If you don't mind me asking, how will you cut down work? Is your employer willing to just reduce your hours, or do you have other plan?

I don't plan on cutting back yet, but I'd like to know for the future, since I've never actually met a career professional doing so.

It looks like mosselman lives in the Netherlands. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15497755 . You are in Portugal (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8029643 ), which also has paternity leave. One difference, according to http://www.theportugalnews.com/news/portugal-among-best-for-... , is that:

> Portugal is the member state with the fifth longest period of paternity leave, with a potential of 21 weeks to care for their newborns. However, this report paints a different picture when it comes to the division of domestic chores. Here, Portugal joins Estonia, India, Japan, Mexico, South Korea and Turkey as among the countries where women put in three times more time on such tasks than their male counterparts.

That sounds in Portugal fathers are more expected to work/be a career man, and mothers stay home, than in the Netherlands.

Nah, we're too poor for that: before the crisis, 87% of women between 25-to-44 had a job here (now they're just unemployed, not voluntarily staying-at-home).

They do most of the chores despite having jobs. We're a very patriarchal society still.

Point taken.

That answers your own question, does it not? That is, fathers don't take time off to spend more time with their babies because they are too poor to risk losing that job?

(This assumes that men tend to be paid more than women.)

Fair enough, but I do know some (though not many) middle-class people who could afford it.

We don't know if mosselman is exceptional or typical of Dutch fathers.

That is, if only 10% take time off, and you only know 5 middle-class people who could afford it, then odds are that even at the Dutch level you wouldn't know anyone who does that.

I suppose it's possi ... okay, that was too easy. A search for "how many Dutch fathers parental leave" comes up with http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2015/06/just-one-in-fo... which says "Just one in four Dutch fathers takes parental leave".

Not sure how this conversation went into parental leave - I actually know fathers who've taken that :) But that's just a month or so. I was talking about working fewer hours (rather than stopping altogether) on a longer-term basis. I find that much harder to achieve than taking a leave, which is similar to regular vacations, which companies are used to handle.

I did consulting work for a Swedish company. They have very generous parental leave policies, including people who were on 50% time for a year.

I also read that in some of the European countries (I'm from the US) there is a right to part-time employment while on leave. I figured that mosselman was from one of those countries.

Searching now I found http://cepr.net/documents/publications/parental_2008_09.pdf from 10 years ago which says:

> Of the 21 countries studied here, ten allow parental leave to be taken on a part-time basis: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. Portugal is notable in that it gives parents an incentive to choose part-time over full-time leave: parents have three months of full-time parental leave or 12 months of part-time leave.

Based on mosselman's followup, my guess was correct.

Thanks for the link! I had no idea our law allowed for that!

Haha I am not sure in which branch of the discussion to respond, so I will do so here. I am from the Netherlands yes and we can have 26 times our employed hours 26 times full time for me) per child to be spent before they are 8, unpaid. You can use all those hours at once, or spread them out. I will do the latter and have 1 paternal day a week the coming 2,5 years. Looking forward to it as well. Yes I am lucky enough to be able to handle the income decrease.

Be good at what you do. Do it in half the time. Work from home so no one complains that you're getting all of the work done in half the time (people will complain about everything). Of course, you have to find a position that isn't a sweatshop to begin with for this to work. Small businesses--not startups--can be good places to practice this.