Reply to Just wrote our org’s paid leave policy

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here is my concern with gender-neutral leave for the birth of a child:  
Reality is that you do not need two people to be at home caring for an infant.  You just don't.  So, let's say a woman and her husband are both home for 3 months of leave.  The man is going to either mess around, giving the parental leave the reputation of a joke, or he is going to work from home -- take calls, answer e-mails.  I'm worried parental leave will become the equivalent of working from home for three months, which is not ideal for a mother recovering from birth and breastfeeding.  The reality is that the mother has a different need and obligation during that time than the father.  His body ain't involved.  I want to preserve that time for women and I think adding men to the mix will screw it up. [/quote]

Disagree - for the first month, the mom definitely needs/deserves someone around to help. that's how many other cultures do it - we're alone in essentially abandoning mothers with their newborns. After that, I agree it would be a little weird if the parents took all the leave simultaneously. I know a lot of families where the mom did 3 months, then the dad did the next 3 months. I think that's really great because a) it invests the dad in parenting equally and b) lets you delay childcare until the baby is 6 months old and a little more robust and more likely to be sleeping through the night. [/quote]

OP again. We did it as gender-neutral because gendered leave promotes gendered stereotypes. And no, men or non-binary persons who use the leave don't use it to work from home -- shocker, they actually take the leave. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/upshot/fathers-parental-leave-unequal.html">Men who have been surveyed have said that they want to be able to bond with their children</a>; research shows they are less often to actually take it because they feel unspoken pressure to not use it. It's clear that workplaces providing and truly supporting gender-neutral leave is essential to dismantling the gender divide in pay and leadership.

Additionally, not structuring it in this way would be discriminatory against gay families.

As a personal aside, with my first child, I had only 3 months of leave, 2 of it paid. (And yes, I say only realizing that it's much more than many have.) It wasn't immediately apparent to my husband and I until a few weeks in that our baby had a serious feeding disorder. Our baby ended up requiring around-the-clock care. We had planned on taking 3 months each, back to back, and every single day of that leave over those 6 months was used to keep our baby alive. A few years later, we had another child. This one did not have the same medical needs, but we set up our leave back to back again because as the PP said, it really does promote equal parenting and bonding. 
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