[rebuilder]

The underlying assumption here is that women take care of kids, while men work. That's what an union should address IMO. Instead of maternal leave, have parental leave that men, too, can take. That way, the playing field is leveled more.

Of course, there's no quick fix here - it's a deepset cultural issue, and getting men to take that leave when it's available to them still seems to take some pushing.

[fastball]

That's because it's not merely a cultural issue, it's a biological one.

By necessity, all women that have children need to take time off, at least in the pregnancy/birth stage. The productivity lost is generally less if you only need to coordinate one person taking maternal/paternal leave. So the obvious choice is to extend the leave of the person that absolutely must take it.

[User23]

Breastfeeding is also a major issue. For the first six months of life it's far and away the preferred food source. And breastfeeding infants need to eat every 1-3 hours. Sure, women can pump, but then they have to do that every 1-3 hours to maintain their supply. Also while pumped human milk is better than formula, it's still not as good as direct.

Biologically speaking pregnancy, birth, and raising children makes serious demands on women that it doesn't on men. Treating people justly requires recognizing these differences.

[rabboRubble]

And by necessity, some men take over primary parental responsibilities when their child's birth mother die in child birth or decide wifehood and mommyhood isn't for them and run off.

[aaomidi]

It's both actually. Different cultures have had different approaches to raising a child.

Painting it as black and white doesn't help.

[Pfhreak]

The phrase 'not merely' implies 'both'.

[aaomidi]

Sorry missed this.

[reverend_gonzo]

Women should get more leave, because they need to physically recover Having a baby damages your body and often requires minor (sometimes major surgery) to repair.

I (as a man) just had a child a few days ago. I'm perpetually sleep deprived and miserable, but my wife? On top of being in an immense amount of pain due to (minor) complications, she is not able to take any real painkillers, and has to spend an hour breastfeeding every three hours.

there is nothing about her situation that I envy, or that any man compares to post-childbirth.

[tomp]

> Women should get more leave, because they need to physically recover Having a baby damages your body and often requires minor (sometimes major surgery) to repair.

This argument doesn't make any sense. You should really be arguing that "women should get some leave". What's wrong with her being off for 2 months (directly before and after birth) until she recovers, and then him being off for the next 4-10 months?

[lotsofpulp]

In order to make it work, I think you would have to force men to take the parental leave, otherwise the implicit value of a man would still be higher. If the goal is to mitigate the consequences of giving birth and taking care of an infant, and the consequence is that women have less time for work, then you have to force men to also have less time for work.

[iamsmooney]

Enabling should be enough. NY State has a paid family leave policy[0] that allows both parents to take advantage. The birth mother may be required from a health perspective to take more immediately but allowing the other parent the same opportunity for bonding and helping with child/family care is important. There's no forcing it at all, the parents can choose what is best for them which is the flexibility and independence that the rest of the USA should be enabling.

[0] https://paidfamilyleave.ny.gov/

[lotsofpulp]

Enabling isn't sufficient to counteract the fact that the men who choose not to take leave will be more valuable to an employer.

If society wants men and women to be on equal footing, and society wants women to be able to have children, and the consequence of having children is not being able to work, which then results in being less economically valuable to an employer, then to "fix" this, society must also make men just as less economically valuable. It all depends how "equal" you want to make the game.

[tomp]

Although I disagree with your assumption (that it's valuable that men and women are equal in every, or at least this particular, dimension), I want to point out that you're forgetting another option - to make women (mothers) more economically valuable (so they compare favourably with fathers / childless individuals). You can simply reward companies whose employees have children! This would also correctly incentivize hard-working smart people to procreate (if rewards are proportional to taxes/salaries).

[iamsmooney]

I'm not sure why the discussion is heading towards making companies value genders equally. Is "women get pregnant" a real concern from an employers perspective? Anecdotally I have not seen that be the case, and if it were a corporate truth I expect some discrimination lawsuits to emerge.

[rebuilder]

Yes, you probably need to push men into taking leave. Incentivizing may work better than trying to force them. For example, go a bit further than just having parental leave, and have some of that time be paternal leave that the mother can not take. You don't have to use it, but there's an incentive to.

Of course that's not going to fully even the books. Men don't get pregnant. They're not going to breastfeed or recover from giving birth. But that doesn't mean that you can't make things better.

Look at it from the perspective of the family: requiring women to bear the entire burden of childcare in terms of time off work puts a serious damper on their career prospects. By allowing and incentivizing the man in the family to also take time off for childcare, you improve the woman's chances at building a strong career. That should translate to higher income for the family.

