"Women have got greedy with maternity leave"

[Bleh]

What do you guys think?
I do kind of feel sorry for male friends, because they don't really have as much of a choice as women do when it comes to leave after having children, as men are only allowed up to two weeks, whereas women can be away for a year. It's really imbalanced. Also, this is a very difficult law for small businesses to fulfill, and discourages them from hiring women of a child-bearing age.

If I was in charge, I would make it so that you can choose to use some of your NI contributions to take extra maternity leave (rather than the employer footing the whole bill), and would have the government give more financial support/tax breaks to small companies that need the assistance.

I am from Germany and find employee rights in the UK truly medieval. Many German companies will happily give you 3 years off for each child, and you get significantly more pay in the first year. They are also much more open to women returning to work part time. Many of my friends only work a couple of mornings a week, for example. Some of my male friends have taken a few months or even a year of paternity leave. And everyone is happy. So why can't the rules here be a bit more flexible and generous?

A years ML is good and necessary for some and is not a holiday!!!

i am a teacher and i only get 4 weeks full pay, 2 weeks 90 percent and then 12 weeks 50 percent. i cannot affort to have more than 2 months off when i get pregnant

rimmer you do realise that compared to statutory min, which many women receive, that is a very generous package.

I would have cut my right arm of for that with both my pregnancies. (Well not literally )

Feierabend - in answer to your question - I have no idea and I wish I did. DH would love to be able to take more time with the kids.

rimmer08 that's a lot more than I got - sounds very generous to me. I only got SMP - ie 6 weeks at 90%, then 20somthing weeks at c£120, and then nothing. So you sound like you're getting a lot to me!

I'm really not sure that allowing leave to be split and calling it parental would help families.

Surely there would be more pressure on Mothers to go back to work?

Surely if both parents take time off then you are damaging the earning/career prospects of both parents, there are 'too many' childless people around who will step in and benefit

(I'm obviously biased since we have 'career' jobs and live in London with crippling costs whereas my childless female friends both London or otherwise with more or less 'career' type jobs live in bigger places with new loft/kitchen extensions and too many foreign holidays a year for me to keep count of [sigh])

Wasn't there a study recently that looked at the impact of increased maternity leave on staff retention, and it found that there was a direct correlation between extending leave beyond 6 months, and women returning to the workplace. ie if you shorten leave to 6 months, many women choose to give up work rather than leave a 5 month old (unless your baby is born on the very day you stop work!) in childcare.

I for one have traded off a payrise and a promotion that in all probability have been mine if I hadn't been on maternity leave when it came up (yes, I know all about the legalities of this, but that's what happened and I need my job, so I've just had to suck it up. I fact, I haven't had a payrise since I got pregnant more than two years ago. So, quite frankly, I think I paid for my own maternity leave.

I got made redundant in January from a Small/Medium size business on the first day back from my honeymoon. EVERYONE on the redundancy list was female and of child-bearing age, this was no coincidence.

The sooner maternity leave is shared 'parental leave' the less discrimination we women will have to face.

Sure mum needs to take the lions-share to start with but there's no reason why dad (particularly if they're on a lower salary than mum) can take over full-time care after a few months.

I have been back at work 5.5 months after returning from maternity with 1st baby who was aged 6.5 almost 7 months on my return. Employer very paranoid about me not returning or being crap when i returned so i started taking files from 3 months maternity through to my return to the office and worked on them from home - up to about 6 hours per week whilst baby was asleep. Since returning I have been extra vigilent about time keeping etc as I knew the presumption was against me - and even tho i am certain i put in the hours (apart from the odd post on mn like this) i still have written on my pdr today "redblue seems to have settled back into her role very well" what is the "seems" about.
Anyway, in my view ML needs to be at least 6 months. In my case babe was only regularly and reliably sleeping thro the night at 6 months and before then, yes I could have come back but who can guarantee the quality of work with night feeds?

personally i think women should gt MORE mat pay.

and the men should be able to share the leave if thast what the couple choose.

Peachys, you can be signed off sick until 36 weeks before your maternity leave automatically starts.

I had 6 months for both of mine, I don't think I would have taken longer even if I could, and I don't think a year off is always a good thing for mum or baby. Breastfeeding duration is not really a valid argument either. I breastfed my girls, exclusively for the first 6 months, and then morning, lunchtime and evening and expressed at work once they were in nursery, it's perfectly possible as long as you are organised and make it clear you are going to take expressing breaks etc.

One point that so many people don't see is that if you start a baby at a nursery (or what ever) when they are 5-6 months old they settle fairly easily. I used to see older babies (8 months +) starting nursery that were seriously unsettled and took ages to get used to nursery, where as the ones who started at 6 months-ish settled in much better. After the age of 8 months or so babies feel much more separation anxiety, but if they are already settled and know their carers they are nowhere near as distressed when they are left at nursery than if they are only just getting to know the nursery and the staff. I saw this both times, I used to go to the nursery and breastfeed my girls until the were about a year old, and saw lots of new babies starting in the baby room, the older they were, the longer it took them to be happy there. I used to talk to the staff about it and they said the same thing, far easier for baby and carer if the baby started before the 8 months mark.

However, I do think mat pay should be full pay, not a percentage, and all of it should be reimbursed by the govt, so that smaller companies are not penalised by having a female workforce. I don't think women have got greedy with maternity leave but I do think that the govt is once again placing emphasis in the wrong areas, instead of paying out more stat mat pay they should be funding more childcare and breastfeeding support!

My sister (lives in USA) only gets 3 months maternity.... That, to me, seems harsh.

Luckily her DH will be SAHD

Agree with greenmonkies, should be fully paid and reimbursed.

