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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
And yes, gender equality has not been tried fully in a society yet so it's hard to know.
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?
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.
Some money is spent into this, I would rather see the money being spent to increase mother’s leave.
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.
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.
It's still less costly than immigration.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!"
The government mandated exempt employees? Just curious.
Not sure what exempt employees are (my own ignorance).
Why should it come out of you salary? Why can't it be fully paid?
Finally, a country that understands that one of the driving forces of gender inequality is the asymmetry of experience caused by maternal leave.
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.
Not true
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...
Edit: changed parental leave to paid parental leave
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.
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.
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?
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.
EDIT: Not a freak, don't care for the infant stage. Happy to dote when they start to turn into people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If its not paid by the parents, who is paying for it? It often is a mix of co-workers, consumers, and taxpayers.
What society is and can be changed is one thing, what you do by making that society ilegal is another one.
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?
The asymmetry of experience is actually caused by child bearing, which can only be done by women. Maternal leave is downstream from that.
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?"
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.
> AMONG OTHER THINGS, the asymmetry of experience is actually IN PART caused by child bearing
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).
As a non-father, you have no way to say "I don't want paternity leave" and negotiate a better salary instead.
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.
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.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22247563.
If someone isn't planning on having kids, they might not think it affects them, so be prepared to convince them otherwise, too.
> 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.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
Or if they need ever greater numbers to keep the benefits paying out like UK/US.
So what's the United State's excuse?
(A lot of US citizens are somehow unaware of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_produ...)
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.
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."
https://www.ft.com/content/9cbba7b0-12dd-11ea-a7e6-62bf4f9e5...
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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?
"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".
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 some European countries women are not allowed to work in the following 6 or 8 weeks after giving birth (maybe even longer somewhere?).
said with love
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.
It's up to you of course, I'm just curious.
But to answer the question more literally I suspect there would be no penalty.
> 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.
Why shouldn't their husbands stay at home?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
But I should not have suggested there are stupid people. One should stick to arguing the case.
I'd say if you haven't worked a year, you don't deserve a year off, pregnancy or not.
Plan your life accordingly and take responsibility.
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.
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).
surplus = production - consumption
Here’s some economic comparisons: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/finland/usa
GDP per capita Finland 49,738$ US 65,462$
Average Wage Finland 52,890$ US 54,951$
Debt Per Capita Finland 29,624$ US 65,545$
Annual Vehicles / 1,000 p. Finland 23.68 US 53.85
CO2 Tons per capita Finland 8.80 US 16.14
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt you can group all those people together, and remember, you don't know them.
You listed a lot of right issues to imply that the left is the only side fighting for it, which is not true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have any citations or source for that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know your friend and I don't know the particulars. I'll just say one thing: of course it's difficult -- for the mother too!
I manage with the bottle, by the way. And play, and change diapers, and soothe my baby when she's upset. It's tiring, but also rewarding.
It's not possible to generalize about what will happen, but probably all fathers should at least give it an honest try.
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).
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.
Men do not produce milk.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yes.
All this besides the obviously wrong equivalence you make between child bearing and breast feeding.
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.
This is begging the question. Nothing you've said has shown this is the reality.
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 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.
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.
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.
> It's still way better than fast food.
Agreed!
> (can't breastfeed, milk in a bottle is not the same)
that was pumped milk.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
Now if it say "mom has X leave after birth and dad Y", this is discrimination in the law.
Please note im not saying this is bad, im just saying it is NOT equality.
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.
It's amazing and really really hard.
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.
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.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FM.NE.ZS?en...
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).
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
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.
And how much in the first five months?
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.
Of course there are people who don't have that but that is a sad state whether you have children or not.
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.
I have a kid about every 600 days. (have 12 so far) Out of that 600 days, it looks like I'd work just 164 days. It would be 2-day weeks for decades.
That is quite a way to run a country. I think it only works because there are very few births in Sweden.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
This is broken.
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.
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.
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.
(It's crap, but it's the same crap.)
No, I mean most workers, under FMLA.
> How long is the leave?
12 weeks.
> Is it paid?
No.
Congrats Finland.
