking about what will come for me or my wife.
Nobody ever did a full A/B study on that, it would require damaging many babies for rest of their lives. We're over Mengele's approach for quite some time and time machine isn't a thing yet.
But there are tons of stories that babies neglected/suffering perform much worse for rest of their lives. Deep mental issues, lower IQ etc. Some proof might be stories I read from some specifically cruel communist Romania orphanage, where children were neglected, often caged or chained. Something like 90% of them struggled significantly in the society in their later lives.
> Nobody ever did a full A/B study on that, it would require damaging many babies for rest of their lives. We're over Mengele's approach for quite some time and time machine isn't a thing yet.
It doesn't have to be interventional study.
> But there are tons of stories that babies neglected/suffering perform much worse for rest of their lives. Deep mental issues, lower IQ etc. Some proof might be stories I read from some specifically cruel communist Romania orphanage, where children were neglected, often caged or chained. Something like 90% of them struggled significantly in the society in their later lives.
Children being caged and chained having long lasting consequences is so far from from the original claim that first 3 years of our lives are most forming on our deeper personalities. It appears there is no reason to consider that claim true.
Have you never been involved in a long project that was initially unfruitful but ultimately rewarding when you stuck at it? It's not supposed to be enjoyable, you're nurturing your child to establish the foundation on which your life together is built and to help them prosper.
You're right, it's extremely mentally challenging in those first months before they start to communicate with you directly (as opposed to general communication of crying!). But it's part of the whole experience that bonds you together in a way I'd never have imagined was possible.
Maybe it is mentally challaging because you worry about the job you have to go to next day? I'm fairly weak mentally but I didn't find that period a challange. I was up every night singing lullabies over and over again but when he slept during the day I slept as well. Most kids sleep a ton during this time and if you sleep when kid sleep most parents will sleep more than ever. Providing comfort and calming him was amazing to me.
I think even if you didn't want to take the leave for its own sake you might find taking it would let the mother have some time and rest which didn't involve caring for a tiny-human non-stop.
But to answer the question more literally I suspect there would be no penalty.
In the US, I have seen cases of both parents taking company leave, and still putting their kids in childcare so that they can do house projects. Defeats the purpose... culture takes time to change
Of course. Just as when they’re old enough they’ll learn about all of my other successes and failures as a human. May they make better choices than I to lead a better life than I have.
> Research has shown this to be optimal (time spent with your children later in life closer to adolescent years matters more than their younger years).
> they're not at an age yet where I can fully appreciate time with them.
Now that sounds closer to the truth. It's not about what's best for "them", it's about how you can _enjoy yourself_ more.
This comment is not substantive and does not add to the discussion in a constructive way — these types of comments are generally not welcome on this forum.
There's a difference between the minimal standard of raising a child to functioning adulthood, which is what orphanages generally manage, and raising a well-adjusted, emotionally healthy person who's not held back, having been given only the bare minimum of rearing.
All the research points to active parenting/interaction with children from day 1 being extremely beneficial.
Crossing into personal attack like that will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong or provocative another comment is. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd be grateful.
It's a paid leave, so you'd be losing money by paying someone to keep your kids so that you can work and earn the exact same money you'd earn by staying home.
I would rather pay for someone else to do what I consider dreck work (changings, feedings, monitoring while they sleep) while still making time each evening to spend with them.
Research has shown this to be optimal (time spent with your children later in life closer to adolescent years matters more than their younger years).
Your child is not a human-to-be, that's a trap I fell into. They are a human now, your son or daughter. We might think we're educating, nurturing them, growing them so they become good adults -- but it's the journey as much as the destination. Children deserve fulfillment in their lives too, not just a hope of future fulfillment. For a baby that means warm cuddles, soft voices, smiles, the care of those that love them -- despite their infirmity and dependency.
I think you're both missing out substantially if you think you can just jump in later after all the messy, hard, stuff is over.
I love a good, "X Nordic Country provides Y for FREE -- so should the United States!" Where Y is some socialized benefit.
Let's put this in perspective: Finland's population is around 5.5 million people. That's somewhere between the populations of South Carolina and Minnesota.
Get a grip people -- The United States is not even remotely equivalent to Finland in terms of demographics and population. Find a nice U.S. State that doles out great Parental benefits, and move.
Yes, Finland is small. Yes the cost of covering these benefits is smaller than it would be in America, but the people who pay taxes are also fewer.
If all of America paid the same %-taxes as Finnish people do the system would absolutely work. It isn't magic. It's just that your country has decided, over a number of years, that health-care should be covered by insurance, and employment, rather than taxes.
If your politicians want to make a change, and get the appropriate votes, you absolutely could do the same thing as is done here.
Among the things you fail to understand is that GDP will generally scale with the population. You wouldn't be trying to pay for U.S. parents' leave with Finnish tax revenue.
The Finnish GDP per capita is $45,700. For the US, it's $59,500. Please explain why social programs are so impossible for one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
Wow, you all are really taking this fact hard. It's ok -- I know was shocked when I first heard this back in high school.
Reading thru the comments, it sounds like New Jersey has great parental benefits, but you will be sharing them with a few more million people than Denmark, so ymmv.
It comes down to this: you sound like a complete idiot comparing social programs of these small Countries to <any> large Country. Stop.
> while fathers are given 2.2 months until the child turns two. However, on average only one in four of them take what they are given. The current plans now talk only of parental leave.
Is it conceivable that fathers actually don't want to spend that much time at home and that the Finland Government is strong-handing them into doing it?
