10 Days Is Not Enough
on the importance of true paternity leave
Much of my writing on this Substack has been wrestling with how we can change the status quo, how we can make motherhood more sustainable, less draining, less devouring. Thus I’ve spent a lot of time writing about how to more equitably share the parenting load at home. I would guess than in 70% of my posts, I somehow mention Fair Play (and Eve Rodsky, a founding supporter of The Mother Lode).
So it is finally time to talk about paternity leave.
Did you know that the average father takes 10 days of paternity leave? And fewer than 5% take more than 2 weeks.1
Let me just ask you: how much is the baby sleeping at 10 days old? Is Mom walking or still waddling to the toilet with ice pads stuffed in her crotch? Is the infant on a schedule? Does Mom magically know what to do to soothe this creature? If Mom had a C-section, CAN SHE EVEN PICK THE BABY UP?
There are so many reasons that 10 days or 2 weeks, is not enough!
So let’s set aside the fact that only 23% of employees actually receive paid leave. Yes, our country fails mothers and fathers, desperately, across the board.
If you somehow miraculously receive paid leave, can you pretty please, just fucking take it?
Twitter’s former CEO Parag Agrawal made headlines for taking “a few weeks” paternity leave back in early 2022. See the headline above? “The move is rare in Silicon Valley.” Yet his company offered 22 weeks. And he assured his executive team that he would be “available” during his short leave.
While I understand running a company is “serious business,” when men at the top don’t take their leave, it sends a signal down the line. If you are serious about your job, you don’t take the full leave.
Some executives are pushing the envelope. Mark Zuckerberg took two months. Alexis Ohanion, co-founder of Reddit and husband to tennis star Serena Williams who almost died during childbirth, took 16 weeks and wrote about it in the New York Times.
But these are the outliers.
When a paid family leave program in California launched in 2004, it provided a portion of a new parent’s salary for up to eight weeks. Yet the program “increased the leave women took by almost five weeks and the leave that men took by two to three days.”2
When fathers refuse to take the full time offered them, it does a disservice to our attempts to create a more equal workplace. If mothers have to be the ones at home tending to newborns because fathers refuse to be seen prioritizing care over career, managers will be less likely to hire women in anticipation of this potential motherhood (it is called maternal bias). When we share this kind of caretaking equally among all genders, there can be no motherhood penalty because the expectation and norm is that both parents take time off to care for their children.
When men don’t take paternity leave or only take two weeks, it signals to the world who the “real” parent is… Mom. And we all know that that messaging continues for the rest of our parenting journey. Who gets called by the school? Who gets texts about playdates? Who is responsible for keeping track of the mental load? It all starts here. If we want more to be expected of dads, we need to signal their essential role from the start.
We need men to take a full paternity leave not just to signal to the world that fathers are parents, too (duh!) but so that they can be a support for the postpartum patient. Someone who has just given birth is a patient. They are weak, bleeding, sometimes anemic, and their hormones are out of whack. When a partner can be home during this time, it is not only to support the baby, but to support the birthing partner. To allow them to heal just like you would any other patient. A c-section is surgery. Vaginal birth is a major medical event. To pretend otherwise just exacerbates the belittling and ignoring of women’s pain and suffering.
(in case you missed it, my post on Maternal Postpartum Care below)
As I touched on in my recent post Part Time Mom, in an ideal world, I think fathers should take some of their leave once mom returns to work to fight the trend of mom becoming the default parent. Give fathers a chance to learn the rhythm of the daily schedule, the consequences of the skipped nap, their child’s preferences and needs (not blue binky, white one! Not the ocean noise, rain!). They would not shake their heads at our “control” issues if they too realized that naptime is derailed with the wrong choice.
I don’t know the exact math of when the first stint of paternity leave should end and the second round should begin (perhaps take eight weeks right after birth and then round two when mom returns to work?). Again, this is all highfalutin pie-in-the-sky dreaming considering NO ONE EVEN GETS PAID LEAVE IN THIS COUNTRY. But I think it is worth interrogating and helping families think about how to spread out and utilize their leave. Instead, I feel like we are all fed to the wolves and told to figure it out on our own.
