Who is for equal parenthood?

[Himalaya]

(this comes off the other equality thread but wanted to start it as a Q in it's own right).

So much of the inequality between men and women in society comes down to the structures and assumptions that push us in such different direction when we become parents together, and it starts with maternity leave.

Sooooo.... Here is my manifesto.

1. 1 months maternity leave for women giving birth.
2. 6 months parental leave for new parents to be taken anytime in first 3 years (with some flexibility for both employer and employee) . An individual employment benefit/right - non transferable.
3. Redesign school hours and terms and wrap around childcare to fit modern lifestyles rather than harvestime and mothers as main carers.
4. build/retrofit cities so that affordable housing, good schools and commercial centres are close together.
5. free chocolate

Does anyone go for that? Is there any county like that?

Would you support a cut in female maternity leave and an equalisation of parental leave?

I would certainly support the idea that some part of the leave is not transferrable. Lived in Sweden for a while and even though parental leave was available, men would not really use it, due to same reasons men in UK would not - employers not happy to let them, bad for their careers and they earn more, not really expected of them etc etc. So while in principle allowing each family to decide how they want to use the leave is of course better, in reality it would not change how things are now.

Once fathers had the option to "use it or lose it", things changed, as men had more interest in negotiating with employers and people were generally more understanding. And now most dads take at least some part of the leave - meaning also that there are less discrimination of women due to potential parental leave, as both men and women can take time off to take care of the kids.

HazleNutt - interesting re: Sweden, that's what i was thinking 'use it or loose it'.

RealityIsNOTWarren

Being breastfed until two and beyond is not a right - otherwise you would be saying that mothers have the responsibility to breastfeed for 2 years + if they can. There is no point talking about unenforceable rights.

I think it is really quite insulting to women to want to remove 11 months of maternity leave from them because basically they are just the same as men and there's no need to recognise the biological difference that means they carry their babies in their bodies and feed them from their bodies.

For the first year of a child's life (or so) a birth mother and a father are not interchangeable parental units, and it is not any kind of equality to pretend they are.

Maternity leave is as much about a mother's recovery as it is about childcare. How dare you demand that women who have sections be forced back to work before they can drive?

Any notion of equality that ignores biological reality is bullshit.

It is perfectly possible for a couple to be equal parents without forcing women onto sick leave so you can diminish motherhood to a few inconvenient weeks post-partum.

DH knows all the things you mention about parks and food. Because he is a genuinely engaged and interested father.

And if he weren't, forcing him to take 6 months off wouldn't help.

Even if you implemented your anti-mother regime, he still wouldn't take the 6 months, because we, as a family can't afford for him to take time off work.

I'm a FT WOHM, I took 3.5 months ML first time, 8 months second time. This time will be more complicated, but I'll be starting back in paid work after about 2.5 months.

I'm all about improved paternity rights, but not at the expense of mothers.

The biggest single cause for poxy patterns being set in the first year of a child's life IME is lazy, entitled men and women who are prepared to defend their right to do fuck all because they have a job.

You won't change that attitude by forcing women onto sick leave when they are still recovering from giving birth.

Vast numbers of working mothers breastfeed and always have done by the way.

Yes of course it is a good plan. I took 2 weeks of annual holiday for each baby and breastfed for 1 - 2 years. We had 5 children, three of whom are now grown up. One reason we have all done so very well in so many areas including financially is because I took two weeks off work. It is a brilliant solution for many women and great for children too (no matter what those with an agenda to keep women chained to the house tend to suggest).

I think the present 6 weeks at 90% pay (not that I ever was entitled even to that) is about right and tallies with the 6 week check at the doctor. Most women have a toddler to mind anyway with a new baby and don't tell me it is harder to sit in your average office than looking after a new baby and toddler because it simply isn't. If women are so pathetic they cannot mvoe much after birth they need more energy at home scrubbning floors and minding toddlers than sitting in most work places. Arguably you could be saying that to protect women return to work quickly so they get a rest.

Everything AThingInYourLife says is true.

Plus, this plan is exceedingly anti-feminist because it is violently prescriptive about what "real" families are, what circumstances babies are born into, and who supports the mother (yes, new mothers need support to look after the babies) when the baby is born. It's an abusive gits charter again, as so many assumed ideas about m-f partnerships are.

another thing too: all this chauntering on about loss of status at work if you take a year off is arse about face too. It's coming at the thing from the wrong direction. You're saying: men don't generally take lots of time off for babies, therefore they don't lose status or damage career trajectory, therefore that is what mothers should do too. ie, men are always right, their way is the right way. Bollocks to that. Honour the mother, don't elide her.

is at actually more restful at slaughter and may, or whatever, than at home if someone else is mucking out the actual house and all you have to do is lie around and breastfeed?

I didn't really want to put my first baby down anywhere for weeks. Obviously by number 3 the novelty had well and truly worn off but it was still quite shit expressing milk in the loos at work all the time.

