And from a "nuclear family" point of view, most cultural traditionalists I know would argue to me that it's good for kids to be in multiple-parent households. When people talk about stereotypical traditionalist nuclear families, these are very often families that have extended support structures of multiple people involved in child-rearing.
Opponents to parental leave (even feminist opponents) are in some ways attempting to equalize the time-off risk between mothers[0] and fathers. And that can be done by reducing the mother's time off to zero to match the father, but it can also be done by letting fathers get involved in early child-rearing and giving them more time to help their partners.
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[0] And nonbinary/transgender/adoptive/etc parents too of course, but I'm just using a shorthand here.
And sure, as a non-parent I can't take a multi-month long vacation every year, but even as a recent graduate I get 25 paid vacation days per year (5 of which can be saved for a few years). So long vacations aren't a pipe dream for non-parents.
And with the way the economy currently works and the gradually increasing life expectancy, increasing the birth rate is a good thing, and generous parental benefits are a way to encourage that. I personally think it would be best if society/the economy wasn't dependant on an increasing population, but that's a separate conversation.
And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents.
I don't know the exact details of what policies are correct for paid time off, but the fact is still true that we have a strong societal incentive to handle situations like this in a way that's beneficial both to the parents and (especially) beneficial to kids -- at least if we believe that parental presence helps early development, which seems reasonably well supported.
I say this as a single person with no plans to ever marry or have children, but the reality is that being single or having kids each carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not sure that fairness between parents and childless individuals is necessarily the best lens to look at policy through.
There's a lot of middle ground here between status quo and what GP describes, but even in that case raising a child is still an 18+ year commitment; I don't think that a single family vacation significantly changes that.
In the US, we have a program called WIC, to help women with infants and children with nutrition. If you are a poor man or poor single woman, this program is not available to you. I would not consider that a privilege. We are trying to help foster the next generation and improve society.
Better childcare / pre-k can help too, but there musn't be a gap between when at least partial leave ends and childcare begins.
Good thing we all work to much already, so reducing total "public sphere" labor hours is not a huge issue.
As an example, they could add extra parental leave days that are earmarked for father classes.
I can vouch from personal experience that I did not enjoy my paternity leave at all and I'd much rather work.
Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.
There are tons of possible explanations to explain a delta in salary between men and women. Men generally tend to negotiate better and women tend to take more time off when a son is born. You can also slice subsets of data, to show whatever you want. For example, if you look at women in their 20s, they are outperforming men on both salary and education.
> Also, the gender gap is not a thing. There are so many variables that go into salaries that any argument around the topic is just an attempt at making a political statement.
The gender gap was the explanation mbesto gave for why paid family leave for women might be opposed even by women. If the gender gap doesn't exist, and unbalanced paid time off between genders won't drive increased wage differences, then it seems like it might be fine to ignore mbesto's worry and just offer women that time off regardless of what paternal leave policies are.
I generally agree, keep in mind the idea is to force everyone to work less, distributing the non-domestic labor more evenly across the board. The idea is very materialist, in that domestic labor needs to be done, and it's not even that "all men" don't want to do it, but that bosses have more power than husbands and ultimately we need to stop the work hours/effort rat race to free up the free time to re-figure out what families and domestic labor ought to look like.
The current trend is capitalism reaches deeper into the family. Restaraunts are displacing cooking for more social strata, Pre-K is less controversial than paid family leave which brings intensified economies of scale to child rearing.
I'm not against either of those things --- at least there will be a villages (of wage-workers) to raise kids again and more social time --- but I don't want them to happen for the wrong reason of employers sucking up more and more of our time for no good reason.
It definitely helped us economically (it's nice to have so much paid holiday) but it forced me into a nurturing role which my partner was definitely better suited for. I ended up being quite depressed by the entire situation and had a series of mental health issues + lost most of my friends. At the same time I am definitely better at negotiating than her and I am earning more - so without that artificial incentive we would have naturally gravitated toward the best solution.
I agree two parents households work great, but you don't really need two parents hands-on with kids all the time. I find it great in limited doses but I would go completely insane if I had to do it all the time, while I can tolerate work just fine. My partner was getting incredibly stressed at work but with kids it seems like she found her balance.
She's looking forward to go back to work once all the kids go to nursery / school in 3 years, but not in a typical employers / employee setting, more like running the family software business.
Citation needed. It's PART of the discrepancy, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Even the link you pasted shows otherwise. Women without children still peak at 90% of relative wages to men without children, which themselves are lower than wages of fathers (presumably because being in a stable relationship allows a working father to focus on their career with someone taking care of the home)
All babies are created by two humans.* Why should the career of one of them be penalized for it? Why not instead create as a society the tools so that both can share the upbringing and care of the baby while the mother is recovering?
* (although the parents are not always the same persons who have biologically made it; yet it is a good idea that the solution for such a case is the default behaviour).
Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable. Unless we can agree to a minimally reasonable set of differences between men and women in the reproductive realm, before and after birth, we won't get very far.
PS. There is nothing "penalizing" in taking care of an infant. It is a fundamental part of life. Some even see it as rewarding.
Pumping is challenging, if not downright degrading. Ask a working mother. It also doesn't work as well as you might think, both the baby and the mother need breastfeeding 2-3 hours apart, or else the lactation may stop. Formula is suboptimal, according to AAP and common sense.
This is exactly how the singleminded focus on one metric (equal wages or bust) goes awry. Both mothers and infants suffer the pressure on mothers to compete on equal footing with males at all times. Is it really that hard to give mothers the space (and financial support) to chose the well being of their infants and of themselves, and accept that course of action will inevitably lead to a small decrease in lifetime wages?
Even the ancients were well aware of the dangers of attempting to equalize everyone to the exact same standard. See the story of the Procrustes bed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
Admittedly, you can't read properly, because that's not a question I asked.
> Admittedly, it is very difficult to have this conversation when some people hold axiomatically that men and women are biologically interchangeable.
Speak for yourself if you want to introduce straw men in the discourse; no one else did. Here we adults are talking about participation in society in equal conditions for all humans, irrespective of debilitating conditions that may temporarily affect them, whether due to illness or strenuous exertion.
Excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere because some of them have a higher biological burden in reproduction is anything but a libertarian ideal. Having men participating in equal terms in the responsibility and joy of raising their children should be seen as a right as well as an obligation. A society that is unable to guarantee that right and claim that duty is a society that has lost its way.
1. The proposal is to offer mothers a 12 months leave, at the very least as a social expectation, even better paid by a state run insurance, see e.g. unemployment, to take care of their infant children.
2. Mothers rather than fathers because mammals feed their infants with milk, and milk is produced only by mothers. Human mothers need to feed their infants every 2-3 hours. As long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question.
"The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that infants be exclusively breastfed for about the first 6 months with continued breastfeeding along with introducing appropriate complementary foods for 1 year or longer." https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/faq/index.htm
3. This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers. Specifically their wages will be smaller compared to same age fathers.
Working the chain of reasoning backwards, anyone that axiomatically insists no wage gap should ever be measured between men and women, sadly a very popular stance, is (willfully?) ignoring the motherhood aspect. Men and women are not fully interchangeable.
I don't see where the catastrophizing charge "excluding half of the human kind from the social sphere" comes from. As stated above, there is at least one critical area in life, specifically infant care, where men and women are not perfectly equal. Not being perfectly equal does not imply men and women must be maximally different to the point of "exclusion from the social sphere".
Until we drop the pretense that men and women are perfectly equal, we are going to produce inhuman outcomes. This is not even a new observation, the ancients had the story of Procustes holding people equal by the standard of his iron bed and fixing any deviation from his equal norm via blunt force.
You don't see it because you make chains of reasoning backwards leading you to absurd conclusions because you leave thousands of alternative explanations along the way, such as "as long as breastfeeding takes place, simultaneously working a career is pretty much out of the question" (then how is it possible that many women do exactly that, breastfeeding and working?) or "This arrangement will create gap years and have a measurable effect on mothers careers" (no shit Sherlock, that's why there are proposals being made to fix precisely that effect. Of course it won't be fixed if you do nothing and keep the current status quo.)
> Men and women are not fully interchangeable.
And that is the starting point of my reasoning. The only option you see from that point is "as a consequence, women have a lower salary", completely blind to the possibility of "let's put means so that this biological difference does not represent a burden, on the basis of sharing the upbringing of children" that you keep ignoring over and over again.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-m...
The argument assumes that all people receive the same pay and promotions for the same work. Wage differentials between people from the same age cohort appear because gap years, which are the human approach for infant care, lead to small but measurable delays in the mother's careers.
BTW, this is not an argument that all wage differentials that are observed in the real world are, or should be, explainable this way. It is simply a pushback against rigid Procrustean axioms that risk doing more harm that good.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/your-employment-rights-in...
There's a lot of evidence around wage discrepancies, but I have never heard anyone claim that it's the _mothers_ who are forcing themselves back to work. That seems like a huge stretch and doesn't align with anything I've seen before.
The cultural components manifest themselves different ways:
As a biz owner: Why would you give a raise to someone who hasn't contributed anything to the company in the last 2-4 months?
As an employee: how would you (man or woman) feel if your equal peer didn't contribute anything for 2-4 months and got the same raise as you?
> The cultural implications are that you will likely miss out on job opportunities and thus wage increases.
Strongly agree with the above.
I'm personally a proponent of parental leave, but I'll answer this one point.
"Forcing women" back into work after pregnancy is an attempt my mothers to minimize wage decreases. All of the evidence for wage discrepancies between male and female is due largely to women's role of motherhood.
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/motherhood...