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Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

bbc.com

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Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#481

Post by krastanov »

HBKXNCUO wrote: post #427
krastanov wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a generic defeatist premise. Yes, if we do not try to make the world a more pleasant place to live in, the world indeed will not be a more pleasant place. And yes, poor people (and right now even middle class people) do not have the luxury to have the choice I depicted, or many other choices. But it is worthwhile to have our institutions try to change work culture for the better, exactly so that these options…

The government can't pay those costs unless you are suggesting some kind of communal child raising situation rather than having children raised by their parents. Raising children well requires a lot of time and effort. I don't think it's defeatist to acknowledge that. If you want to try to improve that, find some way to raise children without needing so much of their parents' time and energy and without sacrificing q…

A number of issues with what you said:

- daycare (including fancy stuff like daycare on your work's campus where you can join your kid in between work activitie)s is a great idea that has already been tested

- it is perfectly reasonable for the extended family to help with child-rearing, especially in location where there is a history of that

- It seems crazy to me to suggest we change the ways we raise children, without suggesting changes to the ways careers progress. Even without my hippy suggestions about idealistic version of childcare, a comparatively trivial thing to do is to realign employee and employer incentives. And there are governments that do that successfully. This is why I am calling your comments "defeatist".

Stop projecting your view of the world on everyone: yes, your view is consistent and reasonable, if the homemaker is happy with the arangement, but it is not the only possible way to have a healthy family.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#482

Post by nisuni »

gambiting wrote: post #361
nisuni wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government is putting some money in it. I would prefer that money was used to extend the mother’s leave.

Again, no one is taking anything away from you as is. You can prefer that the money was given to mothers instead, that's fine.

Money is limited and the government decides how to distribute it. The difference between spending it on B and taking it away from A is, to me, absolutely unsubstantial.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#483

Post by romaaeterna »

dang wrote: post #448
romaaeterna wrote: post #142

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…

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22247178 . This comment starts off fine. Sharing personal experience is nearly always ok and interesting and good HN material. But please don't go the way of your last paragraph here. Escalations like "if you are not emotionally autistic" and "he is likely a broken individual" are guaranteed to activate someone, and that way lies flamewar—completely…

Dang, I know and respect that you are trying your hardest, but I have believed for a while that you are simply online too much -- understandably -- and that you therefore sometimes confuse the social consensus of the extremely online extremely niche Hacker News for a well-adjusted consensus.

As for your critiques of the last paragraph, "autism" is a word coined from the Greek, literally meaning "self-ism" and is used both clinically and colloquially to refer to individuals that have difficulty recognizing important aspects of the social world around them. If you have a better word or even a better explanation than emotional autism for someone's inability to recognize male/female differences in human social interaction, I'd like to hear it.

Now, as far as brokenness goes, I'm sorry if people have been "activated" by such an opinion. But I've known too many people who preached a certain sort of sexually liberating personal philosophy for entirely selfish reasons to retract the judgement. If Hacker News can't handle this critique because it is too emotionally distressing to discuss calmly, maybe you should consider binning all gender-related discussion on this site.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#484

Post by Lev1a »

radicalbyte wrote: post #200
gylterud wrote: post #109

When we had our first child (in Sweden), we could divide the time (13 months total) freely between the two of us. Then we got some extra money if each of us took more than 30% of that time. I think they stopped with the money bonus, but it was really great for us. We are now having our second child (now in Norway), and while the father quota is great, they now require the mother to be "in activity" (i.e. working) if…

This should be the norm in all of the developed world! As a freelancer I took a self-funded three-month break (it just finished) when our third child was born and it has been amazing. I wish that I'd been in a position to do the same for my other two children too. Firstly, we're trying hard to close the gender pay gap. Giving fathers the same amount of free time as the mothers goes a long way here. Secondly, it's fan…

> Thirdly, the cost is not large. Businesses are already absorbing the lost productivity caused by the fathers being exhausted. This formalizes it.