The ONLY way to address "equal parenthood" is to build a country-wide network of heavily subsidized or even free proper quality childcare from early days (4 months I think is reasonable). The parental leave should not be too long though (3 months?) and be equally accessible to both partners and used at any point in the first 5 years.

The way it is set up right now, women are often pushed onto extended maternity leave by the economics and extending those benefits without addressing the vast damage it does to the female careers does nothing for equality of parenthood or in the workplace.

Just look at what works in places like Sweden - do not need to invent a proverbial bicycle.

'I think it is really quite insulting to women to want to remove 11 months of maternity leave from them because basically they are just the same as men and there's no need to recognise the biological difference that means they carry their babies in their bodies and feed them from their bodies.

For the first year of a child's life (or so) a birth mother and a father are not interchangeable parental units, and it is not any kind of equality to pretend they are.

Maternity leave is as much about a mother's recovery as it is about childcare. How dare you demand that women who have sections be forced back to work before they can drive?'
thinginyourlife
Great post! Agree totally. Equality doesn't have to mean being the same.

"other than if you accept that the ability to bath, feed, change nappies and clean up around a family belongs to one sex."

Well feeding certainly does! So you might as well do the rest while you're there. I think making workplaces family-friendly (or allowing working from home in conjunction with childcare) is a much better solution than reducing maternity leave.

Surely it's already illegal to discriminate against a woman (i.e. her career is harmed) if she takes maternity leave? She should be considered equally to a man who hadn't taken leave but otherwise had the same experience/skills etc.

The key point is equality. This doesn't mean treating people the same. Just fairly. Women have breasts, so they feed the baby. They are its default main carer when it's young. That's not sexist, just a biological fact. So she does have a greater need to be with the child than a man.

'The way it is set up right now, women are often pushed onto extended maternity leave by the economics'

Some mothers want to spend extended time out of work though and it is a choice rather than a financial decision. Applies to some fathers also.

From a feminist perspective, what is the problem that this is supposed to solve? The fact that typically men don't take enough responsibility for their children, or at home, to support their partners to flourish at work?

This won't work. Women don't not flourish at work because men aren't allowed to take responsibility at home. Men don't want more responsibility at home. It is my observation that, in general, when men want something, they ask for it. Really ask for it. Either at home ("let me do that, you sit down") or at work (in a conversation with their boss) not a general whine in a social context about how "oh it's so unfair that women get maternity leave and breastfeed and bond and all that". If they want to do night feeds, if they want to wash pukey pooey baby clothes, if they want to push a pram around the park for hours when they are absolutely gritty with fatigue, LET THEM ASK. They could start by doing it at evenings and weekends. Let's not come up with any perky well meaning suggestions for them, shall we.

Next.
"Women's work" is not without status by accident. It isn't that women don't flourish in high status places (paid work), and sort of end up doing the work that just happens to low status (child care and home stuff); it is the other way around. They call it crap work because we do it. They don't pay us for it and assume it is trivial because we do it.
If we agree that the traditional women's stuff is naff and shouldn't be honoured, they won't reward us by inviting us onto the board and all the corporate events in the VIP box. That is really not the issue.

Women have been working, like, for ever. There is a measurable pay gap, there are huge problems with the perception of women in the work place. This is not because we're not doing it right. It's because men think they are owed women's work and time for free. It has very little to do with women being mothers too. That's just a justification.

MAternity leave is a tiny precious little window that recognises an important job being done by women. Not paid (enough); but it exists.

Athinginyourlife

If you have major abdominal surgery and cannot drive of course you should not be forced back to work if that work involves driving etc... you shouldn't be forced out of work either if reasonable accommodation can be made.

Recovering from major abdominal surgery is not 'motherhood' (in fact in can get in the way of it in the same way that it gets in the way of work) it is recovering from surgery. The two should be recognized and provided for separately.

If your DH had a protected right to paternity leave and pay, which was not deducted from yours why would he not be able to take it?

Vezzie -

I don't think this plan is violently prescriptive about what "real" families are. I simply says 1) mothers should get time off in recognition of the physical toll of giving birth and establishing BF and 2) parents should get time off work when they have a new baby.

Actually I don't think the big thing is about losing status at work by taking a year off (or 2 or 3) it is about cementing roles at home. It is about opening up a wider and wider gap between partners' earning capacity so that it never makes financial sense for fathers to take time off or go to flexible working that would enable mother's to look for the job they want rather than the-job-that-fits-around-childcare.

Himalaya, I think we should look at work in other ways - that have been suggested by other posters on here - to improve the practical realities that apply to women at work (once they get back there) and in fact all parents at work.

Vezzie, yes indeed.

But that doesn't have to mean instead of having 'use it or loose it' parental leave for dads.

