Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I wonder how much this would change if parental leave was also granted to fathers at similar or equal rates. The article mentions postpartum issues -- this is stuff that isn't really mitigated by having one parent alone care for a kid. If you're struggling with depression by yourself in the house with a kid... it's nice to have more people around to help. Even if you're not struggling with depression, having people around to help with care can let you avoid the worst parts of the whole 3 hours of sleep a night thing.

And from a "nuclear family" point of view, most cultural traditionalists I know would argue to me that it's good for kids to be in multiple-parent households. When people talk about stereotypical traditionalist nuclear families, these are very often families that have extended support structures of multiple people involved in child-rearing.

Opponents to parental leave (even feminist opponents) are in some ways attempting to equalize the time-off risk between mothers[0] and fathers. And that can be done by reducing the mother's time off to zero to match the father, but it can also be done by letting fathers get involved in early child-rearing and giving them more time to help their partners.

----

[0] And nonbinary/transgender/adoptive/etc parents too of course, but I'm just using a shorthand here.

Some European countries require the parental leave to be shared to some degree. Here in Sweden each parent gets 90 days of parental leave each, and the remaining 300 days can be split in whatever way the parents choose. You also don't have to take all the parental leave at once, you can spread it out over a few years (and 96 of the days can even be saved until the child is between 4 and 12 years old if you want).

Yeah which doesn't make any sense, how can you motivate to have two adults full time only to care for your own children. Sure I agree with the parent that "it's nice" but come on, it's extremely privileged. And it's commonly abused in Sweden to take several month long vacations abroad with the whole family, which literally nobody else can do, unless you have children. It's a privilege not available to single people at all.

> It's a privilege not available to single people at all.

And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents.

I don't know the exact details of what policies are correct for paid time off, but the fact is still true that we have a strong societal incentive to handle situations like this in a way that's beneficial both to the parents and (especially) beneficial to kids -- at least if we believe that parental presence helps early development, which seems reasonably well supported.

I say this as a single person with no plans to ever marry or have children, but the reality is that being single or having kids each carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not sure that fairness between parents and childless individuals is necessarily the best lens to look at policy through.

There's a lot of middle ground here between status quo and what GP describes, but even in that case raising a child is still an 18+ year commitment; I don't think that a single family vacation significantly changes that.

Yes, it is a privilege that won't be available to me (since I don't plan on having any kids), but I believe these benefits are good for the children, which is ultimately good for society.

And sure, as a non-parent I can't take a multi-month long vacation every year, but even as a recent graduate I get 25 paid vacation days per year (5 of which can be saved for a few years). So long vacations aren't a pipe dream for non-parents.

And with the way the economy currently works and the gradually increasing life expectancy, increasing the birth rate is a good thing, and generous parental benefits are a way to encourage that. I personally think it would be best if society/the economy wasn't dependant on an increasing population, but that's a separate conversation.

All social programs will be abused at the tail. That is not a reason to avoid those social programs.

Of course single and child less couples don't get this privilege. We are trying to create incentives to having children.

In the US, we have a program called WIC, to help women with infants and children with nutrition. If you are a poor man or poor single woman, this program is not available to you. I would not consider that a privilege. We are trying to help foster the next generation and improve society.

Yes exactly. The only way to close gender gaps is to force men to do less work outside the home, not women more. (Men doing more work inside the home and women less follows from that more easily than in the other direction.)

Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins.

Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.

We can follow the tactic used in other gender equality initiatives and creates targeted incentives to raise participation levels.

As an example, they could add extra parental leave days that are earmarked for father classes.

They attempted that in Sweden and it backfired massively. The more you try to force people into what they don't naturally gravitate towards (eg. women in STEM and engineering, men in nursing / teaching roles) the more the difference grows.

I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work.

Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.

There are tons of possible explanations to explain a delta in salary between men and women. Men generally tend to negotiate better and women tend to take more time off when a son is born. You can also slice subsets of data, to show whatever you want. For example, if you look at women in their 20s, they are outperforming men on both salary and education.

There might be a middle ground here between forcing men to spend less time at work and offering them the opportunity to spend more time at home if they want to. Everyone is unique, but I know a number of fathers who would have liked to take more time off for their kids and would have chosen to if they had the opportunity, I suspect the ratio here may be higher than you expect.

> Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.

The gender gap was the explanation mbesto gave for why paid family leave for women might be opposed even by women. If the gender gap doesn't exist, and unbalanced paid time off between genders won't drive increased wage differences, then it seems like it might be fine to ignore mbesto's worry and just offer women that time off regardless of what paternal leave policies are.

> forcing men to spend less time at work

I generally agree, keep in mind the idea is to force everyone to work less, distributing the non-domestic labor more evenly across the board. The idea is very materialist, in that domestic labor needs to be done, and it's not even that "all men" don't want to do it, but that bosses have more power than husbands and ultimately we need to stop the work hours/effort rat race to free up the free time to re-figure out what families and domestic labor ought to look like.

The current trend is capitalism reaches deeper into the family. Restaraunts are displacing cooking for more social strata, Pre-K is less controversial than paid family leave which brings intensified economies of scale to child rearing.

I'm not against either of those things --- at least there will be a villages (of wage-workers) to raise kids again and more social time --- but I don't want them to happen for the wrong reason of employers sucking up more and more of our time for no good reason.

My employer privately gave me tons of paid parental leave. I took a portion of it at the beginning and ended up using the rest of it to work every other day for the remaining year - and my partner used the chance to work on her stuff.

It definitely helped us economically (it's nice to have so much paid holiday) but it forced me into a nurturing role which my partner was definitely better suited for. I ended up being quite depressed by the entire situation and had a series of mental health issues + lost most of my friends. At the same time I am definitely better at negotiating than her and I am earning more - so without that artificial incentive we would have naturally gravitated toward the best solution.

I agree two parents households work great, but you don't really need two parents hands-on with kids all the time. I find it great in limited doses but I would go completely insane if I had to do it all the time, while I can tolerate work just fine. My partner was getting incredibly stressed at work but with kids it seems like she found her balance.

She's looking forward to go back to work once all the kids go to nursery / school in 3 years, but not in a typical employers / employee setting, more like running the family software business.

That's the case in Spain since 2021. Both parents get 19 weeks paid leave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com