In our project management course we learned a rule of thumb that for new parents you have ~25-30% less FTE available during the first year of the child's life (due to care for sick children, getting sick themselves, being exhausted from lack of sleep etc.)

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#485

Post by blub »

satyrnein wrote: post #469
blub wrote: 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.

Please cite the studies on breastfeeding. Most show very little long term benefit (meaning, excluding upset stomachs in the first year of life and similar). Example article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/20/is-brea...

Such newspaper articles are of limited use because they don't cite the studies they refer to. No one's gonna buy the author's book to verify her statements.

You also have to consider that women are sometimes bullied into breastfeeding even when it's very hard for them and that is the author's main message. Otherwise she still thinks that "breast is best": "Breastfeeding seems to improve digestion in the first year, lowers rashes for infants and is especially important for preterm babies. It also seems likely that it has some impact on reducing ear infections in young children and lowers the risk of breast cancer for the mother."

"Breastfeeding in the 21st century: epidemiology, mechanisms, and lifelong effect" - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#486

Post by ve7cxz »

systemtest wrote: post #461
jredwards wrote: post #312

In the tech worker's paradise that is California, I'm preparing for my generous two weeks of paternity leave. My co-worker, having not been employed at the company for a year yet, is preparing to burn all four days of his vacation time because he's not entitled to paternity leave yet. This is broken.

As a tech worker in California, your income is triple to that of a Finnish tech worker. You can easily take unpaid time off for your paternity leave, perhaps even quit your job for a year, and still get out ahead.

...and his living costs are probably way higher too, so it's not a fair comparison.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#487

Post by Moru »

mumblemumble wrote: post #95
dairylee wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was someone we definitely noticed about Norway when we were in Oslo for a week. There was so many dads just walking around the city/parks in the middle of the day pushing prams. It was so nice to see.

sigh I suppose none of them have to deal with people dismissively describing spending time with their families as "babysitting", either.

Nope, never heard that.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#488

Post by CathedralBorrow »

lacker wrote: post #465
scrollbar wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to downplay the importance of your fathering and nurturing your child's passions at all- My understanding of the research around personality development is that something like 80% (BS statistic I know) of the personality is formed in the first 5 years of development. The early few years are when we get conditioned with the core emotional programming: "I am safe" vs. "I am at risk" - "I am lovable" vs. "I am unlov…

80% of the personality is formed in the first 5 years of development. There's just a huge difference between a 3-month-old baby, who can't recognize faces yet and spends most of the day sleeping and eating, and a 3-year-old child who is running, jumping, telling stories, making friends, and learning to read. For a 3-month-old baby, I doubt that parents do much more than a random babysitter. For a 3-year-old child, th…

Is your doubt founded in any research or more of a gut feeling?

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#489

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

camelNotation wrote: post #389
petercooper wrote: post #240

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'm an American who received several months of paid paternity leave when each my children were born (my company is an exception to the rule here in the US). It's not just about the child that is born, it's about your partner as well as your other children. The introduction of a new child is a huge shift for everyone in a family and being there to support your partner during that time makes a huge difference if you sp…

In Norway we get the paternity leave after the mother goes back to work. It is just the man for 4 months. When baby gets sick/teeths then it must be the man that is there with baby 24/7. You are describing a support role. The Norwegian model forces the father into the primary role.

It's amazing and really really hard.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#490

Post by sonofhans »

MadWombat wrote: post #423
gnud wrote: 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?

> Could this become a "don't hire married people in their late 20s and early 30s" incentive?

Not for a good company. I've had several employees go on maternity and paternity leave. I've given them respect, and time, and money, in order to make this time of their lives as unstressful as possible.

I've done it because it's the right thing, but these people remember being treated well. They've come back to work and done very well. They feel safer knowing that their day job explicitly supports their families.

The time someone needs off work to care for a new family is a drop in the bucket compared with a whole career, or even a few good years spent at one company. Optimize for the humans, and for the long term.

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