Who is for equal parenthood?

I don't think that one month off for recovery is medically or psychologically advisable at all. While some women can manage that, the majority will not be able to.

I have a very different view. I think the fact I as a self employed single parent have very few maternity rights has been a massive benefit to me as it means I always worked so customer stuck with me and I made a lot of money. Give someone money to sti around at home which is what some rich do for their children and the situation kept women are in and you arein a sense killing them with kindness and keeping them down.

It seems to me that women get into the role of being senior parent without ever questioning whether that's right, so I see what it is that your manifesto is trying to do but, I don't think that your proposals would promote equal parenthood, because I more and more see that as a mindset. I think that it is more important that women are made aware of the downsides of becoming the senior parent and to make sure that they don't sleepwalk their way into that role. Some women rellish that role (and good luck to them) but it can be damaging for a lot of relationships and I personally think damaging for society as a whole, including the work environment.

I'd definitely go for that manifesto. Redesigning school hours for the modern world is way way overdue.

Self employed people should have the same rights to statuatory maternity/parental allowance as employed people get for SMP.

Obviously they can't have enhanced maternity pay, since they employ themselves, and they can't ask their clients for a secure 'job', but that is the nature of self enployment.

Self-employed mothers have at least some options through Maternity Allowance (although woefully inadequate compared with SMP provision for those employed).

Self-employed fathers get absolutely nothing. My DH could only have a week off because we couldn't afford to lose any more money than that. His business would not have been massively effected by having two or three weeks off and it would have been possible had he been entitled to some kind of stat paternity pay.

The major issue with self employment is this idea of non-transferable leave - two parent families where one is SE and cannot leave the business for any length of time face the same discrimination as single parents in this issue.

Or, to put it another way, from the perspective of the child, they have less right to spend the same amount of time with one or both of their parents as a child with two employed parents.

Parental leave should be a set amount that all children have the opportunity to benefit from (depending on what their parents decide is best for the family unit) - children with only one parent or one parent self-employed should not be at a disadvantage because of some arbitrary attempt to force fathers to be more involved.

Well currently the partner of a woman claiming Maternity Allowance does not have the option of taking 3 months of paternity leave.

As I understand it anyway.

So they have introduced a welcome measure of flexibility and excluded families where women are not in long-term employment.

Baffling.

Then what is the point of creating the administrative nightmare and new opportunities for sexist discrimination of separate "birth leave" and parental leave at all?

Just leave it that women have the option to take whatever amount of maternity leave they choose up to 8 months (2 + 6).

Fathers should also have the right to take their paternity leave straight after the birth (concurrently with partner) or at the time of their choosing within the first year.

Then each parent has the option of deferring whatever of maternity/paternity leave they didn't use as paternal leave, used flexibly (as described) over the first 3 years (I would extend this to 5).

That I could go for.

But any arrangement involving "birth leave" I utterly reject.

ClaireDe - the self-employed parent is a whole other can of worms, because the current arrangements discriminate so openly in a way I can't (as someone in a quasi-self employed situation, soon to be fully) get my head around.

The other thing we have barely touched on are the changes in employment practices for people working now.

DH's maleness is only one factor in his job being our "main wage". The other is his age and the time he entered the workforce (and his sector).

The employment protections and benefits available to me are nowhere near his. In my industry fixed term contracts and self-employment are the rule and any kind of long-term relationship with an employer very much an exception.

My colleagues in their 20s are facing a completely different set of considerations when it comes to them figuring out how to have children.

Any proposal that doesn't include consideration of this is largely pointless, IMO.

Or, in short, good point :)

And it still leaves all the problems about how to make sure single mothers are not discriminated against.

And self-employed parents

"Your proposal does not work our so far from mine - it's a question of a few months difference in the length of the use-it-or-loose-it part of the leave."

No, it's a question of the 1-2 month post-birth recuperation before being put onto "parental leave" at your employer's convenience.

Making it easier for fathers to take time off to spend with their children is a win for everybody.

But taking important things away from women to give other, less valuable, things to men, seems like a backward step.

Your plan is effectively to abolish maternity leave as it is currently understood and replace it with something less advantageous for parents.

Why would anyone (other than business representatives) be in favour of this?

