Maternity leave needs to be redesigned

[PlumPudd]

Did you enjoy your maternity leave? Because I’m finding mine a challenge (50% exhaustion and terror, 30% boredom, 20% joy) and I can’t help but feel it’s something to do with the way it’s set up.

No idea what the alternative should be but surely entirely dropping entirely out of society and work for a year and having solo care of a tiny helpless lovely being who is attached to you like an oyster on a rock all the time - then doing a 180 and going back to full on work and life but still caring for your kids is not how it’s supposed to be?

Feel that in some ways (not health, sexism, life expectancy etc) things must have been better in the past, when there would be a bevy of aunties, neighbours, siblings and friends around you in your village, and you’d look after your baby but still spend a bit of your time working / cooking and share a bit of the baby care with the others there would be a bit more of a balance between babies and the rest of life.

Not articulating this very well, but somehow feel this lurching between extremes - a year of nothing but baby then back to normal - is not how it’s meant to be and not really good for anyone.

What would a better alternative look like? Is one even possible now modern society has changed so much and we live and work in different ways?

Maternity leave is what you made of it. I did only 7 months with DC1 because of finance. I loved it so much I took 1 year off plus all my annual leave the year before. I exclusively breastfed mine and I didn’t want to introduce bottle and formula. It’s much easier at over 1yo and switch to cup and cows milk. I do not want a gradual return. Much easier to start a new chapter by going back to work and little one at nursery. I work full time and enjoy my time back to not just being a mum too.

If anything is to change I like the Scandinavian model with the dad taking 3 months after 12 months.

I tend to agree. Haven’t RTFT yet but I live in the Netherlands, where a lot of mothers take maternity leave only until the baby is 3 months old. They then return to work 3-4 days a week and then take parental leave for the other 1-2 days. The dad also gets a compulsory day off per week to look after his kids and it’s also very common for grandparents to put in 1-2 days of childcare a week. As a result, you only pay for 1-2 days of childcare per week. Would that be more the kind of model you envisaged @PlumPudd ?

@Wenfy, I'm sorry you had such a tough birth experience.
Obviously I wouldn't want any woman feeling forced back into work if she has birth injuries that haven't yet recovered, but I'm sure with some thought, there would be a way of accommodating those women's needs, so they get additional time without it being classified at mat leave. Most women don't have birth injuries that totally prevent them from resuming normal life, 6 months after the birth.

I don’t get this at all. You make zero sense. Child rearing is difficult. What do you expect maternity leave to be like? It’s not an employers fault if you don’t have a villiage. With regards to going back to work there’s always the option of using holidays to ease your way back in. And KIT days.

Eh? You don’t need a year off to successfully breastfeed a baby…

This is a western thing. In Africa, we still have your mother and a bevy of aunties. I had my mom for 5 months and various aunties coming in for several nights while I was on maternity leave. It was so glorious. I can’t imagine if I’d had to do it alone with just my husband.
unfortunately I’ve found that a lot of women on mumsnet are intolerant of their mothers or their MIL (usually for the flimsiest reasons) and thus are left stranded and alone during postpartum. A sure path to PPD. It’s unfortunate

don't think yabu but it is flexible. you don't have to take it all off. there is the option of shared parental leave. plenty of jobs are full time / wfh / flexi hours so it doesn't have to be such a cliff edge when going back to work. I'm not sure there was a golden age when people could do a bit of work, a bit of childcare, rely on the village etc. i think it was a case of women not working at all. if poverty forced them to work i expect it wasn't that easy to sort childcare. plenty can't afford to take a whole year off. some can afford to take more. you just have to know what you want, what works for you and your family and do that. part of me wants to be a sahm, the other part wants to have a successful career, bringing in a decent salary and all that, but that's my issue. you obviously can't do both and need to decide the path that works best for you. not sure it's the system so much as not being able to have it all that makes it hard?

That sounds lovely to have your mum there to help. My mum and mother in law are both dead so some of us don't have the option. But I agree , female relatives can be such a great support in the post partum period.

I really enjoyed mine; but I think you have to design it yourself. I booked a lot of classes, did a lot with antenatal friends, etc. There's always people who say you don't need to do any and can just be home with your baby, but that's quite a change from "normal" life for most people, and I found me and DS were happier doing things and seeing people.

