Back to work today after two and a half weeks at home with the new baby is pretty tough.
I keep telling anyone who’ll listen that I’m really jealous of two guys I know who are both relatively new dads – one is a University professor who (I assume on purpose) timed his sabbatical year to coincide with the birth of their child. The other is an RCMP officer who was able to take a year’s paternity leave at 90% salary since his wife was already a stay-at-home mom to their first child.
When I’m King of the World, a couple of my first changes will be to extend maternity leave benefits to 18-months instead of a year (not least because there’s a “daycare gap” in our society when many moms get a year of leave but many day cares won’t take kids until they’re 18 months, forcing parents to scramble, take longer (usually unpaid) leaves, rely on relatives or pay extra to put their kids in one of the few daycare spots for younger kids.) And while I’m doing that, I’d also allow new fathers to take a six month paid paternity leave, structured similarly to and in addition to maternity leave (unlike the current situation where parents often have the option for both but have to choose one or the other instead of both a paternity and maternity leave at the same time.)
[Edit: A co-worker suggested an alternate plan that may be more workable than allowing concurrent leaves. Give the mother a year as is currently the case but then grant the father an additional six month leave instead of giving the mother 18 months. That way you still close the “daycare” gap and both parents get a leave with the child, just not at the same time – unless the wife chooses to take an extended leave as Shea has done and will do for both of our kids.]
Many people only focus on the economic bottom line for questions like this – oh, the cost to EI would be too high, productivity would go down, employers would struggle to replace fathers who go on the leave.
But I think the overall benefit to our society of allowing full families to bond in a child’s earliest months, although difficult to measure on a spreadsheet, would pay off greatly in the long term in ways we can’t even imagine. Less postpartum depression. Less divorce. Less child abuse. A stronger social fabric overall. Who knows what else having fathers more involved could lead to? (And I can’t help but note that what I’m proposing probably falls into what would more traditionally be seen as a “conservative” (eg. family-centered) value if you choose to look at it through that lens.)
A man can dream…
Anyhow, this song doesn’t *quite* capture what I’m talking about but it’s a fun one so I’ll post it anyhow. Oh, and today is Sasha’s *official* due date. I’m *really* glad she came out to meet us a few weeks early! We’re already three weeks closer to her sleeping through the night than we would’ve been if she arrived today! 😉
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