Reply to Crazy paternity leave situation

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "Crazy paternity leave situation"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My friend came to me with the saddest mid-divorce reveal I’ve ever heard. When her only child was born, her DH only had 2 weeks of paternity leave. He didn’t take all of it and went back 2 days early. It was really hard on her and sometimes we still look back on those days pretty ruefully. The worst part was he worked for a Fortune 500 company that changed paternity-specific leave to parental leave that year and gave everyone with a new child 12 weeks, paid. He ended up covering leave for half his team while they still had their own tiny baby at home.

As part of some kind of mediation session during divorce, she found out that he actually had 6 weeks leave and just never took it. Which explained why when she asked him to petition to HR to be grandfathered in or get some kind of additional leave when they changed the policy, he said it was impossible.

I’ve never heard anything quite so specific and awful that wasn’t an affair. She’s asking me if she’s crazy. Am I ok in validating that this was a supremely messed up act of deception? Why would a father do that?[/quote]

Really? So he didn’t take all of his leave and that’s why people are acting like this is some unforgivable betrayal worthy of divorce?

My DH took a week off after our baby was born. I took about a month, and then my mom and mother in law rotated helping until we got a nanny around 2 months. It was exhausting, but honestly pretty normal for a lot of families.

I’m all for parental leave and think it’s great companies offer more now, but people acting like anything less than 12 weeks means the father failed his family feels detached from reality. Plenty of loving, involved fathers went back to work quickly because that was the norm for decades.

Get some perspective. People before you often had maybe 3 to 4 weeks total between both parents, sometimes less, and families still turned out fine. My kids are teens now, thriving, close with us, happy, successful, one headed to an Ivy League school, and somehow they don’t have lifelong trauma because dad didn’t stay home for months.

Also, at some point more leave really doesn’t fundamentally change much. Having a baby is a massive life adjustment and reset no matter what. Whether someone is home 4 weeks, 12 weeks, or even a year, eventually real life starts and you adapt. Acting like those extra weeks are the difference between a healthy family and lifelong damage is honestly overblown.

Honestly, this almost proves the opposite point people are trying to make. There’s a concept called Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available for it. I think parental leave expectations do the same thing. If society says 4 weeks is normal, people adapt to 4 weeks. If society says 12 weeks, then suddenly 12 weeks becomes “not enough.” If society said a year, eventually people would say a year isn’t enough either. At some point you are just prolonging the adjustment/reset period and removing productivity, not fundamentally changing long term family outcomes.

If their marriage had deeper problems, fine. But turning this into some shocking act on the level of an affair or abuse feels wildly overdramatic.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics