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Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

bbc.com

471–480 of 617 posts

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#471
post #54

Thanks but no thanks. When I’ll have a baby I‘ll have to breastfeed, after having carried him for nine months, and having him exit through my private parts. Give me my extended, non trasferrable maternal leave! Edit: since some people are misunderstanding my point: extending the paternal leave costs money. I would rather prefer those money being spent on more maternal leave.

Mothers already have a year of maternal leave, this is about fathers getting decent amount of leave as well. No one is taking anything away from you.

Please edit out swipes like "What are you on about" from your comments here. They poison discussion badly.

The rest of your comment is fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#472

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…

> 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…

> This little jab is probably why you got downvoted. Please don't make up nonsense about medical conditions or use the autistic spectrum as your synonym for dysfunction. It's not only unfair and uncivil, it's factually incorrect.

I suggest that you take a much more careful read through the DSM 5.A section of Autism diagnostic criteria. Not that I care about downvoting.

> people who support broader definitions of women's rights are sexual deviants likely to molest your children

In my experience, at least, grown men who support broader definitions of women's rights very often have selfish motives for it, and are often willing to have sex with women outside of a deep commitment for or even normal human concern for her, or to take things to the very edge of legal consent, without worry about the consequences to her. That is not a person that I wish to have around my daughters, but rather, I want them to date men who respect and protect women.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#473

I'm a dad (of three) and I am not convinced that time spent at the very start of their lives is as significant as that later in their lives (note the "as", I am not saying it has no value!) when you can really nurture their passions, knowledge, etc. I did spend a lot of time with my children in their earliest days because it was the right thing to do, but I don't feel either they or I particularly gained from it (tha…

I've learned over the last few years that much of the parenting that parents do is far removed anything that can be seen. Anything that you can conclude is a direct function of your influence amounts to a very very low percentage of your actual influence. Not that I disagree with the importance of influence in the later bits, but so much of what a child is learning for the first time is all the subtle stuff you don't realize you're doing. How you and your spouse resolve conflict, and you and the child resolve conflict, and you deal with your own emotions, facial cues, body language, regular language, music taste etc

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you have taken 6 months off without pay to do what you are doing now?

If I could afford it, absolutely. In reality, my mortgage and other financial commitments would likely have necessitated me going back to work. What we likely would have done instead is staggered my wife's medical leave with a shorter chunk of my own PTO rather than both of us being home at the same time, and put the baby into childcare earlier than we're currently planning on doing.

If you are a bet receiver of funds, who is the net giver?

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#475
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These policies have definitively contributed to a big social change. And while it looks on the surface like this is about "fairness for dad", on a macro level the changes mostly benefit women who want to both have kids and a career. It's no longer a bigger risk for companies to hire late 20-s women compared to late 20-s men - both will go on leave if they get kids. At my job, I also see way more dads staying home wit…

> It's no longer a bigger risk for companies to hire late 20-s women compared to late 20-s men - both will go on leave if they get kids True. But now it is a risk to hire people in certain age groups in general. Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?

It would at least least disperse the risk from "don't hire women of a certain age" to "don't hire people of a certain age" which I think is a win on the margin.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> both need to be employed or able to quickly become employed Not particularly 'quickly', really. Keeping it so both parents are able to be employed only requires corporate culture changes, and minor ones at that. The cost is very small and does not hurt children.

Most people don't have enough in savings to last more than half of a year without a job. I'd call that "quickly". You could try to stop corporations from preferentially hiring people who have recent relevant experience, but I am not going to hold my breath on that.

A preference is fine, if it's in proportion to how much experience from the last couple years is actually worth over experience from 7 years ago. So maybe $5k less in initial salary.

The preference for someone having zero gaps in employment is extremely overrated, and giving many more people gaps in employment to disrupt that idea is great.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#477

I'm a dad (of three) and I am not convinced that time spent at the very start of their lives is as significant as that later in their lives (note the "as", I am not saying it has no value!) when you can really nurture their passions, knowledge, etc. I did spend a lot of time with my children in their earliest days because it was the right thing to do, but I don't feel either they or I particularly gained from it (tha…

I think you miss the biggest point. This will have a significant impact on the wages of women. As suddenly women are not longer at a disadvantage when companies need to decide who to hire for a certain position.

[deleted]

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#478
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These policies have definitively contributed to a big social change. And while it looks on the surface like this is about "fairness for dad", on a macro level the changes mostly benefit women who want to both have kids and a career. It's no longer a bigger risk for companies to hire late 20-s women compared to late 20-s men - both will go on leave if they get kids. At my job, I also see way more dads staying home wit…

> It's no longer a bigger risk for companies to hire late 20-s women compared to late 20-s men - both will go on leave if they get kids True. But now it is a risk to hire people in certain age groups in general. Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?

"don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?" --> "Don't hire people during their most economically productive ages."

Not an economically viable strategy for any company looking to stay in business more than a year or two.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#479
post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please cite the studies. It seems at least impossible that babies of a male-male couple could do as well as those where the baby is raised by its biological mother even only because of the advantages of breastfeeding.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/06/children-... Breastfeeding is one of many variables and formula has come a long way.

That was not at all as conclusive as I was expecting, for several reasons:

* it's study not studies

* it refers strictly to educational performance

* it's likely detecting something else entirely: "The researchers found that same-sex parents are often wealthier, older and more educated than the typical different-sex couple. Same-sex couples often have to use expensive fertility treatments to have a child, meaning they are very motivated to become parents and tend to have a high level of wealth. This is likely to be a key reason their children perform well in school, the economists found" [...] "When the economists controlled for income and wealth, there were a much smaller gap between the test scores of children of same-sex parents and children different-sex parents, although children of homosexual couples still had slightly higher scores."

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#480
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagreed. Child bearing is only an initial factor; after the baby is out it goes away. The problem is breastfeeding, but there are ways around that (and some mothers, for a variety of reasons or impediments, don't breastfeed; in that case it's completely moot). So minus breastfeeding, the asymmetry has a large component of "it was always done like this", plus the mistaken idea some employers have that the leave is s…

I think it's worth pointing out that in the midst of this brave new world - where every woman is supposedly a kick-ass world-beating entrepreneur if only the damned patriarchy would get off her back - there are plenty of women that have zero interest in having a career, and see the point of their existence as being to have children and be a mother to them; and the erosion of wages as a consequence of womens' entry in…

There are plenty of men that have zero interest in having a career! Most people get jobs because they have to. Or at the very least, they would choose a shorter work week if they could.

If wages erode, that's a failing of capitalism, not of the idea that more people should have more options. You could restrict supply by having people not work completely at random and get the same effect on wages. I don't know what the best way to fix things is, but making employment based on gender is a dumb way to do it.

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