The BBC reports:
Fathers will be able to take six months’ paternity leave, the government has announced. The move will allow mothers to decide to return to work after six months and fathers to stay at home for the rest of the 12 months off allowed by law.
This is of course great news. But it still enshrines the thought that mothers are more essential to parenting than fathers. It looks to me like the first six months *must* be taken by the mother. There’s no room to shift the order, and there’s no room for a father to do all of it– though there’s plenty of room for the mother to do all of it. And it just seems silly to keep these restrictions– if we want equity, why not really go for equity?
(The answer will perhaps be that mothers need to be there for all that breastfeeding. But breastfeeding is, and should be, a choice. And in fact it’s a minority choice. Families should not be forced into particular structures simply on the basis that they’re well-suited to this choice.)
H/T Broadsheet.
In the Netherlands the law is as follows:
If you are the caregiver of a child under 8 years of age, and you have been with the job for at least 1 year, you are entitled to up to half a year of parental leave (unpaid!) for half of the hours of your contract per week. So say you have a 40 hour workweek, then you can take 20 hours leave for half a year. This is a law is seperate from the law for maternity leave (16 weeks) and adoption leave (4 weeks). It is also irrespective of whether one is a biological parent, as long as you can prove the child lives with you and is under your care.
Unfortunately, it still often gets frowned upon when men want to make use of this law.
Isn’t it interesting: 50 years ago when most women with young children didn’t work, when breastfeeding was convenient but bottle feeding was inconvenient because baby formula had to be brewed, bottles and nipples had to be sterilized, etc. bottle feeding was the norm. Now, when most women with young children work (or want to) when formula is ready made and you don’t need to sterilize equipment so bottle feeding is convenient but breastfeeding is inconvenient–unless you take extended maternity leave–women are being pushed hard to breastfeed.
Nobody is calculating utilities here–asking whether the minimal advantages of breastfeeding over bottle feeding for infants offsets the major disadvantages to their mothers, who either have to disrupt their careers or go through the hassle of pumping and freezing breast milk. No one will even whisper the dirty little secret that babies can get formula at their caregivers’ and breast feed from their mothers evenings and weekends.
If it’s not a hassle, you’re not a good mother.
In Austria it’s 2 years, which can be divided between father and mother (subject to some restrictions: at most 1 month simultaneously, at most 3 chunks of at least 3 months of which the father takes at most 2). The first 8 weeks are handled separately (for mother only). All this at full salary. After that, mothers have a right to return to their jobs, and even to be offered part-time work until the child is 7 years old.