Doing more will get rid of the boredom, and then hopefully make it 50/50, at least...

Where is the exhaustion and terror coming from? I mean, sadly I think tiredness is par for the course for most of us, and I am still tired; but it usually reaches a level where you can cope with it. But maybe there's something you can do to reduce the terror?

I tell you what....I had my kids 44 and 37 years ago. 6 months half pay mat leave....three months before, three months afterwards. Now THAT needed redesigning.

It's not law that you take the full time off though. You could do half and half with your partner if you wish. You can also go back to work part time, or not at all if the mood takes you. Be grateful you have options, many other countries you'll get a lot less of them!

I think it's the return to work, rather than maternity leave itself that needs a rethink. There should be a legal right to substantially reduce your hours for the first 6 months of your return.

My return was horrendous. I had started a new job, and my child got back to back illnesses from nursery, which my DH and had to juggle due to no family help. I also caught so many D&V viruses from my DC that I lost 4 kg in the space of 3 months! It was absolute hell, and I handed my notice in after 4 months.

I have recently started in a new role, after a few months of freelancing and resetting, and it's nothing like the shock living hell of my first return to work attempt, as my DC has some immunity now, and I have had some time to adjust to using the work part of my brain again.

This was the sort of thing I was going to suggest. Go back to work sooner (although I was still barely sleeping when DC reached 3 months!) but with much more flexibility for both parents.

I do hear exactly what you are saying. Even before going off on maternity, I found the concept of being away from work for so long (and then expected to just come back as normal) mind boggling. When you are off sick for an extended period your work can do do a phased return to help to you reintegrate slowly…and yet no such joy with mat leave - you’re expected to jump straight back in after such a long period of absence, and somehow juggle it all expertly with now a baby in the mix too…unless you have the annual leave to do it differently!

I have chosen to have 10 months off and I return on a 4 day week for half a year but on full time wages, using annual leave. This gives me a bit of comfort that I still have a day with baby which is good for both me and them too I’m sure. I’m also planning to go in a day a week in the month before, as it’s all just using annual leave so it’s up to me how I use that annual leave. That will also help me adapt and reintegrate slowly I hope, in an engineered phased return. I also started doing KIT days early on to help me build confidence and see that I was capable of the juggling act in the morning and drop off, before even reaching work (exhausted of course). I started KIT days around baby being 4 odd months as sleep had started to come in blocks at least and I was better adjusted. No way could I have managed much sooner than that though.

The thing that’s got me through mat leave is handing baby over to family to catch up on housework and shopping etc, and occasional ‘me time’. I’m lucky I have family to do that with. And having an almost daily baby class too - it’s helped me with the routine of getting up and ready with baby, out the house, something for them to stimulate them / socialise with other babies etc and then a chance for me to spend time with other adults and get a nice coffee / sandwich while baby usually naps. Tried to start doing a walk after the class and coffee too, now it’s summer and I can shift some baby weight.

@MaybeOneAndDone if you give women the legal right to reduced hours in addition to the legal right of a year's mat leave, you will render women of child bearing years unemployable.
It's often just not sustainable for a business to support that - they need the employee to be present for the role they were hired for. Why would they hire you, invest in your training, pay for your pension/company car etc and have to pay someone else to do your actual job?

Yes, 3m would have been too soon for me, just because I felt I was still getting to know my little babies then as they emerged from the alien/larva stage 😂
I returned to work when my eldest was 6m and will do the same with my youngest next month. I think it’s the right time for them and for me (though admittedly I FF both babies from day one so maybe that makes it easier too).
In the Netherlands they make you start your maternity leave a minimum of 4 weeks before your due date, which is what I did with my first (…who was 8d overdue). With my second I stopped 6w before (good job, as he was 10d early!). Once the fully paid maternity leave ended with my first I stuck all of my statutory paid days and unpaid days onto that in one big block. This meant I went off on maternity leave at the end of September and returned mid-May, which worked brilliantly as I am a teacher (only had to do the fun end of term bit before summer holidays started!). With my second I am returning to work at the start of the school year, midway through the statutory paid days, and spreading the remainder of those (and the unpaid days) out as one day a week. As such I am only returning 4 days a week and that takes me up until April 2025 when by law they have to take me back for 5 days again if I want to do that.