One frustration I have in this topic is that it is seldom mentioned that any parent with any savings and a decent job has the option of taking unpaid leave and take as much as they want with their kids, but choose not to. That is a very strong case for revealed preferences.
this is paid leave (it's only an allowance, not usually a full salary though). Where I live it's up to a year for a father, but most of them do not take it since we are still entrenched in the "father at work/mother at home" society
If it provides a competitive advantage for fathers to sell their labor to not take parental leave, then they won’t. In that case, if the government wanted to incentivize fathers to take parental leave, they would have to mandate it, but of course that would conflict with goals of providing freedoms.
It’s the age old conundrum of what is good for society versus the individual, and how an immeasurable benefit (fathers spending time with children) can lose out to measurable benefits (fathers being able to sell their labor for a higher price due to having more experience/getting promoted since they didn’t take parental leave).
The other benefit of forcing fathers to take parental leave, would be to help equalize the playing field for men and women. But then the country may lose a competitive advantage to other countries since their products might be cheaper since they have a greater supply of labor, but in the long term it would be beneficial for the world to have mothers and fathers both spend time rearing children, however it unquantifiable unlike their cheaper products resulting in higher exports.
I am pretty sure that if instead of parental leave you gave a bonus equal to the salary of that leave, thats what would happen. Because that is what happens.
Somehow it is egregious to say that you will get a 50k Euro/100k dollar bonus if you have a kid, but somehow if its paid by not working it makes sense?
Many comments laud this as a step towards gender equality, which is a noble goal. However, I do wonder about the unforeseen consequences. All mammals (afaik) are raised by mothers. Humans are mammals. Humans do a good job of making changes to our nature, and for the most part those changes have resulted in better lives. However we still have things like nuclear families. Children aren't taken away from parents and raised by communities instead. So we don't throw everything out from nature, because some of it works well and reliably. Is there any science to suggest that there are no adverse effects on an infant from having an absent mother?
To move back up: I'm saying there might be a good reason mothers should be given maternal leave and that there might not be as good of a reason for men to be given paternal leave. Gender equality doesn't mean both genders are the same.
Other animals don't commute to an office hours away every day. There is practically nothing in human society which is very normal, relative to the natural state.
In fact I would argue this in many ways makes things MORE normal not less. Fathers in hunter and gatherer societies would have spend far more time with their children than a modern father.
A hunter and gatherer spend around 8 hours per week hunting. The rest of the time the family was quite close together.
> I'm saying there might be a good reason mothers should be given maternal leave and that there might not be as good of a reason for men to be given paternal leave. Gender equality doesn't mean both genders are the same.
Of course genders are not the same. But there is no reason to encourage difference just for the sake of it. The fact is that giving fathers and mothers leave works great for families.
I have lived through this myself. Your kids are much better off for it, and so are the parents.
Statistics speak for themselves. Nordic countries score well on family friendliness, child development and happiness.
Humans are herd animals. From what I know there is consensus among developmental psychologists for attachment theory. A theory that roughly states that the caregiver or caregivers a child has from 6 months of age to two years old is very important and forms how the child will form relationships with other humans during the rest of their life. It does not need to be a single caregiver nor that the caregiver is the mother.
Edit: Historically it has not been uncommon for the mother to die while giving birth. So it has always been important for us to accept other caregivers than our birth mothers.
All of your assertions are false. Male wolves and foxes help with child rearing.
Aka Pygmy Men breastfeed (some men can lactate a little) Most Women outside these tribes don't look for it in a man. Whereas there's do.
Social Services does take children away from there parents and raise them instead.
It's only culture that says just the bad children.
Colonialism commonly took natives away to be raised by society instead.
The kibbutz movement used collective child rearing. They thought it was the only way for equality.
Nuclear families are mostly a western thing. Plus we see more and more young people living together in shared housing.some in a family atmosphere. Why not shared child rearing?
Of course if there are good reasons then someone can provide them righ
> Is there any science to suggest that there are no adverse effects on an infant from having an absent mother?
This is a straw man argument. It's not possible to conduct such a study scientifically because it would be unethical and that's not what this policy is promoting.
Mammals are polygamous by nature and humans are no exception. We have only changed this in the last several thousand years and the benefits have been substantial enough that it's now the model in most of the world. I expect gender equality in the workplace to move in that direction.
What? Why would giving men paternity leave suddenly mean that women would become absent mothers?
As a species that grew out of bands of hunter gatherers, tribes and communities have played a huge role in raising children. Our modern circumstances are the exception — two parents, often shouldering the burden largely on their own.
What kind of good reason would you be looking for? I mean for most just spending time with their small children and forming good relationships with them is 'good enough'
And yes, gender equality has not been tried fully in a society yet so it's hard to know.
Under Finland's system mother are still given maternal leave, but the fathers now get mandatory leave too. That's how I understood it, no country would forbid the mother maternal leave, except maybe the US.
If would be say the first 6 months the mother takes leave while the next 6 months the father takes leave, for a total of 12 months.
It just means they share the burden and benefits. What exactly is wrong with that?
I cannot say I understand your "entitled" question. Is anyone in principle entitled to anything? Does it matter? Why not simply do what works great? Does doing something need to have any other reason than that it works great and everybody is happy about the result?
We used to live in caves and evolving past that touched off a chain of events that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. But we don't lament our evolution. Living indoors, while messy with unintended side effects if you choose to look at it that way, is something we value.
Ever seen or known someone who grew up with an absent father? It makes a big difference in their lives despite what you might intuitively assume about mother/child relationships.
I did spend a lot of time with my children in their earliest days because it was the right thing to do, but I don't feel either they or I particularly gained from it (than if I'd spent a bit less, say). Do I feel the time I spend with them now they're older pays serious dividend for their futures? Absolutely.
I own a company and can spend an above average amount of time with my children.. but are companies or the government going to support the majority of parents spending prolonged periods of times with older children? Sadly I can't see it happening, but I think that's a more important task than having two parents on tap for a newborn. All purely IMHO, of course.