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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

IMO this should be woman's (or man's if man is staying at home with the kids) choice, and their choice alone. And paid leave should be at least 2 years, even if partially paid. The job market hasn't been this tight in 50 years, now would be a good time to introduce longer paid family leaves.

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Two years seems absolutely absurd on many levels.

It is not absurd. We have (I think partially-)paid 2-year parental-leave here in Romania and people and companies manage just fine. Of course, not all of the involved people choose to stay for the whole two years at home, but I have lots of former colleagues and acquaintances that did just that and they were more than ok, even more than that, the companies hiring them managed to stay in business, even if they weren't owned by successful business people like Bill Gates. 6-month only parental-leave is a joke, no parental-leave is barbarous.

Six months? My wife and I receive exactly as many paid days as we have saved up PTO. So, about three weeks each. Any time after that is unpaid, but we’re protected from being fired for three months.

This sounds so wrong to me, and I don't even have kids yet. Until issues like this one aren't resolved then the inequality between men and women (in wages, management positions) will continue to remain the same, no matter the media rhetoric, for the simple fact that many women will choose not to go back to work (it's mostly women that make that sacrifice).

How does the work that would have been done by the person on leave get taken care of?

Does it (1) go undone, (2) do those not on leave have to do it in addition to their normal work, (3) do companies set their staff sizes so that they have extra capacity to take up slack from those on leave, or (4) do they hire temp workers to fill in until the person on leave comes back?

Does it? Most European countries offer 1 year paid maternity leave (quite often it's almost 14 months because PTO is still applies) then you can take another 1 year of unpaid leave. The employer cannot fire you.

If I’m a small business making enough to employ myself and 2 other people, how very carefully would I think about taking on someone whom I might need to pay to not* work at my company for a year?

Where I live: Government pay for it if the company has fewer than 20 people.

That makes it way more feasible for small businesses. Of course that now just makes me think extremely hard before hiring my 20th person.

That’s at least a much less serious limitation to job creation.

I'm not saying it should be fully paid, although I'd welcome some sort of a UBI-like payment to stay at home parent (singular, mother _or_ father) in the first 2 years of their child's life. I'm saying that's what the needs of the child really are. To have to sacrifice that to "reenter the workforce" should really be socially unacceptable.

>Two years seems absolutely absurd on many levels.

Especially "at least" 2 years. As in, 2 years was the minimum and maybe 5 would be better?

It likely would be, actually, but I think 2 years is more economically sustainable. Like it or not, for a society to work, we have to procreate and raise kids. To make raising kids properly (which is already hard work) impossible is idiotic and counterproductive.

Allowing one's children to be raised by strangers is lazy and selfish. And absurd.

We of course need procreation to continue the species, but arguably the world is already overpopulated, unsustainably so. Aside from that, there are plenty of orphans in the world that need loving parents.

Choosing to procreate, period, is selfish. And yet we don't scorn people for taking that path.

I dunno selfish, I could make the argument that raising your child yourself out of some misguided notion that you're the best person for that job is selfish.

Disagree, within the timeframe of this topic. 0-6 months is basically all about the bond between child and parents. Sometime after that, sure, a requirement to socialise comes into play.

I'm afraid I must disagree. There's no evidence to suggest that the bond between a child and its biological parents is in any way important. Further, it is unlikely that its biological parents are experts on raising children and are thus likely to raise it suboptimally, leading to a poorer quality of life in its future.

Therefore, it is more selfish to raise your child yourself than to have an expert to do it for you.

I shouldn't have to disclaim this by argument by saying that I'm not making a serious recommendation to anyone, but because parents are so defensive and irrational when it comes to how they raise their children, I feel that I must. I don't have kids and don't plan on having kids, so this is merely an intellectual exercise for me.

What do you mean "socialize"? Do you have kids? Most kids can't even walk until they're about a year old.

That was my point? In that there’s no benefit to the child to be in someone else’s care with a bunch of other kids for the first 6 months at least, and probably quite a lot older than that.

Assuming 2 years paid leave only works if your workers are non-essential and additionally more-or-less interchangeable. What happens if a person is hired for an essential role, then leaves for 2 years expecting their job back?

Imagine like, a CFO or specialist mechanic takes 2 years paid leave. What do you do? You hire a new CFO/mechanic. You can't function well without one, certainly not for 2 years.

Then when the paid-leaver returns, what do you do? Fire the person you hired to fill the gap? Have 2 CFOs or redundant mechanics on staff?

If parental leave is equal between genders, this argument may stand.