The results are in: dads who take paternity leave have better relationships with their children and even those who only take a week or two are 26% more likely to stay married.3
“The big thing is having a newly personal appreciation for the fact that this is work…It may be time away from a professional role, but it’s very much time on.”
“Pete Buttigieg Joins the Parental Leave Debate: ‘This is work.’”
Do you remember how Pete Buttigieg got eviscerated for taking paternity leave? In doing research for this post, I typed “paternity leave” into a search bar for Apple Podcasts and stumbled upon an episode of Drinkin’ Bros titled “Pete Buttigieg on Paternity Leave.” I should have known by the title of the podcast and the thumbnail image which includes an American flag and memojis of three dudes that I was about to enter dangerous territory. First of all, listen to their opening here.
I really don’t know why I didn’t turn it off right then. I am pretty good at staying in my bubble in liberal California. I mean, I know dudes like this exist, but I don’t watch Fox News. My algorithms do not deliver this content. I do everything I can to try and avoid this reality.
In the first few minutes, they misgender Caitlyn Jenner several times. Then they begin to talk about why Pete Buttigieg is taking paternity leave. What is there for two dudes to even do with a baby? they ask. (Note Buttigieg and his husband had twins, so I think it is pretty easy to figure that one out). They go on to discuss paid leave and question why a company should pay you when you aren’t doing your job. Then they try and argue that this is counter to how things have been for hundreds of years. Like, centuries ago, two parents weren’t staying home to take care of babies! Dad was off hunting!
But what they neglect to realize is that hundreds of years ago, we lived in communities. We did not live siloed, suburban lives. While perhaps fathers didn’t step in to do much infant care, mothers had a village of women to support her in his place! But now we’ve removed the village but expect women to be able to do it all alone. Not to mention, sure, maybe it feels weird for someone to be paid while they are not at work. But if they aren’t paid, what can they live on? Are we all just expected to amass three months of savings to be able to even have a child? And then, are our jobs protected?
I felt like their discussion exemplified how much we expect that none of this “caretaking” should be seen or acknowledged. It is all supposed to fly under the radar, unpaid and un-supported, while everyone else is doing “real work” in the cog of capitalism.
But as Pete figured out pretty quickly, caregiving is work and it is important.
In order for this the work of caregiving to have value in our patriarchal society, we must have men doing it. And where better to start than with with paternity leave. But much more than 10 days.
From How Moms Get to Act More Like Dads, Sarah Kessler, The New York Times, March 5, 2022.
ibid.
What Paternity Leave Does for a Father’s Brain, Darby Saxe and Sofia Cardenas, The New York Times, November 8, 2021.
My husband took four weeks of full leave and then was working from home about 10-15 hours a week until our child was 6 months old. (I started working from home 15-20 hours a week from 18 weeks postpartum).
Our child is now five and I think this arrangement has had a positive long term impact. We are equal parents, even though we don’t currently have equal caring responsibilities. I have always been able to just walk out the door without giving instructions.
There are still structural impacts that push me into the default parent role (he works fulltime inflexibly so I have to be the flexible parent) but to the extent that we experience our intimate relationships within the family, this is how it is.
It also was largely outside of our control that those were our circumstances. We were pretty broke and I think if we had the choice we would have chosen more money. So I’m glad we didn’t have the choice.
My husband took his full paid leave (he actually had extra time banked because of overtime so he took time off starting when I hit 38 weeks to make sure he wouldn’t be at work when I went into labor (she ended up being born at 38 weeks, 5 days). He stayed home with her during the day for 4 weeks when I went back to work (I had unpaid leave as a preschool teacher) so she started coming to school with me at 14 weeks old (at the time I worked with 3 year olds, I have now been an infant teacher since November of 2021). My husband was able to be on leave from his position as a corporal in the police department but still work off duty though so I do wonder what it would’ve been like if he had been home the entire 10 weeks I was on leave (he worked off duty jobs at night, and being up in the middle of the night by myself so often really contributed to my anxiety postpartum).