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Without parental leave I might be dead

nytimes.com

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Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#541

Post by beaconstudios »

lucaspm98 wrote: post #538
beaconstudios wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has socialised healthcare, so you just disproved your own point.

In a ranking of 11 high income country healthcare systems, Canada ranked 10th. They were only above the US, and I completely agree our system is fundamentally flawed as well. Source: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...

And that's because of what, there are non white people in Canada? That's a belief looking for a justification. The UK, France Germany and Sweden are also racially diverse.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#542

Post by CountDrewku »

pertymcpert wrote: post #447
CountDrewku wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Every company should be able to do without any employee. If not, that's a failure of the company. What if they decided to quit? What if they died?

They would hire someone else. That's a silly comment and you know it.

They should be able to do without an employee for a few weeks not over half a year and be forced to continue paying this individual.

What this does is affect small businesses very badly while giving the upper hand to large corporations that can afford it.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#543

Post by ido »

ant6n wrote: post #531
ido wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I Germany it's 14 months total (if both parents take at least 2 months, otherwise it's 12) & it still felt like too little! I wish I could have spent more time with my kids when they were babies but I had to go back to work.

Up to 36 months unpaid if I remember correctly.

Could be! We only took paid leave.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#544

Post by angelzen »

UncleMeat wrote: post #537
angelzen wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your question: "Why should mothers take care of infants?" A passing familiarity with mammal biology is required. FYI, babies do not subsist on hamburgers and fries. Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable. Unless we can agree to a minimally reasonable set of differences between men and women in the reproductive…

Pumping exists. Formula exists. And it isn't like we see balanced childcare responsibilities once children are weaned. The disparity in expectations for men and women in childcare roles extend far beyond the biological realities of childrearing.

"The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm

Pumping is challenging, if not downright degrading. Ask a working mother. It also doesn't work as well as you might think, both the baby and the mother need breastfeeding 2-3 hours apart, or else the lactation may stop. Formula is suboptimal, according to AAP and common sense.

This is exactly how the singleminded focus on one metric (equal wages or bust) goes awry. Both mothers and infants suffer the pressure on mothers to compete on equal footing with males at all times. Is it really that hard to give mothers the space (and financial support) to chose the well being of their infants and of themselves, and accept that course of action will inevitably lead to a small decrease in lifetime wages?

Even the ancients were well aware of the dangers of attempting to equalize everyone to the exact same standard. See the story of the Procrustes bed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#545

Post by themaninthedark »

jseban wrote: post #403
DavidVoid wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some European countries require the parental leave to be shared to some degree. Here in Sweden each parent gets 90 days of parental leave each, and the remaining 300 days can be split in whatever way the parents choose. You also don't have to take all the parental leave at once, you can spread it out over a few years (and 96 of the days can even be saved until the child is between 4 and 12 years old if you want).

Yeah which doesn't make any sense, how can you motivate to have two adults full time only to care for your own children. Sure I agree with the parent that "it's nice" but come on, it's extremely privileged. And it's commonly abused in Sweden to take several month long vacations abroad with the whole family, which literally nobody else can do, unless you have children. It's a privilege not available to single people a…

Of course single and child less couples don't get this privilege. We are trying to create incentives to having children.

In the US, we have a program called WIC, to help women with infants and children with nutrition. If you are a poor man or poor single woman, this program is not available to you. I would not consider that a privilege. We are trying to help foster the next generation and improve society.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#546

Post by Ericson2314 »

danShumway wrote: post #416
jokethrowaway wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They attempted that in Sweden and it backfired massively. The more you try to force people into what they don't naturally gravitate towards (eg. women in STEM and engineering, men in nursing / teaching roles) the more the difference grows. I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work. Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that…

There might be a middle ground here between forcing men to spend less time at work and offering them the opportunity to spend more time at home if they want to. Everyone is unique, but I know a number of fathers who would have liked to take more time off for their kids and would have chosen to if they had the opportunity, I suspect the ratio here may be higher than you expect. > Also, the gender gap is not a thing. T…

> forcing men to spend less time at work

I generally agree, keep in mind the idea is to force everyone to work less, distributing the non-domestic labor more evenly across the board. The idea is very materialist, in that domestic labor needs to be done, and it's not even that "all men" don't want to do it, but that bosses have more power than husbands and ultimately we need to stop the work hours/effort rat race to free up the free time to re-figure out what families and domestic labor ought to look like.

The current trend is capitalism reaches deeper into the family. Restaraunts are displacing cooking for more social strata, Pre-K is less controversial than paid family leave which brings intensified economies of scale to child rearing.

I'm not against either of those things --- at least there will be a villages (of wage-workers) to raise kids again and more social time --- but I don't want them to happen for the wrong reason of employers sucking up more and more of our time for no good reason.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#547

Post by mbesto »

deanCommie wrote: post #427
mbesto wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its just not beneficial for anyone. I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point. "Forcing women" back into work after pregnancy is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases. All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/motherhood...

> All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood. Citation needed. It's PART of the discrepancy, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Even the link you pasted shows otherwise. Women without children still peak at 90% of relative wages to men without children, which themselves are lower than wages of fathers (presumably because being in a stable rela…

https://www.bustle.com/p/equal-parental-leave-can-close-the-...

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/01/28/how-big-...

https://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/Assets/Documents/PDF/wor...

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#548

Post by nzmsv »

drewzero1 wrote: post #268
nzmsv wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sucks to be the kid of these bursting energy balls though. Hope the kid has a nanny or a grandmother who isn't like that.

Or a father.

True.

I think a child would benefit the most from an involved male and a female figure in their lives, but even one is better than none.

In other words, ideally that should read "and a father" ;)

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#549

Post by Apes »

echelon wrote: post #290
refurb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

There are many children where you have a choice:

* Subsidize them with 15 years of child care for a relatively small amount now, and they will become productive members of society.

* Do nothing now, and in 15 years be forced to subsidize them via crime, the justice system, and outreach programs for the remainder of their life.

Re: Without parental leave I might be dead

#550

Post by angelzen »

TuringTest wrote: post #523
angelzen wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's recap: 1. The proposal is to offer mothers a 12 months leave, at the very least as a social expectation, even better paid by a state run insurance, see e.g. unemployment, to take care of their infant children. 2. Mothers rather than fathers because mammals feed their infants with milk, and milk is produced only by mothers. Human mothers need to feed their infants every 2-3 hours. As long as breastfeeding takes…

> don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from You don't see it because you make chains of reasoning backwards leading you to absurd conclusions because you leave thousands of alternative explanations along the way, such as " as long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question " (then how is it poss…

We seem to disagree with a very specific point about breastfeeding. One perspective is supported by reasonable authoritative sources (AAP). What is your recommendation for the care and feeding for an infant in their first year of life?
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