As such, I have enjoyed both maternity leaves because I have structured them in a way that works for me and because they have been fairly time-limited. I actually don’t enjoy 9-18m very much (aka The Danger Zone) so 6m is a good time to return to work IMO.

I would never have survived if it had been me and just the baby. I am shy introvert, so I made myself get out and about and we had a great wee life, going to M&Ts meeting other mums, going out and about some times we were out all the time. It does not need to be a boring lonely time.

I feel like some of the posters missed your point a bit. I am on mat leave right now (not my first one) and I completely feel your frustration and where you are coming from. Maybe it's because I am in your shoes right now and not looking at the issue from a distance. As an aside, I often wonder HOW did people look after babies who breastfeed every two hours or even three AND did the washing, cooking without our modern appliances AND read baby stories or did anything developmental with the child (or indeed, did they at all?)
More to your point: it is very challenging to do 100% baby then go back to work and of course your baby is still very dependent on you. I am trying to go back 3 or 4 days to start with to make it a bit more gradual but beyond that either your money and career suffers or your mental health. The only idea I had is maybe the 3 year mat leave that we have in my original country isn't that daft after all....

I was lucky in that my nursery manager got breastfeeding. I trained both my babies to feed at night (up to 10 x). During the day at nursery I gave them a single bottle of 100-200ml of expressed breastmilk - they would feed it to them 20ml at a time & would keep it in the fridge and let me know when they needed more. During hot days I often needed to provide a bottle a day but most of the time I didn’t.

But one of the grandmothers, when she found out about the policy, told me in her day they only fed the baby once every 3-4 hours, never at night, and that the babies were weaned by 3 months lol

I agree with you, I absolutely loved maternity leave and can’t wait for my next one! But then I also wish I could be a SAHM which some people would hate.

This 1000%
I work in a small company - bosses are actually married so they have exact same mentality.
Shared Parental Leave, KIT days, phased returns all scoffed at. They quite clearly begrudge anyone taking maternity leave at all and openly "joke" about it.
All things are certainly not even.
In my job it is difficult to take annual leave at all, never mind using it to come back part time to ease back it. Hard no.

I personally think maternity is a bit too long - I would rather split it up a bit. I could (and did) go back after 6 months and then would like to take the remaining time on the run up to them going to school.
I was able to spend time with my first during that time as I was off on leave with number 2. I loved it. And it still makes me sad I never had the same time with the second.

I think actually that it might be more about better managing expectations for maternity leave, but also for parenting. Being at home with babies and small children is very hard work. I think it's very easy to think of it as 'a year off work!' and I know I thought of it that way with my first and all of my friends have as well. Like I think most people know it's going to be tiring, but it's thought of as a positive and a happy time - but unfortunately, it isn't for a lot of people.

If someone has to take time off to be a carer, either for a parent or for a poorly child, we recognise as a society that this is not 'time off!' - it's hard, emotional, potentially quite lonely work being a carer. And while there are usually not the burdens of illness or disability to deal with, beyond that, I don't think that caring for a small baby is a whole lot different. It's 24/7, it's physical hard work, it's exhausting, it limits your social circle and how easy it is to get out of the house to see other adults, etc. Yes, you can go to baby groups and it's fine to have a cup of tea with a random other parent for 15 minutes between nappy changes and singing songs, but that's not real human connection. I think we almost need to prepare people (mothers) better for what it's really going to be like, and then everyone can better put in place the supports they need individually, according to their needs, family structure, etc. We were the first amongst our friends to have dc, and literally all of them have come to me when they had kids and said, why didn't you tell me it was like this?! I think just no one talks about the reality because it seems terrible to moan about having time off with your lovely new family - but honestly, I was running back to work after a year, as were most people I knew. With better expectations, we might have planned things differently.

You are right OP. We, as a species, aren't designed to look after babies (and children) like this.

This is how I imagined my mat leave would be....instead I had a baby who HATED their pram until 6 months, who had a feeding issue meaning truly horrendous early weeks of constant feeding 24/7, who would only nap on me until 6 months (so no 'sleep when the baby sleeps'). Add in lockdown, it wasn't great. But 6-12 months were much better, I was actually able to go walks easily and have naps, go to a couple of baby classes that had restarted - so I'm very glad I was able to take the whole year off.