The really worst part is that they don’t have to give you more than 12 weeks per pregnancy. So if you are put on bedrest before the birth, those weeks count toward the 12 week total. I had a friend forced back to work only three weeks after her baby was born. That’s just evil.
Bonding wasn’t the main reason I took paternity leave – it was to help my wife cope with the new baby. She alternated between states of bewilderment, panic, and exhaustion for those first few weeks.
My company offered one week of paid paternity leave, which I took full advantage of. Then I added some regular paid time off so I stayed out for about a month.
True. Although there are some states that provide more protection than the federal FMLA requires. Most notably California, in which any period of pregnancy-related disability does not count toward the 12 weeks of family leave under the California Family Rights Act (CFRA). A new mother in California could potentially qualify for 16 weeks of pregnancy disability leave and an additional twelve weeks of CFRA leave; much of it with at least partial pay through the state disability insurance or Paid Family Leave programs. The moral of the story is, if you’re going to have a baby take a job in California a year in advance.
I just want to point out that maternity/paternity leave are not really about “bonding”. If the issue was bonding, we’d be better served to have people take months 3-6 off, or even 6-9: newborn-newborns are pretty unformed. For mothers, part of the reason for taking maternity leave immediately after the birth of a child is because they’ve been through a pretty significant medical event and need to recover. However, for both parents, a major reason is simply that newborns need round-the-clock care that is effectively impossible to contract out: it’s so difficult, and so intense, that only the top tiny percent of earners make enough that it would be cost effective to have someone else come in 16 hours a day to provide newborn care (and it would pretty much have to be 16 hours a day–two full time nannies–for both parents to be able to sleep and go to work).
The reason why six-nine weeks is when most people find returning to work plausible is not because some key bonding window has passed–it’s really just opening–but because 6-9 weeks is when baby’s sleep patterns regulate enough that you might be able to get 5-6 hours a night sleep yourself on a fairly regular basis and 2) daycares start accepting infants.
When we act like parental leave is about bonding, it makes it seem like a nice thing, an indulgence. It’s not. The closest parallel is when someone’s mom gets cancer and they have to take a leave of absence to take care of her. No one talks about that as a “nice little vacation”.
As you say, Manda JO, but nevertheless it’s typically referred to as baby bonding leave because that’s what most family leave laws, including FMLA, call it. “Baby adjustment leave” might be more accurate but doesn’t sound as nice.
Not related to what you said, but as another thought, it’s increasingly rare to hear anyone refer to “maternity” or “paternity” leave any more. Sex-neutral language is the rule. So usually lawmakers, administrators and employers refer to “parental leave” or “baby bonding leave” or “pregnancy leave” (to distinguish the medical portion of the leave from the rest).
Of course there’s a stigma. You’re prioritizing something other than work!!! And what does a baby need from its father anyway, apart from his wallet? (Yes, I am being sarcastic here.)
In many companies a similar stigma exists regarding taking “too much” vacation. God forbid an employee wants to take two or three consecutive weeks of vacation.
When my son (I call him The Boy) was born, I got a couple of paid days off for the birth. I then took off 3 months when he was 4 months old to take care of him. I called it manternity leave, which most people found funny. When I went back to work, I actually had some coworkers who asked me why I would want to come back.
My manager wasn’t too happy about me leaving, but he didn’t hold it against me or anything. It was more of a “He’ll be gone for 3 months, suck it up and drive on.” There wasn’t much else about it.
I did not take off when my daughter was a baby. On one hand, I wish that I could have. On the other, she was one of the very slim percentage of children who would absolutely refuse a bottle. I wasn’t quite prepared to be a father and I would not have been able to feed her, which is unfortunate.
As usual, Manda JO, everything you say.
Relatedly, at my company the dads tend to be back within the week of the baby’s birth, sometimes mere days, even though FMLA and CA law between them guarantee a measure of pay for six weeks. In at least some of the cases (including mr. hunter) I’m pretty sure it was because work is WAY calmer than dealing with a screaming newborn round-the-clock, sometimes plus useful but still stressful in-laws. For example, there was one case where the guy whose wife had just had a kid the week before came in at 7am, and I’d hear (live) guitar music from his closed office…
When my daughter arrived seven years ago, I planned to take a few weeks off. I inquired at Human Resources about the procedure for taking FMLA leave. A few hours later my boss notified me that I was a designated key employee, and as such could not be granted leave. This was even before I even started the request!
Meanwhile many women further up the organization, including VPs, have taken FMLA. Including the one who is currently my boss. As I understood it they could designate me as a key employee because I was one of the top x% by earnings. By that logic something like half of the 3000 corporate staff could be so classified. We have 200,000 employees in the stores who don’t make all that much ($10-$15 an hour, mostly part timers).
A couple of months later, one of my peers (a woman) took leave after adopting. A few months after that, a male peer asked for leave and was denied. He threatened to sue for discrimination. He got the leave. For the next five years he was passed over for promotion several times. He went through endless battles every time his kids were sick and he took a day off. His boss will ask him why his wife can’t stay home. Is he dedicated to his career. Meanwhile the corporate culture is awash with messaging encouraging us to be supportive of work/life balance. Of course the posters has five women of varying ages and one guy who looks 70. The message could not be clearer. Mommy track, okay. Daddy track, nope.
