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French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

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Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say it’s probably more like there aren’t many Swedes who could deal with a house with 12 kids. The after school logistics alone must be a nightmare. Either that, or there’s something plugging the loophole the GP mentions.

What about the difficulty of having 12 pregnancies? You'd have to set aside 12 years in the first place. A woman in such a family isn't planning on working.

Women don't need to be off work for the entire pregnancy nor the entire year after giving birth, though. If you are splitting your maternity leave with your spouse, you might not take an entire year off. You might just take the time that pays you more instead of being paid less: I don't know how it is other places, but you aren't getting paid for maternity leave if you don't work. (IIRC, in norway, the man doesn't get much leave if the woman isn't working).

Your job is probably protected while on maternity leave too.

I*d say that one of the main difficulties with 12 pregnancies is the actual pregnancies - they are hard on the body and honestly, it isn't recommended that folks have a pregnancy a year - if one even is able to have so many. The more likely situation is that having 12 children means some of those children are fosters or adoptions. And at that point, I don't actually care if someone has 12 children so long as they are good parents.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#142
post #91
post #22

Compare this to 480 days of shared and paid parental leave in Sweden at 80% salary. The fathers are looked at negatively if the don’t take some of this time. https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-maternity-leave-pater...

Germany also has quite generous parental leave. 14 months to split between parents as they see fit. But no single parent can take more than 12 and it's only 65%. 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.

Not completely true though. Salary caps are in place that restrict the amount you can get. While for full time parental leave that's capped at 1800 Euro/months, for part time they restrict the eligible amount you're allowed to earn. For anyone working in tech that means if you work part time you're likely to get only 150 Euro per month, even if you only make half the money. Not really better than just reducing your hours outside of parental leave.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#143

Spain found that parental leave resulted in fewer children. Ha. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

> Spain found that parental leave resulted in fewer children. That's long been known to be true of social support and safety nets generally, so it's not a surprise that it would be true of parental leave, which is a subset of that.

IIRC free childcare results in higher fertility though.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#144
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany also has quite generous parental leave. 14 months to split between parents as they see fit. But no single parent can take more than 12 and it's only 65%. 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.

I can echo that. 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 t…

  > Still only 2% of men take the leave, while 42% of women do [1].
  > I can only speculate as to why.
This is actually pretty simple: Germany's culture is still deeply rooted into old gender roles - father provider and mother educator.

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.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#145
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is enough time to have another kid. I have 12 so far. If I lived in Sweden, I wouldn't have to work. I could keep it going for decades. It's odd that Swedes aren't taking full advantage of the situation.

Twelve kids is 24/7 work. Why I would change 8 hours to it? It is also unethical way of life in this planet.

> It is also unethical way of life in this planet.

Let’s not project western purity codes to the entire planet. This planet still has countries with high mortality rates, infant and otherwise.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#146
post #4

It really irked me that here in Canada the options were generally skewed towards mothers remaining home. You can split 40 weeks of parental leave, but many employers won't provide parental benefits and those that do often only provide parental benefits to mothers. For instance, my employer at the time provided wage top-up for women on leave but nothing for men. Just one of _many_ structually sexist policies in societ…

It's not "structurally sexism", it's biology. Practically no women ever will make it through the entirety of a pregnancy without needing (not choosing) to take some time off work if she works a full-time job. Even if this is just a single day of delivery. Generally though, it's much more than a single day that needs to be taken off. In contrast, at no point in a woman's pregnancy does the father need to take time off…

Employer payment structure is biology?

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#147
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can relax a lot and enjoy retirement with 12 kids at home ;) This sounds like hard work to me..

With that many kids the older ones are probably helping raise the younger. My wife's cousin has 5 kids (in relatively short intervals, I think there's less than 10 years between the oldest and youngest) & the 2 oldest ones help out a lot.

So it turns into more of a management role, and less like hard labor. Still not really retirement.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#148
post #103
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is wishful thinking that policy makers understood (or even understand today) the 'tradeoff' or have any real awareness of the systematic effects of said labour policies. Many of the 'side effect' realities, for example as cited by the OP are very real, and go somewhat unmeasured or sidelined. Europe is not doing very well, it's treading above water, fumbling from crisis to crisis without any obvious pathways out.…

Those policies are discussed in the open, don't generalize your countries dysfunctional political culture to the rest of the world. Also, don't assume then that your legislators considered the externalities such as poverty and working poor of such a disparate society. Europe is fine, don't confuse the absence of tophits for an absence of a strong middle class. I'm tempted to say Europe is in fact one of the most resi…

"Those policies are discussed in the open, "

It's the opposite. French labour policy for example is a giant political boondoggle. It's one series of short-signed populist back-room deals after the next.

What 'serious reform' looks like is the 'Hartz concept' [1] - nothing like it exists really in the rest of the EU.

The results of French labour policy mean consistently almost 2x the unemployment rate of US/UK/Germany, for example. [2]

This is not an example of 'strong' it's an example of 'very weak' and it hurts quite a lot of people.

A perfect example of shortsighted, populist, untenable policy: Hollande's 'Supertax' on the rich [3]. This was an an act of self-destruction, not construction.

While Hartz is widely viewed as being a giant success, none of the French economic reforms made sense, and none of them have helped.

And FYI Europe doesn't have a middle class, and remember includes places like Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Greece, S. Italy which are actually quite poor.

European nations individually have 'decent' Gini coefficients, but if you do the 'EU-wide' coefficient it's quite bad. Average Slovak is nowhere near the average Swede.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept

[2] https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-7...

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is enough time to have another kid. I have 12 so far. If I lived in Sweden, I wouldn't have to work. I could keep it going for decades. It's odd that Swedes aren't taking full advantage of the situation.

Florida Man informs Sweden and Germany that their societies are failing. In other news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBqY-4oDWAQ&feature=youtu.be... But in all seriousness, Germany and Sweden (and the USA for that matter) all have sub-replacement fertility rates. I understand that you believe that people will reproduce like rabbits, especially if incentivized, but the data doesn't reflect that. In every system ther…

Does Sweden want more kids? If so, I don't think someone having 12 kids is really abusing the benefit, but rather providing Sweden with what it wants.

Re: French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is enough time to have another kid. I have 12 so far. If I lived in Sweden, I wouldn't have to work. I could keep it going for decades. It's odd that Swedes aren't taking full advantage of the situation.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that people want to be sexually active and don't want children until they have an existential crisis and many existing people are unplanned happenstances. Educated people don't have enough children to replace themselves, and its not because they are too busy. Give people the choice and most choose to do things preventing children until they have existential crisis. Remove the cho…

Would you mind sharing some of these evidence ?
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