The Economic Benefits of Paid Parental Leave
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1) You can take these 18 months intermittently up until the child is 8 years old. 2) The days can be shared between both parents. 3) Both fathers and mothers are required to take 60 days each of those 480 days (versus one parent taking 421+ days).
"Since Swedish men started to take more responsibility for child rearing, women have seen both their incomes and levels of self-reported happiness increase. Paying dads to change nappies and hang out at playgrounds, in other words, seems to benefit the whole family."
Great country (obviously it has other flaws, but this is not one of them) :)
I don't know what people on a lower end of the income spectrum do.
1) As an employee in the US you get very little paid vacation per year, and as a consequence, US companies are extremely bad at planning for people being absent for longer stretches of time. Contrast with European countries where everyone takes off for three to four consecutive weeks in the summer, and consequently European companies plan for it and have a much easier time handling people being absent.
For longer parental leave to work in the US, paid leave also has to increase, to force companies into coping.
> opponents of paid leave say it is an economic burden that can be expensive for businesses
2) That's a naive and short-sighted way of looking at it. Long paid parental leave creates a happier population, with happier children, which in turn presumably are more productive when they reach working age. Accessing a labour market, any labour market has certain costs. For example, accessing the Silicon Valley labour market is more expensive than accessing the Midwest labour market, but the Silicon Valley one has higher quality potential employees, which justifies the cost.
If you think about it, a labour market doesn't spring into existence in a vacuum, if you want a pool of college-educated employees, you need colleges, quality high-schools, middle class parents who value education, and economic incentives to make going to college a good idea (i.e. a higher salary for these people). All of this costs money, and the ones paying it are the very companies that want to hire these people.
3) In the long run, it's very important to switch away from a system of maternity leave to equal parental leave. Women of child-bearing age are routinely discriminated against because companies know that they might quit/focus on the children/work less hours/have long maternal leave etc. By having equal paternal leave, and making sure that men take as much as women, this discrimination will disappear.
You aren't going to be able to force a father to take time off, just because you think he should. Even if he takes a week or two, the vast majority of them will go back to work in short order.
I would argue it is pretty much impossible to get men to take as much leave as women. The baby is literally attached the the portion of mothers who breast feed. It is stereotypical, but in my experience true, that mothers are more in tune with their infant and end up taking a lot more of the burden than the father. Ignoring that, single mothers are going to need time off, the father isn't even in the picture; and that is going to skew things as well.
> Even if he takes a week or two
22% of 16 months is 3.5 half months of paternal leave on average. That's pretty far from "a week or two". This is exactly what I mean when I say that americans must adjust their view of paid leave first, before adressing parental leave.
So one super-simple way of making it more equal is to make the parental leave completely individual. The mother gets 8 months. The father gets 8 months. You won't reach 50/50, because some fathers will still choose to work instead and forfeit the paid leave, but you'll move the ratio much further, without force. You just provide very strong incentives, which is not the same thing.
I decided early on that even in our minimally funded startup that we would give any of our (3) employees up to a month of paid leave after a baby. Our co-founder/CTO will be testing how possible this policy is in April when he welcomes his second kid and taking a month off right during a critical launch period.
I understand that it is a risk (everything is a risk in a startup btw) and we have to put in extra time and cost up-front to get the other team members up to speed, but I think in the end it will be very much worth it. Worth it not only as a practical matter for him and his family who are already taking risks and sacrificing for the company, but as a signal to other tiny startups that it is possible to do it and not crumble.
Before reading this, I assumed the "economic benefits" would be for the business owner. Is that what the title suggests to you?
The US is generally clueless to this, because there's such a huge influx of talented foreing workers that offset domestic policies, but smaller nations are painfully aware of this, and the ones doing great on global competitiveness are also the ones with the most generous social welfare. This is no coincidence.