This is not the only company doing this. My sister is a schoolteacher, her husband is an IT manager at a huge global firm. He cops a lot of grief over taking time off when the kids are sick. My sister hates missing work, and of course she has no flexible work schedule and can’t work from home as he can. Heck. most of his staff is in India and Malaysia.
My brother and sister-in-law both worked for the same high tech company. She got no grief for taking time off. He got hammered every time he did it, and she was senior to him. She was the chief software architect. If anyone was critical she was. But having a woman in that position was very valuable to the company. So she took three months off. Then two years telecommuting, and then three years on a flexible work schedule.
So yes, in my experience there is a huge stigma attached to men taking parental leave in the US.
Good - they should take a couple of the weeks before she pops the kid out, and the balance after she pops the kid out - not just for bonding, but because after pushing out a watermelon, the mom really is not able to do much housework [or really much beyond trying to take care of the kid and try to get sleep]
Pity more countries can’t manage to do that.
I don’t know about macho posturing but given that men are expected to fit into those arbitrary gender roles just as much as women are you might want to cut us a bit of slack. Misconception? When I was an undergraduate my wife and I agreed that I should stop working so I could get my degree as quickly as possible. I took as many classes as I could during the summer and regular semesters (18 hours once) so it only took me two years to finish. The only other students who ever treated me as if I were some deadbeat were two women. My wife got a little heat from her side of the family. How can he just let you support the family while he goes to school? So, yeah, there’s probably some stigma attached to men taking paternity leave in some areas.
Or very small.
I’ve worked in places with only 3 full-time staff including the owner (plus a few weekend staff)- and though we were all able to cover the vast majority of the work each other did, if one went on leave, it left us very vulnerable, and yes, depending on who was off there were things that we couldn’t really do.
It’s unrealistic to expect a company on that scale to have a back-up for every single task, even those only done once annually- could most companies cope with losing a third of their workforce without any issues? If so, I’d suggest they’re badly organised, and badly overstaffed.
On the flip side, I did have a manager who was convinced he was utterly irreplaceable, while working in a crappy shop. He would come in every morning and open up at 7, and come back to cash up and lock up at 10, every day, which he’d done for something like 15 years, even on his ‘days off’, because it was ‘far too complicated to trust anyone else to do’. It took him about 15 minutes each night to do it all.
When I’d been there just a few weeks, the guy had a heart attack, and that night the deputy had to find the company manual and work it out for himself- it took him 20 minutes.
By the end of the week, we could make it in 10.
Managing absences is one of the natural results of employing humans rather than machines. It’s a cost of doing business, and if a business cannot handle it, that’s nobody’s fault but the management’s.
I wish more men would be encouraged to take paternity leave. I think it would go a long way towards equality, as men would get a bit of the “career hit” we take for having a family.
I’m getting six weeks of maternity leave at half pay. My understanding is that newborns really do need round-the-clock care for most of this period and nobody is going to be in any state to work during those first weeks (and indeed, the first months are not much better.) We’re not sure what hubby’s paternity leave is going to be, but we’re hoping for at least a few weeks, if just to delay baby’s entrance into the wilds of daycare a bit. Because my maternity leave is so short, I’m planning to work up to my due date if at all possible.
Until a few years ago, the idea of a man taking time off to care for sick kids, unless the child was hospitalized and maybe not even then, was incomprehensible. Just a few years ago, I worked with a woman who believed that a man doing this should be a firing offense! :eek: She felt that it was the mother’s duty, which was interesting to me because her father was a single parent of two babies in the early 1960s after her mom walked out on the family!!! She believed that if there was no mom, it was the duty of a grandmother or other female relative.
And yes, she was married and her husband was very much a co-parent when their kids were young. Oh, and the idea of a man taking the kids to a babysitter when the mom was sick REALLY freaked her out.
Wasn’t me, but my friend and former boss asked HR about paternity leave when his first was born (maybe five years ago.) He basically got laughed out of the HR office. He was disappointed, but took one week vacation (that’s his own vacation time out of his X allotted weeks vacation every year) to spend with his wife and newborn. In that time, I filled in for him, which I was happy to do.
Pretty much every salesperson we supported gave me an earful on how bullshit it was that he was taking time off just for a baby, and how in their day they were back to work the day after. Did I mention that the delivery ended up being a medical emergency, with an emergency c-section, and that his wife not only got pretty much gutted on the table but also nearly died? And that she was bed-ridden for like two months after? (kid and mom are fine, years later. But dad was ashen when he told me about it.)
They’re full of shit. The system is full of shit. I’m not a parent, but you should have the right to spend some time at home with a newborn, whether you’re the dad or the mom. There is still a stigma to paternity leave, and it really should be dealt with.
Weird. In Canada, the management can’t refuse to grant either maternity or paternity leave. Labour standards acts provide that the employer must give 1 year of leave, and must hold the job for the employee’s return.
My husband works for Mennonites in the Midwest. When our daughter was born he took three full days of vacation with me in the hospital, then several more half-days when I was home recovering from a c-section and trying to breastfeed a baby who didn’t want to eat. His employers begrudged him taking his own vacation time for this, which is why he only took half days off once we were home. There weren’t enough rolleyes in the world, from my point of view.
Before I was born, my mother worked for a company that allowed her to take a year’s LOA (without pay) and they would hold her job for her. And this was in the early 1960s!