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.