Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 617 posts

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#141

Post by codingmess »

"to get fathers to spend time with their children"

I'm all for fathers spending time with their children, but this kind of framing annoys me.

The feminist narrative, which governments seem to swallow, is that fathers don't want to spend time with their children, and force mothers out of their careers.

The reality is probably that it is primarily a financial issue. Fathers spending more time with their children means less money for the family, in most cases. Not only is the compensation usually lower than the salary, many dads also fear disadvantages in the job when they stay away for too long, which would also result in less money for the family.

And yes, there are also reasons why it is expected primarily of fathers to provide for the family. It is not just an arbitrary social construct.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#142

Post by romaaeterna »

My family is of Norwegian extraction and I'm a dad too.

My wife has a completely different relationship with my kids than I do. She also had to go through a great deal more to birth them than I did. Her parental leave was as much about medical recovery as it was bonding time with the kids.

And, to put this delicately, but as something that needs to be stated because it's true and important for the discussion: she has a different relationship with our children precisely because she is their mother. The two of us are not interchangeable. There are a million ways this is true. I'm an attentive and a loving father, but the sound of a crying baby is something that I can compartmentalize when I need to. On my wife, though, it is an unbearable sound with physiological effects even. (One that she uses when pumping milk, for example.)

If you are not emotionally autistic, one of the most striking things that you notice about other people is how startingly different men and women are in a myriad ways, many of them related to the care of other people (big or little). Personally, I find that this "gender equality" push winds up being extraordinarily anti-woman in effect, and whenever I see a man preaching it, I assume that he is likely a broken individual in his relationship with the fairer sex, certainly someone that I would care to keep far away from my daughters.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#143

Post by sandos »

jve wrote: post #30

> Neighbouring Sweden has Europe's most generous system of parental leave with 240 days each after a baby's birth That's working days or what? In Latvia (Estonia neighbour) you may get 12 months (60% of money calculated from amount BEFORE taxes) or 18 months (43,75%). And dad can leave, too. https://likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/38051-on-maternity-and-sicknes... Section 10.6. Amount of Parental Benefit

Also Sweden gives ~80% of normal income. If you mean 60% of [income before tax] without taxes, thats pretty good.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#144

Post by codingmess »

kaybe wrote: post #107
weinzierl wrote: post #70

In Germany it is the parents who get the leave and they can freely decide who takes the 12 months of it. Even better yet: If they decide to split they get an extra of two months, so 14 in total.

And it usually ends with the mother taking 12 and the dad taking 2, and these 2 being spent on a longer vacation somewhere. There are many reasons, it seems to me that external circumstances are shaping a lot of them.

Finances.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#146

Post by socialdemocrat »

willis936 wrote: post #86

Many comments laud this as a step towards gender equality, which is a noble goal. However, I do wonder about the unforeseen consequences. All mammals (afaik) are raised by mothers. Humans are mammals. Humans do a good job of making changes to our nature, and for the most part those changes have resulted in better lives. However we still have things like nuclear families. Children aren't taken away from parents and ra…

Other animals don't commute to an office hours away every day. There is practically nothing in human society which is very normal, relative to the natural state.

In fact I would argue this in many ways makes things MORE normal not less. Fathers in hunter and gatherer societies would have spend far more time with their children than a modern father.

A hunter and gatherer spend around 8 hours per week hunting. The rest of the time the family was quite close together.

> I'm saying there might be a good reason mothers should be given maternal leave and that there might not be as good of a reason for men to be given paternal leave. Gender equality doesn't mean both genders are the same.

Of course genders are not the same. But there is no reason to encourage difference just for the sake of it. The fact is that giving fathers and mothers leave works great for families.

I have lived through this myself. Your kids are much better off for it, and so are the parents.

Statistics speak for themselves. Nordic countries score well on family friendliness, child development and happiness.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#147

Post by dudul »

blub wrote: post #104
dudul wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is probably more to reach equal pay/opportunity as opposed to any population growth agenda. When I was in the EU, I knew a woman who had 4 kids, each ~1/1.5 year appart. So she would have a kid, be out 6 month, go back to work for 6 month, have another kid, rinse and repeat 4 times :) . It was a total nightmare for her employer because they couldn't let her go, and they couldn't hire anyone permanently to do…

A smart employer would have hired someone full time to have slack. Especially after the 2nd kid.

I don't believe it was that simple. Technically the full time position existed and hiring someone else would have required finding long term budget for another one. It was in a country were firing people is very difficult when they're on a permanent position so when you hire, you have to be sure you can make it work.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#148

Post by the_af »

toasterlovin wrote: post #125
kraigie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paternity leave is a lot easier to implement than artificial wombs.

We could also stop pressuring women to conform to male standards of behavior and economic performance and instead celebrate the fact that they alone are able to perform the sacred work of growing and nurturing new human life. Then the “problem” that policies like this are trying to fix simply ceases to exist.

"Sacred"? It of course has lots of satisfactions -- why would you have babies otherwise? -- but it's also energy draining and it can drive mothers to exhaustion and a feeling of isolation that can lead to depression.

And it's also bad for the fathers. Why wouldn't you want to spend more time with your kid? You made him/her, after all.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#149

Post by kingkawn »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #12

But will they force Dads to take it? As a Dad who had two kids, I would much rather pay for childcare than take paternity leave. Would someone like me be held back artificially to promote equality? EDIT: Not a freak, don't care for the infant stage. Happy to dote when they start to turn into people.

A grave error to believe oneself superior to the pure emotional existence of infancy

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#150

Post by sampo »

weinzierl wrote: post #70

In Germany it is the parents who get the leave and they can freely decide who takes the 12 months of it. Even better yet: If they decide to split they get an extra of two months, so 14 in total.

In the new system in Finland, both parents get 6.6 months, of which they can give up to 69 days to the other parent. But in other words we can also say that both parents get 4.3 months, and then there is 4.6 months that they can divide between themselves.
Post reply on HN