Feierabend, surely that only applies to permanent jobs? What about those with short term contracts in Germany? (Only asking because I might just move back there...)I've been in temporary contracts for years (three years each usually which is quite good for academic research) and managed to take a year off mid contract with dd1. Then paid the price by being made redundant a few months after coming back (ie. no new contract) and now have no job, nor will get much pay for dc2 due early next year. Also can't get a job now with big bump on show!

6Feet, that's generous for USA, most women only get 6 weeks, and it's classed as sick leave, after that they are unpaid or go back to work, no wonder they have more SAHM's and crap bf rates!!

it could be a useful mumsnet campaign perhaps to make it a bit more widely known that 'a year's mat leave' certainly isn't paid leave as many have made the point. I also know that's what a lot of my childless friends assume it is.

I'm very lucky in that my employer (a big company) offers 18 weeks on full pay, and i took 12 months with dd and plan to take 12 months again this time. Although financially it is a big struggle, ironically its actually financially worse when i go back to work because the cost of childcare for 3 under 3 (expecting twins) is crippling, but i will have to work or we can't afford the mortgage.

interesting idea for men to be allowed to share the leave, as long as it is the couple's decision - in our case it would sadly never be possible because DH is self-employed and the self-employed get zero benefits of any kind relating to children and family. were it poss i'd have happily gone back after i'd stopped bf (9 mo) and let him do the next 3 months.

couldn't agree more with the posters about women self-limiting their careers though, so in effect more than 'deserving' your mat leave! i've either turned down or not been able to be considered for promotions 3 times in the past 3 years because i was either pregnant, on mat leave bfing or the manager wouldn't consider flexible / 4 day work. In the end I chose to work 4 days with the 20% pay cut, but no one else picks up the 5th day... i am just expected to manage the same job in less time for less money. Which i do. really well. So frankly, my employer gets a bloody marvellous deal out of me, despite maternity leaves.

How is a year greedy when most of it is unpaid or paid at a very low rate (SMP)? I get full pay for 4 months, half pay for 2 months, then SMP for 3 months. No - don't think that is greedy at all. As a public sector worker I am hardly raking it in.

As a teacher I see the effects of poor/neglectful parenting on too many kids. I think that as a society we need to value parenting more as an essential base which requires the necessary investment, both in terms of time and money. I know that given all the time in the world at home there will still be neglectful parents, but at the other end of the spectrum I have been bitten by a small child (whilst holding her in a full body restraint to protect the headmistress) who was having a hissy fit over something innocuous, and she was a product of career parents who left her in childcare for the maximum hours a week and bought her everything she ever wanted as compensation but didn't have time to give her love.

Germany's way of doing things makes sense to me (but I'm not an economist - I don't know how it is achieved in practice). Time to bond with your child and teach them your values properly in the formative years. My childminder does an excellent job if this for me, but I'd give anything to be able to afford to do this myself (back to the house prices/mortgages/dual salary argument).

What evidence do you have that the girl's bad behaviour was caused by her parents having careers and not, say, the fact that she was a little shit? Or unwell? Or whatever? And how precisely do you know she didn't have enough love? Did she tell you that?

I thik if I were to get pregnant my maternity leave is

18 weeks basic pay (is this my pay?)
21 weeks SMP

I'm guessing this is good?

1dilemma, I do think that allowing parents to split parental leave would help families.

This assumes of course that parents can choose how they want to split the leave. If that's the case there would be no more or less pressure on mothers to go back to work.

The question re whether both parents' careers would be damaged by both taking leave is a very valid one. Ultimately I believe this depends on cultural norms. If this system was introduced into the UK tomorrow I do think that both parents' careers would be damaged but in the long term, once splitting leave became the norm, this would change. The effect then would be to create equality between the sexes with regards to this issue, i.e. employers wouldn't make decisions on the basis of the "risk" of a woman taking ML as the risk wuld be the same with respect to a man iysim.

This is true in, for example, Sweden where a (male) friend of mine lives. He took 9 months and his DW took 9 months. We work for the same company and I thought that this would be the kiss of death to his career but he said that quite the opposite was true in the Stockholm office, ie that it would have been weird and a bit frowned upon if he hadn't taken leave. Gotta love the Swedes!

GreenMonkies, I'm afraid I disagree with you re a year off not being a good thing for a mum or a baby. Obviously these things are entirely personal and every mum/baby dynamic is very different but I think being at home for a baby's first year is a wonderful thing and recognised as such by research done into this. A lot of people (including myself) would have reservations about putting a young baby in nursery and these don't relate purely to bfing or separation anxiety. Your decision has obviously worked well for you which is great but I am not sure it would work for all or even most. Also, I don't see how your comment that the govt should pay full pay to mothers tallies with your comment that the govt should pay less SMP and fund more childcare/bfing support?

Personally I don't see how anyone can say that mothers are being greedy re one year's ML - particularly when few are being paid for it. Imo it is absolutely essential for mothers to be able to be choose to stay home without the risk of losing their job and a year is the minimum they should be offered.

"she was a product of career parents who left her in childcare for the maximum hours a week and bought her everything she ever wanted as compensation but didn't have time to give her love"

absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the fact they worked but much much more to do with their style of parenting IMO.

working mothers don't harm childrenMajor study proves.

"dueling - that is extremely good!! would you be public sector government by any chance? "

I am. I think I have understood it correctly, though the work site is really confusing.

My US colleagues get six weeks which is truly shocking. Most end up having to work right up to the birth and go straight back to work after 6 weeks (if they go back at all). There was no way I would have been able to go back to work after 6 weeks, mentally or physically ... absolutely criminal.