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.
https://likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/38051-on-maternity-and-sicknes... Section 10.6. Amount of Parental Benefit
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.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-hav...
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.
We also have $8.25/child/day government-subsidized daycare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hardly think that has anything to do with making good decisions about civilization
Just saying, don't take other adults not interacting with your child as some overarching statement about gender in society.
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.
There are many reasons, it seems to me that external circumstances are shaping a lot of them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
exactly! Single payer universal health insurance will also take care of the numerous doctor's visits that follow. Oh wait...
"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."
https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2019/06/16/involved-d...
There was so many dads just walking around the city/parks in the middle of the day pushing prams. It was so nice to see.
I suppose none of them have to deal with people dismissively describing spending time with their families as "babysitting", either.
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.
We shouldn't exclude them either.
Every mention needs to include a long list of every possible combination, no matter how rare and edge case. /s
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.
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?
Dads get 6 month non-trasferable paid leave.
They were not going to be able to fire him without repercussions. He was not required to let them know during the interview.
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.
>14 months paid leave
Certainly you meant weeks... FMLA only covers 12 weeks of unpaid leave here in the United States.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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? =)
I mean, really, how do people think like this?
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 :)
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.
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.
The easy solution would be to have this set up for the desired number of children. 1-3 children: 100% of the benefits, >3: 20% or something similar.
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.
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.
What other things are there?
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.
What other things are mother-only things in your opinion?
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!
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.
Not sure how you would notice that when visiting, but, yes, they do.
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.
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.
If all it’s competitors have to, what’s the difference?
If you’re really concerned make an exemption for small businesses that allows them to claim the costs back from the government.
Edge cases like this are irrelevant, most Americans are employed by enormous companies that can most definitely afford it.
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.
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/fin/
https://tradingeconomics.com/finland/personal-income-tax-rat...
The US has a lower top income tax rate of 37%:
https://www.debt.org/tax/brackets/
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:
https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/producti...
You're confusing Finland with Norway and their national fund.
Huh? We don't have any sources of oil. We do have oil refineries but not any wells or drilling. You may be thinking of Norway.
There is a reason the entire Silicon Valley doesn't pack up and move to Finland. The money is in California right now.
Immigration moves people about quite well.
The method of milk delivery is not as important as being with the baby.
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.
Research apparently indicates that being loved in your first year is key to your development.
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.
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.
Looks like it would lead to bloat & waste
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...
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
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?
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.
But they can! The article talks about 2 months the father must take off.
Especially as my comment didn't even touch upon pro or contra breastfeeding but just stated a simple fact or reality.
You mean when someone says -or signs- that we should build a wheelchair ramp?
Some people are deaf and can't speak. Let's not exclude them.
Example article:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/20/is-brea...
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."
"Breastfeeding in the 21st century: epidemiology, mechanisms, and lifelong effect" - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Breastfeeding is one of many variables and formula has come a long way.
* 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."
A basic google query will get a ton of results. Here are a few.
Overview of 75 studies: https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equali...
https://thinkprogress.org/same-sex-parenting-study-age-25-67...
https://qz.com/1320434/new-research-debunks-old-science-abou...
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?
Not an economically viable strategy for any company looking to stay in business more than a year or two.
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.
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.
If it were a three person company, one person is now gone for 14 months and legally can’t be replaced? A nightmare for the other two employees.
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.
Example: our childcare facility employs two people, and replacements are VERY difficult to find at the moment.
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.
Don't these fall under "experimentation/probation" period, where you can fire without reason?
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.
Just some thoughts.
Forgive them, Milton, for they don't know what they are saying.
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?
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.
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.
My wife's leave comes from our state's short-term disability insurance program, which I believe draws its funds from state taxes.
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.
To be treated with respect like a human being and having overall a good life is still a privilege in 21st century.
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?
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.
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.
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.
10 people or 10,000 people, if you can't afford your staff going on parental leave / long term sick / vacation, you don't have a sustainable business.
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
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
You've never run a startup or small business. At the beginning margins can be razor thin, and unplanned or extended leave can have a huge impact.
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.
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.