But beware any unequal treatment of men and women with generous leave. It creates big incentives not to hire women of a certain age and family status. It's a lot harder to oppose discrimination when the discrimination is obviously rational and arguably not even wrong.

I do wish it was socially acceptable for men to stay at home with kids too. In 90% of the cases currently people will think there's something wrong with the man.

The way it's done in Sweden is that 3 months are reserved for the father, otherwise they're forfeited. Works wonders because initially, fathers had a very legitimate reason to take the leave, anything else would be giving up free money. But once it became the norm, it changed the culture. Now it's creeping upwards slowly, at around 4.5 months on average I think. Not amazing, but it's enough that it's harder to discriminate against women in particular, rather than perhaps more broadly couples in their early 30s... What I see though is that since everyone's doing it, there is a much bigger understanding in company culture that people may be away for a while and just find ways of dealing with that.

Unfortunately I think many men in the US would forfeit that time, free money or not, believing that taking leave as a father is "unmanly" or "shows a lack of loyalty to the company". It's incredibly dumb, but... social pressure usually is.

I don't think American culture is more fundamentally macho than Swedish culture. Maybe now it is on average, but not when this rule came into place. Monetary incentives really do work.

It's not about being macho or anything. It's about societal expectations. I feel that here in the US this shit is actually seeping into the female population as well as more women insist on equality with men. So rather than insist on affording quality parenting time to fathers (which IMO is what they should actually want if they want real, actual equality), they give it up themselves. The aforementioned Swedish use-it-or-lose-it model strikes me as sensible. Some companies here in the US offer vacation time in this fashion, without rollover into the new year, and anecdotally people make it a point to take vacation in that case.

The market won't always be this tight...and frankly, people don't realize how expensive it is for companies to essentially subsidize child care through paid leave and stipends.

If a civilization finds that systematically supporting the creation of the next generation of citizens is just too expensive, it won't find itself a civilization for much longer.

Civilizations currently finds themselves basically over-run with people at the moment and getting “worse” every decade. I don’t think we’re headed towards any kind of insufficiency.

I just find it ironic that the people on the right screaming in fear of immigration, are also allied with the ones causing a huge concentration of wealth, driving poor economics, and lower fertility of people already settled in first world nations.

I'm ok with our nation as a melting pot, I think we end up stronger for it in the mix, but when you combine demographics with Ebenezer Scrooge capitalism it ends up with groups in nations on the tail of economic expansion are the ones who end up with expanded population.

Children will exist and be part of your civilization regardless of how much you spend on them. You'll be a civilization, just not a very good one.

There used to be a time when there was an unwritten contract between employer and employee - growth options, learning, leave packages, etc - in return for long term tenure at the company. That has basically gone the way of the dodo in most companies.

Because long term tenure doesn't get companies enough of a return. If a company wants me to stay long term, I need regular raises above the rate of inflation, parental leave, everything you listed. It's so much cheaper to spend the $10k or so it costs to replace me every year or two and not worry about the other things.

The market is this tight in part because birth rate is dropping like a rock. It's dropping like a rock because having a child is either unaffordable or too much pain in the ass to deal with. The companies will have to see a bit beyond their next quarterly revenues to see reason in having a sane labor market in the future. I'd also like to see large tech companies (which constantly complain about the "shortage of talent") pitch in on the education/training side of things, without externalizing those costs to the taxpayer and worker.

I don't disagree that governments should be incentivizing reproduction (at least that is my position) the problem is that in this particular instance, the Gates Foundation was not having their cost offset by government and they were just losing workers for a year at a time on their own tab. Yes, Gates is a very rich man, but in the end that really takes away from their charitable work for people that need things a lot more than an extra 6 months. For other companies it takes away even more, and in some cases can outright drive them out of business or cause companies to just hire less women.

What's the problem with letting them work part-time from home while they're rearing their newborn? Maybe show up at the office with their newborn once a week to catch up in person. I don't get it. It's not like the work typically conducted at such foundations requires them to be in the office 100% of the time.

The problem is that in many places that would be illegal.

>It's dropping like a rock because having a child is either unaffordable or too much pain in the ass to deal with

Why is it that everyone leaves the invention of the birth control pill out of this conversation? It is likely more significant (in its effects on the world) than the invention of nuclear weapons.

Because people are choosing not to have children, or to have fewer children than they have in the past. Sure, better birth control methods make it easier to realize those choices, but... so what?

The alternative is we end up with many more unwanted children, which I hope we agree isn't a good outcome either.

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