[hopler]

How does trading one person's career for the other improve family income? If the woman has higher earning potential, the man can stay home thanks to her earnings. If they can't afford that, then they can't afford kids and economically the system is broken regardless

[tathougies]

> If the goal is to mitigate the consequences of giving birth and taking care of an infant, and the consequence is that women have less time for work, then you have to force men to also have less time for work.

What exactly is the point of this? All this does is penalize poor families. No amount of monetary hand out is going to ever devalue the wealth creation ability of work. You cannot pay out the social benefits of working. Women undertake a vital task in giving birth, and they of course need time to recover. However, in that situation, the best thing for their family is not for neither spouse to be uninvolved in the workplace. Forcing men to stay home (rather than choose what is best for their family) simply limits the family's overall ability to create wealth for themselves.

Yes, paternity leave is important and nice, but the truth of the matter is that some women are going to need many months to recover from birth, and men simply do not. Why disadvantage entire families in the name of 'equality'. There is no equality to be had. The woman's body suffered through birth, and the man's didn't. The baby needs the mother nearby to feed it, not the father. What's the big deal then if the man goes back to work earlier?

Can anyone articular why it is better (for families) for men to not return to work when they feel ready, which is almost invariably going to be sooner than their wives? This seems to me a good thing that ensures children have their financial well being looked after.

[rebuilder]

It's not about having men stay at home so their unrecovered wives can get back to work. The assumption is that people are sane and that parental leave is long enough that by and large physical recovery is done well before the leave is over.

It's about making hiring a woman less burdensome to employers compared to men by letting men take care of the child when the mother is well but the child still needs at-home care. Of course, how realistic that is hinges very much on what the period of parental leave provided is in the first place. If it's just long enough to let the majority of women hobble back into the workplace after dropping their infants in daycare... well, maybe that's a whole other issue.

[tathougies]

> It's about making hiring a woman less burdensome to employers compared to men by letting men take care of the child when the mother is well but the child still needs at-home care.

I understand that this is the purpose, but I'm questioning why that's a good thing. All this does is hobble the workforce artificially. This is like requiring a man who can lift 50 pounds for his job to take time off twice a week to make up for the guy who -- due to some bodily reality -- can only lift 25. Why is the man who can lift 50 pounds artificially limited in helping his family in the name of 'equality'.

A central point of the women's right movements was that women should work because husband's income was not always reliable. Plus, men could die, leaving a woman without any means of income. However, we have swung in the very opposite direction, where we are now limiting men providing for their families in the name of women working. If women in the workplace require men to take extra time off in order to be 'equal', then it's clear that the arguments used to keep women from the workplace were valid to begin with.

Now, I don't believe in any of this, but this is the underlying logic (whether admitted or not) of various schemes meant to hobble fathers returning to the workplace at whatever time they and their family decide is appropriate.

[thecopy]

I don't know why this is being downvoted. It is certainly true in Sweden that while we have parental leave, men take a lot less, and the left wing parties are trying to create a law forcing men to take time off.

[oarabbus_]

Hmm, even with paternal leave, the mother would be taking more time off while the husband works in the overwhelming majority of families, at least those who are not fortunate to have millions in the bank where both spouses are able to take time off without any thought to financial impact.

Painting this as a "deepset cultural issue" and not a matter of practicality and biology is either missing the point, or intellectually dishonest.

[rebuilder]

I probably didn't put all the caveats in that post that I could have. To be clear, you're not going to change biology, and as long as women bear children and men do not, they will require more leave for childbirth. But that doesn't mean they have to take all the parental leave, and it certainly doesn't mean that childcare much later on should be a women's issue.

[saghm]

> the mother would be taking more time off while the husband works in the overwhelming majority of families

> Painting this as a "deepset cultural issue" and not a matter of practicality and biology is either missing the point, or intellectually dishonest.l

What part of human biology dictates that "the husband works in the majority of families"? That should like a deepset cultural issue to me

[oarabbus_]

Thanks for putting words in my mouth - I said "Hmm, even with paternal leave, the mother would be taking more time off while the husband works in the overwhelming majority of families" which CLEARLY implies I am talking about during pregnancy. Instead you attempted to paint it as some general remark where I am claiming the husband should work and the wife should stay at home. I resent this.

I don't know if you're intentionally being difficult, but it's a biological fact that the mother carries the child. As you may or may not know, late-term pregnancy carries very a heavy physical burden.

