12 of the 14 months can be doubled as well, up to 24 months, at half the regular salary replacement. A good option if a parent wants to work part-time.
One can go also up to 36 months of parental leave, but the rest of the time is unpaid.
Fellow German here, I don't know of anyone in my friend circle rich enough to be able to put together the downpayment for a home...
So yes, it's a good amount but still much less than the minimum 80% here in Sweden.
Still only 2% of men take the leave, while 42% of women do [1].
I can only speculate as to why.
1) Our cultural wiring runs deeper than just "sex is a social construct"
2) The German system is still quite complicated. As countless online calculators and private consultancies helping you filling out the forms prove. As well as the above statistic itself, since financially it would make more sense if the father took as much leave as possible (if he earns more, the family gets 65% of "more").
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit...
Whoever of the parents is earning less, in most cases it would make more sense for the less compensated parent to just switch into part-time, if he/she isn't already working a tax-free "mini-job", while the higher compensated parent takes the leave. This yields the highest income per hours@home.
But that's usually not what people optimize for, they optimize for max total income, because rent or mortgage payments etc aren't based on a percentage of income but fixed amounts. Sure, it's great if you only work one hour a month and get 1000€ for that instead of working 100 hours and getting 4000€. But if your rent is 1100€, what good does that do?
Does it matter?
This option gives you neither.
Rather, I have a colleague who took paternal leave with their partner and afterwards switched to part-time for a bit.
This statistics is simply misleading. It says that 2% of the fathers with children under 3 years old are currently on parental leave at any given time.
Let's say you split the 14 months of parental leave so that the mother takes 12 months and the father 2 months (which I commonly see). So within the first 36 months of the child's life there is a 2 in 36 chance that the father is currently on paternal leave in any random month. So basically you have to multiply that 2% by 18 to get the total number of fathers who take paternal leave: 36% if they all take the minimum number of months.
"which I commonly see" is not something that is statistically sound. And neither is just multiplying it. If fathers would on average take 1 month out of 24 offered this wouldn't exactly count as a success for the programme or gender equality.
At least anecdotally, many of the fathers I've talked to take the 2 months at the very minimum.
> Still only 2% of men take the leave, while 42% of women do [1].
> I can only speculate as to why.
To give a context of the culture and legal system, as of today, unmarried fathers don't get legal custody automatically, and if they apply and the mother refuses, they need to go to court. This is even a recent change; until 2009, if the mother refused, there was no chance, and until 2013, the father had to go to the European Court of Human Rights.
Germany has a very surprising family culture in the Northern Europe context - the surrounding countries are considerably more progressive. An educated guess is that the Nazi regime promoted the father provider/mother educator model, and it's taking a very long time to move on.
Interesting. Do unmarried fathers have any financial responsibility for the child?
everything else being equal - i.e. both parents having the same salary, career prospects, desire to work vs. spend time with baby, energy levels, etc. - it's simply more efficient for the woman to take care of the baby, as she's the only one that can feed it (or, more specifically, her feeding the baby is very likely medically better than using baby food)
You get paid (80%). You can't get fired. Choosing not to do it means you don't want to do it, or you chose something else over your parental leave. Not only would skipping parental leave not be seen as normal by my social circle, it wouldn't be seen as normal by my manager or colleagues. I'd be getting questions like "you took zero weeks of leave when your son was born? why?".
So maybe it doesn’t mean you don’t want to do it but simply can’t afford to do it.
That would of course be an acceptable excuse. I meant that for my particular situation since my peers know I can afford it, they would also know I chose not to because I dind't want to (not acceptable), or because I felt my career would suffer (not acceptable).
I can only speculate as to why."
I thought the answer is simple - father cannot breastfeed a baby (even though gender is only a social construct, as some people claim, nature is still nature and reality is still reality).
This issue could be fixed easily, by adding up the income of both partners and then paying 65% of the sum.
But instead in Germany you get 65% up to a maximum amount of 1800 Euro of the person taking the parental leave. So if your salary is higher than roughly 2800 Euro (after taxes/netto) you will get even less than 65% of your income during parental leave. So if there are two partners, one above 2800 Euro and one below it is clear that the one below should take the parental leave. So the mathematics of the German system together with a gender imbalance in salaries guarantees a conservative split of the parental leave.
If our government wouldn't be so incompetent one could think that they invented these rules on purpose. But that would imply that they can do math. And that is a conspiracy that is so absurd nobody would believe that.