The employment rights from someone who has had major abdominal surgery for non-pregnancy related reasons are very very different and much less secure than for people who have had a baby.

As Athinginyourlife says, you can't just dismiss the biological elements in the first year. It is a biological imperative that I remain with my child as I am BF'ing. As it is, I will be going back to work when she is 9 months old. She is currently 8 months and it is only in the last 4 weeks or so that she started to reduce her feeds enough for me to be able to leave her for any length of time.

The emotional attachment I feel is a lot stronger this time than with DD1, presumably due to the BF hormones (DD1 was bottle fed) and if I'd have had to go back to work when she was 7 months old, I would have been a wreck.

You also assume in your 'manifesto' that both parents are employed. I am employed and am the main wage earner. DH is self-employed and doesn't even qualify for paternity pay. Even if there was adequate renumeration from the state for this leave you think fathers should take, he wouldn't be able to take 6 months off as he would not have a business to go back to, so under your non-transferable plan, I would be able to have seven months off, be forced back to work before either me or DD were ready AND she would end up in child care / with GP's anyway rather than her father.

DH would actually love nothing more than to be a SAHD, and hopefully by the time we have a third DC it will be viable financially, but you can be damn sure I'll still be taking my 9 months paid maternity leave!

You cannot push such a one size fits all approach, just because it would have worked for you!

I whole heartedly agree there should be more access to paid leave for fathers, but NOT at the expense of the current hard fought for maternity rights that women currently enjoy.

vezzie Wasabi, why women business owners in particular?

i am a small business owner, so i am going to look at the situation from this angle.

jellybeans "Some mothers want to spend extended time out of work though and it is a choice rather than a financial decision. Applies to some fathers also."

Of course and it is great. But a lot of women stay at home because there is no reasonable cheap childcare in place and it is cheaper for them to stay at home than for their partners because of the wage discrepancy... they are forced to regardless the fact that their careers can get damaged in the process. That was my point.

"Recovering from major abdominal surgery is not 'motherhood' (in fact in can get in the way of it in the same way that it gets in the way of work) it is recovering from surgery. The two should be recognized and provided for separately."

As someone who has had two CSs and is about to undergo a third, I can assure you that for some women recovering from abdominal surgery is very much a part of early motherhood.

Trying to separate my recovery from my section from my recovery from pregnancy, my tiredness from breastfeeding and broken sleep is pointless and stupid, and pretty demeaning TBH.

I do not want my employment protections eroded in the way that you demand because you think it would be more "fair" for me to have to take sick leave rather than the far more advantageous maternity leave I am currently entitled to.

Your regime insists that women should be recovered and ready to return to work at less than 6 weeks post-partum. Worse than what is available to American women. If you make returning to work too onerous, too damaging to mothers and babies, you create an incentive foe women to stop working altogether. Where's your equal parenting now?

You insult me, and any other woman not physically or emotionally ready to return to work after a month, by insisting that we are just "sick" and that that sickness is not relevant to the fact that we have just had babies, when in fact it is the bringing of the baby into the world that means we need to recover.

My last pregnancy battered me physically. Not the birth, the pregnancy. I needed time to recover from that. Not sick leave - I wasn't sick. I needed time to heal from the trauma my body underwent carrying a 10lb baby 2 weeks past term.

And I'm in pretty good shape compared to some women - I'm strong and healthy, I've never suffered from PND.

You can't separate the physical and emotional recovery element from the rest of early motherhood, and your contention that ML is only for childcare and not for recovery is dubious at best.

"If your DH had a protected right to paternity leave and pay, which was not deducted from yours why would he not be able to take it?"

because he earns a lot more than SPP

vezzie, you are not talking about womens rights you are talking about the rights of employees, who are women.

or women who are employees. its just dodging the issue to say you are an entrepreneur, you sort it out. yes of course i can 'sort it out'...but this is feminism and if the results is fewer women employers, how has that helped feminism?

or does feminism only apply to some women?

Wow, great post vezzie, I missed it earlier.

The breastfeeding is a red herring - I've been away for a whole day (9 hours) from my breastfeeding child when she was 6 and a half months old, without any problems - and she didn't even take expressed milk or formula, but just made do with solids (BLW) until I was back in the evening without much trauma.

I returned to work fulltime each time when my kids were 9 months old, without seeing it as a need to wean. no 1 was breastfed until 18 months, and who knows how long she'll keep doing it. she's a year old now and gives no indication of wanting to wean.

A friend of me (self employed) returned to work 2 weeks after giving birth, while her husband looked after the baby, she expressed and breastfed in the evenings and nights. For them it made sense as she earned much more than him.

I think giving parents choice who's taking what proportion of the leave makes sense, and those choices can't only be driven by emotional but also by economical considerations.

I think breastfeeding's great, but I don't like the way how it is being pushed as holy duty. And since breastfeeding is no real detriment to working, it's not neccessary to leave the maternity leave to mothers alone.