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Comment by oflordal | Hacker News Reader

Being from Sweden with its relatively generous parental leave (~18 months for both parents, a fairly common company perk is to get 6 of these with 90% pay) its hard to understand how especially mothers can return to work already after 12 weeks. Will most people in practice work out a deal to take a longer leave and or be forced to quit?

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The parts about Sweden's law that I love the most:

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) :)

If you can take those days intermittently over 8 years, it seems like that is an easy cop-out for the dad to take 8 days a year to satisfy the requirement.

If they have the income to support it, many will put their child into day care (for a quality program in the NY suburbs that is around ~$1500/month) or hire a nanny (~$500/week).

I don't know what people on a lower end of the income spectrum do.

most often deal with pay or promotion cut. many quit. this is how women are discriminated in USA nowadays.

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