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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

#551
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Surely whether it's "their most economically productive age" would depend heavily on how many children they have and how much parental leave they are allowed.

We know that people in most developed countries aren't even hitting replacement rate, so I don't think that 6 months of leave is going to break the bank.

In my experience, employees who are bad employees and blame it on time commitment to their children have usually been bad employees to begin with. I have a child, spend upwards of 4 hours a day with them on average, and work at a FAANG, while hitting promotion tracks more quickly than my colleagues without children. I know a bunch of people doing the same.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#552

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…

Having been forced to become a single dad over the last few years - your view is wrong in my opinion. But I will admit I had a similar view before my own experience. The thing is, society teaches boys/men to be self-focused and work-focused, and we subconsciously derive our own self worth from being good at those things. But that is not biological, I am pretty convinced of that now. If you were to single parent your children, you would see quite quickly you can develop a very similar relationship that a mother traditionally has. It's just a matter of spending less time on yourself and work, and more time on your children and the running of the family. Then those stronger bonds just develop naturally (and are the silver lining of my own experience).

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#553

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 Czechia, there is similar approach to paid parental leave, but it is up to 36 months. I think that this is much better to left it to parents to decide how to split that based on their personal preferences, than to force equal split in all cases.

Is there more to this, or can you really just be employed to make babies? Most couples can produce another baby before the leave expires.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#554
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swedish parental leave can be saved until the kid turns 12. Not that the 480 days will last that long, of course!

From another comment, it looks like the father only gets half, but I assume you get weekends off too. Sweden also has 25 days of vacation. I have a kid about every 600 days. (have 12 so far) Out of that 600 days, it looks like I'd work just 164 days. It would be 2-day weeks for decades. That is quite a way to run a country. I think it only works because there are very few births in Sweden.

Basing policy on 99.99 percentile sized families would certainly be odd.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#555
post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you have a small business. Not every company is a 10,000 headcount multinational. Over 90% of small business employ fewer than 20 people and small businesses make up 30% of the economy. Realistically, 1 person missing from a small business can mean 10% of their workforce is gone - and due to the size of the company they may not have people to cover the missing staff.

You don't need to have 10,000 people working for you to be able to afford to hire cover for when people going on parental leave. 10 people or 10,000 people, if you can't afford your staff going on parental leave / long term sick / vacation, you don't have a sustainable business.

> if you can't afford your staff going on parental leave / long term sick, you don't have a sustainable business

You've never run a startup or small business. At the beginning margins can be razor thin, and unplanned or extended leave can have a huge impact.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this argument. A man and a woman can decide that whats best for them is that he not take leave, but for the benefit other people he should take parental leave. Even if he enjoys working, even if the mother has decided she wants to stay home, even if they need opportunity that work brings (such as the opportunity to get promotions). Even if there are a hundred reasons for a man to not want to take l…

I'm pretty sure no one can force you away from your laptop and colleagues, but also, no one can force you to work. It's a protection. I like it.

> no one can force you away from your laptop and colleagues

But they can! The article talks about 2 months the father must take off.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#557
post #527
post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Child bearing is only an initial factor; after the baby is out it goes away. Men do not produce milk.

Why did you selectively quote me to exclude the part where I mentioned breastfeeding? Besides, some women don't produce milk either, or not enough of it. Bonding with a parent is not exclusive to breastfeeding, either (though of course it helps!).

Being perfectly honest, that sentence was so wrong I didn't feel the need to read anything further.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Daycare, the act of handing your infants and toddlers over to minimum wage workers who do not care about your children on an individual basis and who are also supposed to be taking care of several other children, is not a great idea, or even a good idea. It's a bad idea. For any decent parent, it would be a last resort before giving the children up for adoption. Yes of course it's great when the extended family can h…

I do not know where you are coming from, but our surroundings must be extremely different. This is why I am saying you should not project your assumptions on everyone. Why do you assume that daycare staff are minimal wage workers as opposed to well paid professionals that know more about intellectual enrichment and child psychology than the average parent? Why are you assuming a career means "slaving away for corpora…

>Why do you assume that daycare staff are minimal wage workers as opposed to well paid professionals that know more about intellectual enrichment and child psychology than the average parent?

I didn't assume it, I looked up what they tend to get paid and what qualifications are typically required to have that job. They tend to get paid around minimum wage, and they typically only need a high school diploma.

>Why are you assuming a career means "slaving away for corporate masters" as opposed to a myriad of ways one can work to enrich the world around them while at the same time being paid (academia, small business, art/design work, community work, the vast majority of lifestyle business, social purpose work, solving intellectually interesting technical problems, etc)?

Because that's what most people do.

>There are people that love their creative jobs, and we should not pretend they are unicorns or that they have to sacrifice their child's upbringing.

I'm sure there are some people like that, but the vast majority of children do not have two parents that fit in that category.

>What you describe sounds borderline selfish to me.

It is explicitly so.

>I get you are trying to suggest something good, but a person can make the world better (and even be paid for it) without compromising how much they care for their child.

Maybe some can. Most people aren't going to make the world better through their corporate job, and are going to compromise on how much care they give their children in order to do it. It doesn't make much sense to set society's expectations so that they only really work for exceptional people. They will do fine. They need to work for regular people.

>But then why not advocate that our communities try to make more people's lives easier?

I do advocate that. Raising children well so that they are not a problem for other people later in life is part of it. Encouraging stay at home parents to work to build their community once their children are old enough not to need full time care, rather than going back to being a corporate drone, is another thing I advocate.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#559

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 Germany it's not restricted to just parents. Could also be the new grandmother taking a few month off.

Re: Finland to give dads same parental leave as mums

#560
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

This seems like a sound argument for avoiding hiring people who might become parents soon. 30% less output for the same amount of pay seems like a bad deal for an employer.
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