Longtail is quite right about what would happen where women had to prove sickness after 1-2 months. It would create an expectation that women should be back at work by then and were dossing if they weren't.

Meanwhile each parent is in negotiations for when over the next 3 years they get to take time off to be with their child. They've both lost the entitlement for their child to have a parent at home for the first year, should they choose that.

My proposal is that the current entitlements persist, but that they can be shared as a couple prefers, with 3 months that is non-transferrable to encourage men to take it up.

And it still leaves all the problems about how to make sure single mothers are not discriminated against.

A month? Goodness, you must have had an easy birth. It took me two months to recover from an episiotomy / post-partum infection. Four weeks after the birth I was sitting on cushions and could neither sit nor stand for extended periods of time. Yeah, sling on my work suit and briefcase, I'll be there

And before you mention sick leave, I can't imagine anything more mortifying than having to spell out all of that to my boss. I think your proposal is impractical because women would routinely have to take sick leave for at least a further month and it would cause bad feeling and be thought of as "malingering" because there would be a social assumption a month was more than enough to recover from a birth because that's what the state allowed for it.

I largely agree with what Himalaya has been saying.

We are in a situation where men and women are fairly equal in the workplace until they have children. Then roles in the family have a tendency to become polarised into traditional duties, and economic power becomes concentrated in the hands of men, to the detriment of women.

I would like to see childcare and domestic duties be viewed as the jobs of both parents. This would require a massive change in attitudes in society. Giving men a large chunk of paid paternity leave would help to achieve this.

In many families the mother would then take the first period of parental leave, and the father the second. There would be no transfer of parental leave as this would perpetuate the current attitudes. All parental leave would of course be optional - as maternity leave is currently.

"lactation doesn't define or make good parent"

No, but the ability to lactate is an indication that the parent in question is a woman.

A feminism that tells me that women are unimportant, that the things their bodies can do are a mere logistical inconvenience that mean they have to have a couple of months of medical-based leave but no more, is not any kind of feminism.

I am the last person to defend any kind of gender essentialism under most circumstances. I don't believe being a woman makes you better at caring for children, or worse at doing hard sums.

But I do believe that being a woman means that you are biologically female, that all things working as expected you have the physical capacity to get pregnant, to gestate a foetus, to give birth (failed on this myself the proper way, but still came closer than a man could), to breastfeed.

Those things don't define me as a person, but they are important things my woman's body can do, and I want them respected and treated as important, not argued away as inconvenient footnotes.

I would happily support a proposal for a year of maternity/paternity to be shared between parents (noting the interesting points raised about how you establish who should do the sharing) on a 3 months each, use it lose it, 6 months divided as suits, basis.

What I object to strenuously is the needless attempt to reclassify the leave women take after their baby is born as special birth-recovery leave, to take a currently generous provision and make it short and potentially punitive (forcing women to the doctor for certs to prove they are still "unwell" if their recovery takes "too long").

There is no need to do that, except to make an ideological (and false) point that motherhood is just pushing a baby out your vagina, and once that job is done and you've been patched up you can fuck off if you think you deserve anything other than derision for the role you played in creating that baby and continuing to feed it.

This thread claims to be about equal parenting, but it is not. Unless you believe a working parent can't be the equal of a SAHP, the OP's proposals make no sense.

Equality in parenting comes from respect and consideration and love. It's based on what happens at home.

This throwback to the 70s suggestion seems to believe that it comes from whether and how much you work.

I agree with vezzie even though am self employed and have started work earlier it's on my terms with minimal childcare.
What about a six day business week? Ty to.better wrap around care

lactation doesn't define or make good parent
given most mums don't bf,and certainly not beyond 6wk what's your point
good parent multifaceted, is not lactation specific

"There should be no presumption that a female parent will have more parental leave than a male one, the balance should be for each individual couple to decide."

Female parent?

Male parent?

Don't you mean "mother" and "father"?

If I'm just going to be a "female parent", just the same as a "male parent", I want the male parent to do half of the gestation, because TBH I find pregnancy a real drag.

I think since we're all being biologically "equal" that the male parent should get his abdomen sliced open.

And I'm fucked if I'm doing all the lactation this time. No reason a "male parent" couldn't do that.