441–450 of 570 posts
I literally worked for most of my child's 8 month life, from her ICU room, I worked the morning of her 9 surgeries, I worked through the genetic diagnosis, I worked through being told my child has brain bleeds, neuroblastoma, is deaf, re-intubated, etc... if my insurance wasn't tied to my work, I would've quit in a heartbeat. I'm convinced I'll go to my grave with working that time being my biggest regret in life. I…
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> Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you. I know this is an exaggeration, but it drew my interest. This expects that the rest of us have to work to subsidize you having children for five to six years . I'm wholly on board with helping parents raise children. Children are our future. But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto thos…
> But at some threshold of subsidization this equation tips and actively offloads the entire burden onto those without children. True, but on a long enough timeframe one could also view it as a repayment from the people who (with or without children) were once children-being-subsidized themselves.
The point stated was that there needs to be a threshold. You have introduced another topic entirely, and the person you are answering implied nothing about your topic.
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> is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.
I should probably clarify and reword. I don't think mothers are explicitly forcing themselves out of maternal leave - I'm saying that it's not culturally acceptable to do so. The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases. The cultural components manifest themselves different ways: As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed an…
> The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases.
Strongly agree with the above.
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Agreed, this sounds like a very good reason to ensure parental leave is available for both men and women.
It's like that here in Germany. It's a little more complicated but in the end mom and dad can split up to 14 months of paid parental leave time where no one can take more than 12 months. Now the pay does not replace a full salary of course. It is a percentage of your pay up to a maximum of 1800€. I know many dads (myself included) that have used this program.
Since the pay is capped at 1800, I know a few fathers who didn’t take even their two months because they were living at the edge of their paychecks (yes, it’s possible to live a little too large anywhere, and Germans aren’t immune), and one mother who went back to work at the end of the eight weeks post-birth that we’re absolutely forbidden to work (but are paid quite close to our pre-maternal net pay) because she was the primary earner. It’s also rougher on single mothers than partnered ones, of course, but at least isn’t as harsh for them here as it is back in the US, and for low earners, 2/3 of your previous net + 200 child benefit is not much less than net + child care (subsidized for big earners, highly subsidized for lower earners) + general costs of working.
“But you could have saved even more than that over the past few years if you didn’t have to pay really high German income taxes!” Yes, we certainly could have, and would have, given our behavior even with taxes the way they are.
However…
Most people wouldn’t/couldn’t, and because the benefit is so widespread, employers expect you’ll take it and have policies in place to accommodate it. The fact that a maternity year is normal makes it less of a career risk, and the same with several months away for fathers.
I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity) leave without an implicit bias towards hiring men (or at least paying women less). You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time. I guess you can force people to…
> Even if the federal government picks up the bill, it's still a discontinuity in business, something an employer would want to avoid. IMO this as well is something where the DevOps slogan "if it hurts, do it more often" should be applied . The "discontinuity" of an employee leaving temporarily with months of warning in advance is the easy case . If that is a serious problem for your business, it's a failure of compa…
I believe parental leave should be provided, but I don't see how anyone expects employers to shoulder the burden of providing paid parental (in reality maternity) leave without an implicit bias towards hiring men (or at least paying women less). You can provide the same benefit to men and women, but let's be honest, even when available most men take only a fraction of the allowed time. I guess you can force people to…
I think there should be more leave but it needs very strong federal subsidies. I worked with someone from a European company working in the USA. She started her full time job here while she was on an 8 month maternity leave from her old European company (which she didn't plan on returning to afterwards). It would be fucked if her old company had to eat 8 months expenses and then not even have an employee returning ba…
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> Saying "other countries do it" isn't really an answer. There's no clear solutions Your argument makes me think about this satiric article : https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na... I live in a country where it's exactly what we do, and it's fine. I took a 7 months paid parental leave as a dad recently and my company congratulated me for the birth.
Which country? What do you mean by fine? It might not affect you directly but there's going to be some negative to treating it that way. A lot of countries that provide services like this tend to have massive burdens on their health systems as well. It's a tradeoff. It might be a better tradeoff for society as a whole but this idea that there aren't some cons to doing it that way is just false. Personally, I think if…
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As a parent who got 6 months that barely fucking scratches the surface of the time it take to raise a human. Subsidize me until they are in public school and I’ll high five you.
You are asking for an incredibly high amount of welfare, essentially "everyone else in society should pay me for 5 years because I chose to have a kid". I'm choosing to have a kid too, but I'm taking the personal responsibility path of saving and paying for it on my own. Perhaps there is some middleground, but 5 years is absolutely absurd.
I have two kids, 2.5 years apart, and there was one year in NYC where a small family daycare was running us ~$5k per month in childcare. We'd been aiming for the kids to be a bit further apart, partly for financial reasons, but shrug, it didn't happen that way (first kid took a lot longer of trying than the second). We're fortunate in that we can afford that, but it did impact our long-term savings and eventual home ownership.
I honestly don't know what the working poor do. I guess you're not aloud to move away from extended family.
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On average in the US, 1 in 2 bankruptcies are due to medical debt. I think it's disingenuous to include the "biggest costs of life" and omit what is arguably the largest for an american citizen. 3000 gross is more like 2-25 net depending on the state. I haven't been in many industries where an employer is going to be covering healthcare costs for an $18/hr employee. So for a family of 3, that's another $1,000 a month…
> " On average in the US, 1 in 2 bankruptcies are due to medical debt. I think it's disingenuous to include the "biggest costs of life" and omit what is arguably the largest for an american citizen." If one's income is as low as the parent described, they would likely be eligible for Medicaid.
The parent described the median-income earner.
In my state of Arizona, if you were grossing 36,000 a year with a family of 3 you would be about 20% over the threshold to qualify for medicaid.
My first child is due January. I sat down with my boss about a month or so ago and told him I'm intending to take parental leave. "No problem" he said, I told him my intention was to take the full 8 weeks I'm entitled to. He didn't say anything right away to that... eventually it was more of a "...that's not typical for the guys around here" We did a bit of back and forth. (I think he went to HR to find out he can't…
Those first few weeks present an unparalleled opportunity of becoming a larger part of the rhythm of your baby’s life. My husband took the month after our kid’s birth, and then the transition to daycare at a year old, and that has entrenched wake up/go to sleep as their special time together, no matter how long his work days have ended up.