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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

I had a baby that died. It was an excruciating experience and nobody around us knew what to do or say. From personal experience I can say it should be treated as a grave mental health issue and companies should be forced to provide a great deal of leave to both parents.

Whether leave is paid or unpaid, this should be treated in the same way as any disability or health related leave. IMHO it would be cheap for companies to simply buy infant life insurance for all employees and pay out $25,000 or so if this horrific thing comes to pass. That would help everyone at a reasonable cost since infant deaths and still births are so rare these days.

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I had a coworker who went through this. My bosses were very gracious. She was on leave for some time, purely for mental health reasons. And I’m sure returning to work with her job intact was a major comfort. Our direct boss at the time would meet with her for lunch occasionally until she felt well enough to come back. I’m willing to bet it was the best way it could have gone for her in light of what she experienced.

She has since had a healthy baby and is usually beaming.

The boss in this story should be used as an example for others to learn from. What a great person.

He definitely is. Having had less positive experiences in the past—meeting him was a sea change for even myself.

I am happy to hear that she is beaming.

But, from personal experience, I would not assume that she is anything like "over" losing the other child.

Maybe over the hump is a better way to describe it?

My own problems with seasonal / occasional depression have resembled something of a bell curve- not bad at first, then really bad, then not very bad. The threat of depression never really goes away, but the likelihood of having bad days generally dies down over time, especially if the gap from what you were missing (IE child, job, spouse, sibling, family, pets) gets filled by something else.

The child they lost is still very much on their heart, yes.

What a tremendous display of empathy and leadership to visit your grieving employee.

This should be the normal course of business... Humanity has taken a backseat to profits in many areas of modern life.

I am also a bereaved parent, although my child died at age 25. I utterly agree about the grave mental health issues being caused in the parents.

May peace be unto you.

(Ping me if you want info about an organization called "The Compassionate Friends" specifically for bereaved parents.)

As father to the best 8 month young man in the world I can't imagine even for a moment what that is like. I never ever comment on hacker news, I just wanted to say I'm deeply sorry anyone here may have lost their child.

On Oct 4 a friend (code name “Paul”) and I were at a viewing for our 25 year old friend who passed from falling while hiking. “Paul” and I both have boys born this year (5-6 months old). After attending the viewing, we both noted how sad it was to watch the father and mother in such a terrible situation. The worst for any parent, and somehow slightly more understandable now that we are parents ourselves.

That night his son passed away silently in his sleep - Not even 12 hours since we talked at the viewing about how surreal losing a child would be. Their baby simply stopped breathing. We’re all still in some level of shock.

Hug your little ones and appreciate the time you get with them. You never know when your life can go the other direction.

That is utterly tragic.

Please be good to "Paul", and do not expect him to "get over it" anytime soon. It doesn't work like that in my experience.

If he and family are ready for it, perhaps mentioning The Compassionate Friends -- along with its link I've posted elsewhere in this page -- might be gratefully received?

My local chapter is wonderful, and has kept my wife and I as sane as we are after losing our (only) son.

May peace be unto "Paul".

Thanks. I know my friends will never get over it. My wife had a sister that passed at 6 months old from a heart issue and my MiL said exactly that (“they’ll never forget its always with you every hour of every day”).

If you don’t mind my asking what part of the world are you in?

Those folks have been around forever, and I'm thankful for them. Not for my own sake, but because my mother had 3-4 miscarriages and one child who died of SIDS (this was in the early 70's). They most likely kept her sane.

FYI, Hacker News doesn’t have a DM feature.

Keybase (linked in their profile) is a messaging service too.

Good point

I can't imagine what it would be like, and I'm terribly sorry that this happened to you.

BUT what's the limiting principle behind 'forcing' companies to provide 'a great deal of leave' for this?

I certainly agree that it's reasonable for an employer to offer bereavement time for the loss of a close family member, but why should this be made into law?

Because of cases like this article. Evidently this woman's employer does not have the insight to behave like decent human beings and needs to be forced.

