The last six weeks have served as a reminder of what it’s like to have a baby in the house all over again, and they’ve brought the matter of parental leave back to mind. If, as things stand today, both parents are expected to work to get by, maternal leave should be a given due to nursing needs, but what about paternal leave?
For the good of the child and the family, I think paternal leave should also be included in any parental leave legislation. For some men, it might be easier, depending on the living situation, to avoid the house and go to work every day, but for most it isn’t. It wasn’t for me, even when there was a grandmother to provide support. For one thing, the baby doesn’t sleep on your schedule, so your ability to follow routines and get enough sleep is severely compromised. Anyone who is familiar with a baby’s cries knows that it’s almost impossible to ignore or sleep through them, and that’s by design. For guys who work with heavy machinery or have long commutes, this could be downright dangerous. One solution, if the house is big enough, is to sleep in another room. But even that doesn’t always do the trick, and sleeping on a couch is far from ideal.
Another issue is that the mother can’t take care of housework as usual. Babies are extremely demanding, and if it comes down to feeding husband or child, baby wins. Despite birth, mother and child remain a “unit” for months postpartum. When she leaves, the baby gets upset. Experienced fathers like me have some tricks up our sleeves for calming babies, but they don’t always work — sometimes nursing is the only thing that will calm them down. So, unless you want to be stuck with a screaming baby watching the clock as you wait for mama to return, you’ve got to do a lot of the errands, and when there’s a new baby in the house, there are a lot of errands to do.
Given the extra workload on mother and father, the best solution is to give both some time to dedicate to the new baby while he or she progresses past the neonate stage and starts to develop a routine.
In Washington state, women are guaranteed three months of leave if they work for a company with over 50 employees. Men have no such guarantee, although many companies will work with new fathers and give them some time off. Paid leave, unfortunately, is usually the privilege of the professional class; a perk extended to those who already get paid pretty well. Ordinary workers have to make do on savings.
While I’m not usually a proponent of socialism, rearing the next generation, despite genocidal leftist fantasies about electing a new people, ranks pretty high up there in national priorities. And if it’s about the bottom line, parental leave can mitigate a lot of the stress of early parenthood which could otherwise result in higher rates of family dysfunction, divorce and the resulting loss of productivity and human capital. From my own experience, a combined total of six months parental leave would be a fair and realistic standard to shoot for in the US. Perhaps parents could split it up as they choose, with the mother taking four months and the father two in a typical situation (most men are plenty happy to go back to work after two months at home with a baby).
If that sounds generous, consider that Sweden allots a total of 480 days of paid leave, 120 of which are to be used exclusively by each parent (both mothers and fathers must take at least 60 days off to reach the full 480). By European standards, American parental leave laws are extremely stingy (now that I think of it, even the tight-fisted East Asians have considerably more generous parental leave policies than the US). While this may not have been much of a problem when America had a social contract of sorts, today’s corporate titans are hardly concerned with the lot of what must seem like little insects from the glass towers they inhabit, and as they suck more out of our government coffers than a million babies could, it’s looking more and more reasonable to force them to rectify some of the problems they’ve caused, such as, for example, the need for a double-income household.
Some of the more purist MRAs may want to demand exact equality in parental leave, and in fact that’s what the Swedish socialists would prefer. However, I don’t think most men would appreciate that all that much. As much as we love our babies, it can be dehumanizing to be forced out of work for too long, and that in itself can cause problems just as denying us an opportunity to provide crucial support in the first couple months can.