Late stage pregnancy can cause severe nausea and vomiting, abdominal pain, severe headache, mood swings, and other very tough issues to deal with. These kinds of symptoms may hinder or entirely prevent an employee from working, requiring them to take leave.

As it seems you aren't aware, the husband does not physically experience any these symptoms. This is not cultural. The husband literally does not have a child inside their body and suffers no physical burden. Therefore, there is no physical impact on the ability to work.

As it also seems you aren't aware, most couples don't have the luxury of having both spouses take leave at the same time, in other words, at least one spouse needs to be working. When the wife is suffering from severe nausea, bleeding, vomiting, cramps, and headaches, it will indeed be "the husband works in the majority of families" (prior to the birth of the child).

There's nothing cultural about it, it's entirely biological. Good day to you.

[InitialLastName]

> I said "Hmm, even with paternal leave, the mother would be > taking more time off while the husband works in the > overwhelming majority of families" which CLEARLY implies I > am talking about during pregnancy.

> CLEARLY

Nope, not seeing you clearly imply anything about "during pregnancy". Especially when the explicit context of the rest of the conversation is what happens after pregnancy (at the top level, "childcare").

[satyrnein]

This seems to be more specifically about backup childcare, for when a kid is sick and can't go to school that day. I suspect that if no backup childcare is available, the mother takes a day off to stay home with the child much more often than the father does. (I'd love to see some data, though.)

So you can fight it two ways, change the culture so that the career harm falls more equitably on men and women both, or create solutions such as backup childcare benefits so the harm does not fall on either.

Not that it's fair, but women stopped washing clothes by hand not because men started, but because laundry machines were invented.

[hopler]

At a software job, work from home with sleeping sick kid seems the likely option

[api_or_ipa]

In Canada maternity and paternity leave are pooled together. The parents can then decide how to apportion their leave-times to best suit their needs.

It seems to be a pretty obvious way to handle this situation.

[psadri]

Even with parental leave, the need for day care doesn’t stop. Some of the companies I have been part of offer very generous (by US standards) parental leave - 6 months. But the need for day care is there at least until the kids are 2-3 years old.

[rootusrootus]

If only it stopped so early. The first reprieve happens at kindergarten, age 5 or 6. And even then, you need after-school care another 5 years or so unless you can work out a schedule with your spouse (which is what I do -- I go in early, get home in time to walk the kids home from school, while my wife is the one that sees them off to school and then she works later).

[rebuilder]

That's true, but should be even less of a women's issue!

[sampo]

> getting men to take that leave when it's available to them still seems to take some pushing.

Are Americans so devoted to they work, that they would not take parental leave even at 100% pay?

[rebuilder]

Well, take a look at how many men take parental leave in, e.g., Finland... ;)

[sampo]

Finland gives 9 weeks parental leave earmarked to the father (cannot be transferred to the mother), at about 70% pay of your salary. According to this (2017), about 80% fathers make use of it, but on the average only for 4 weeks, not the full 9.

https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9516703

[zeveb]

If I leave work for a month, even at full pay, my team will suffer for my absence. Am I willing to burn that social capital? Maybe, maybe not.

[andbaird]

Amazon does give spousal leave.

[chaosbutters]

what about people that'd don't want children? Where is our (full/part) paid time off? This is the same problem restaurants have with smoke breaks. You have to give equal breaks to non-smokers.

It seems the simplest solution would just be to offer X% paid time off per Y yrs of service regardless of children/no children with the rule the employee gives the company Z months notice. That way male/female parents can figure out who stays home with kid and childless workers get the same benefit. It is basically like a sabbatical university professors get to go refine their skills. Employees get a certain amount of time/pay to go do 'life' things based on service.

[reverend_gonzo]

The time after a child is born is not a vacation in any reasonable definition of the word.

You want paid time off that's government mandated? Go break your leg. You'll get that time off, and it'll be about as enjoyable as maternity/paternity.

[hopler]

Broken leg isn't government paid time off, you can work with a broken leg.

[rootusrootus]

You misunderstand. The benefit is not to the parents, it is to the children.

[kgwgk]

Then another solution is to make illegal for both parents to work at the same time. The child will then benefit from the company of one of them.

[rootusrootus]

And cut the household income by half, which defeats the point.

The gov't wants more, and healthier babies, they are not concerned that non-reproducing adults consider it unfair.

[ykevinator]

We should not surrender gender in the pursuit of tolerance.

[zeveb]

Hey, what about the childless? Do folks without kids get to take long-term leave too?