Your argument can be turned on just about any labor law. "It may be reasonable for a company to do this, but why should they be forced?" The answer is without reasonable minimum standards, some people will exploit their employees.

Looking at it from a labor law perspective we can look at what other countries have done. Sweden for example do not provide any paid grieving period, but labor laws does give a right to take a leave of absence. Unions often extend this to paid leave, but also limits it to a set number of days, and often the amount seems to be a single day for the funeral.

What I have seen for actually grieving is that either people go back to work or they go to a doctor and get diagnosed with acute stress or depression because of the situation. I suspect that if the case in the article had occurred in Sweden then that is what actually would happen and the person would have got a few months to recover.

That doesn’t speak to why the employer should do this rather than government.

When employers provide this social good they will inevitably call some of the shots; why should their voice have influence on this matter?

To me, this is similar to the public coming to the feeling that digital public spaces are worthy, but then the conversation turns to whether Facebook should be the one doing it...

The employer has to do it because they're the one who employs the person experiencing the loss. If this guarantee is written into law, then the company's voice will not have much influence on the matter. This is how labor law works.

You only have to look at worrying trend of declining minimum wages in very many developed countries to find employer exploitation is alive and well.

My preference would be for law makers started with laws that forced companies to give theirs workers a fair days pay for a fair days work.

Obvious answer I didn't see from others:

Because hypothetical employers who are actually benevolent are forced to compete with those who aren't, absent regulation? AKA a "race to the bottom".

When corporations send me stuff in writing every day saying that they can only do the minimum mandated by law in respect to any ethical matter, I have to wonder whose opinion it really represents to say that minimum standards aren't necessary.

Competition goes both ways: employers that offer better benefits will attract more applicants, so they can higher higher quality employees.

Which means that those employees not deemed higher quality will only get the minimum market rate of benefits.

This is the essence of competition. Increasing demands on employers pushes people who want to/would be willing to work for less completely out of the market.

People have to make decisions based on the most likely scenarios. Big companies can take advantage of the unlikely scenarios, for employees or for customers, because they average across large numbers of people. This is like a memory leak that defeats competition; it's not a flaw in the rationality of either party, but it is a real problem absent good regulation.

It is reasonable, but reasonable employers for the most part don't exist. That's why we have laws establishing a minimum wage, nondiscrimination, paying out PTO in California, and the FMLA act which gives us parental leave in the first place.

This sounds like you're suggesting no one had good wages, paid time off, etc... before these laws. Is that the case?

If you look at the late 1800s, you can see that that was the case

>From personal experience I can say it should be treated as a grave mental health issue and companies should be forced to provide a great deal of leave to both parents.

This shouldn't be limited to losing a newborn child. Losing a child at any stage of life is devastating.

child, spouse, parent and sibling should be covered, imo.

>and companies should be forced to provide a great deal of leave to both parents.

No. The society should help you out, the company shouldn't be forced to do that.

IMHO it would be cheap for companies to simply buy infant life insurance for all employees

Individuals can buy this sort of life insurance for themselves without the help of their employers. Given that it is, as you say, "cheap" there isn't an economic burden either.

Why would we want employers intruding into yet another aspect of individual's lives? We're all well aware of the problems that come from having employers responsible for health insurance.

Who the hell plans for their baby to die? You don't even consider the possibility, too much cognitive dissonance. And after all, how common is it these days? And then when it happens to you, so many other people have a similar story. Turns out it happens all the time, it's just that nobody talks about it.

Also, consider for a moment how you'd feel being given a huge payout for a lost child. The money can't fix anything, but it's kind of nice to have money, and then you start feeling guilty about that, and it's a whole quagmire of badness.

The emotional complexities of "receiving a huge payout for the lost child" make me even more sure that employers shouldn't be getting involved in this. It's a deeply personal decision that people can have wildly differing views on. The last thing we want is businesses making these sorts of decisions for their employees.

Businesses aren't your parents. They shouldn't be involved in stuff this personal.

I agree that the involvement of your employer should end at "take as much time as you need." I was just pointing out that "people should just self-insure" is an equally bad stance for multiple reasons.

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