To ask for your experiences of shared parental leave?

[Beaujangle]

DH and I are thinking of this but have a couple of reservations/confusions.

The first is around pay. Both our employers pay 6 months at full pay for parental leave. Does this mean I can take 6 months and my full salary and then DH take 6 months at his? Thus effectively being on a full salary?

Secondly - if anyone has done this, how did you find it? Did you feel you missed out by only taking 6 months? In some ways I feel 12 months off work is a reward for being pregnant.

And how did u manage on return to work? Mines only takes boob and is 7 months old… have no idea how it’ll go when I’m back to work and he has zero boob. He rejects all bottles & all formula milk too.

*as he ONLY has boob!!

I struggled for the first 6 months of both of my maternity leaves. And for me the 9-12 month periods were by far and above the best part.

We considered shared parental leave both times but after having my first baby I ruled it out for my second and definitely wouldn't consider it for a 3rd if we ever had another. 9-12 months is such a nice time to be around them.

I'd have happily given DH months 0-6 if it wasn't for recovering from birth and breastfeeding... But realistically when you consider the physical recovery then you're probably offering up the second 6 months or the final 3 months... Which are IMO the absolute best part! If I could have bought him extra leave then I would have done that and happily delayed TTC to save up enough to allow him more leave. But the system isn't really set up to let dad's be more involved without mum's giving something up. And that's with us working somewhere that's quite forward thinking and offers 8 weeks paid paternity leave.

Can't speak to the financial side, we couldn't make any sense of what we'd be paid if we had decided to use shared parental leave.

@WLBalanceHow I returned to work at 7 months with an exclusively breastfed baby. She has never had a bottle in her life, despite many attempts. She was a very good eater though, and managed without me at nursery 7.30-5 4 days a week with just lots of food and water. She wouldn't take pumped milk in a cup or anything either. She's 12 months now and still only breastfeeds and eats, but has maintained her weight curve (50%) perfectly.

6 months off is fine if you have an easy baby :) I had 3 months off with my first, and it was a nightmare, he was bottle fed due to severe reflux and cmpa. It would have been equally bad not working though due to his issues and constant misery and never sleeping. I did miss him a great deal every day though for a very long time, but I'm the higher earner and big mortgage.

Me and my wife are doing it and it’s working really well for us. It was difficult to calculate through. We’re both NHS (different jobs, same pay band) so it should have been easy to work out, but it was hard to understand. The gov.uk website has quite a good spreadsheet template to help though.

We split the year between us:
Month 1 - both off (me using mat leave, DW using “paternity leave” & annual leave)
Months 2 - 9 - me off
Months 9 - 12 - DW off

I’m just going back to work and I feel 9 months off was enough. I’m glad DW and DD have time together. It also makes my transition back to work easier knowing that DD & DW are at home and we’re not also straight into nursery drop-offs etc.

I went back when DS was 7 months and continued breastfeeding until he was a bit over 2. He never had formula or really figured out how to drink from a bottle, so even having a bottle-refuser doesn't automatically make it impossible. From about 7-13 months if I wasn't there he'd take expressed milk from a cup. We used a doidy cup, which he found easy enough to learn to use. After 13 months I stopped expressing as he was happily drinking cow milk, and he would just breastfeed when I wasn't at work.