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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I tried to do this after a 4 month leave and it did not work out. It was frustrating and I definitely ran into some of the attitudes on this thread.

HOWEVER, after I quit my job, I wound up talking to someone in our HR department and she gave me a hard time for not pushing harder. Basically she told me I should have come to her and made the request formally through HR instead of just trying to work it out with my department. I had a director in my department who was VERY opposed to it and frankly angry with me for asking [b](not a parent, if you're wondering)[/b] and once I made the initial request, she was never going to change her mind. But my HR friend told me that there was actually blowback about the incident in the company because they view themselves as very family friendly and part of their hiring strategy is to hire people with a lot of experience who are looking for good work-life balance. So apparently people were upset with my director for, in their eyes, forcing me out by not being willing to compromise with a month or two of unpaid leave or some kind of offer to return gradually in a part time capacity.

Too late for me to benefit from this knowledge, but you still can! If you get pushback, talk to HR and also make sure you review all your company's leave policies very closely (my company had a policy of "up to a year" of leave, combining paid and unpaid, a the discretion of your manager, and I should have pushed a lot harder on that). If this matters to you, get what you can! Good luck![/quote]

You are either inexperienced, uneducated, or both. I am a mom, extremely pro family friendly policies, and own a small business. There’s zero chance I would survive if I had to hold open a job for every single mom I employ until an unspecified end date, paid or not. I offer generous leave but the deal is that you come back and do your job after it. What you are complaining about will lead to businesses just not hiring women of child-bearing age. Wow, what a women’s-rights activist you are!! [/quote]

What an unnecessarily hostile response. Your situation is not true for a lot of big businesses. You are ridiculous.[/quote]

No, but it is true of big business because hiring managers are people (like the mom/business owner above) and once they get burned by something like this it's unlikely they'll be up for getting burned again. Many companies have flat budgets in FY23 and FY24 and many departments don't have excess funds to cover more than 6+ months of maternity leave or employees who are willing to pick up the slack for moms who aren't ready to return after 6 months. And for those saying that there is something wrong with everyone responding, you get 6 months in Canada and many other countries..6 months is a very reasonable amount of time. It's not as generous as many European countries but then again we don't pay the same high taxes as many Europeans.[/quote]

Canada only pays $638 per week which is less than $500 USD. I would rather go back at like, 4 months and be fully paid for that time than go back at 6 months at $500 per week. [/quote]

Which you would absolutely be welcome to do in Canada, where some companies do in fact offer fully paid leave and where the government funded leave system is offered as a backstop to employers that don't provide such benefits.

In the US we have no such backstop so you will never have this choice. But MANY moms would happily take the lower payout in order to take a longer leave without having to leave their jobs. And in Canada, many due. Because it turns out that not every mother is fully prepared to return to full time work at 3 months or 4 months or whatever it is, and it's actually very common for parents to want to wait until their child is walking or until they are done breast-feeding or until the kid is old enough that they feel comfortable leaving them in a daycare or whatever. And it also turns out that some moms need longer to recover from pregnancy and childbirth, that some women experience PPD and/or PPA or have more physical recovery needed from childbirth/pregnancy. These women would be so grateful for an option that took any of these things into account, but in the US we like to pretend that all women who give birth are ready to go back to work (where they will be expected to pretend like they do not even have children) somewhere between 2 and 8 weeks after giving birth. We're the only country on earth with this expectation but based on the replies to this thread, we're very, very proud of being a weird outlier in our extreme disregard for children, families, the act of childbirth, or the mental health of workers.  Woo hoo, America![/quote]

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