Ask Lemmy

People are idiots. Why would you give up a benefit you're legally entitled to? Nobody is going to as much as thank you for that.

So basically, the choice is to spend 12 weeks with those idiots or with your baby? Seems like a no brainer to me.

Come to the EU, noone will scoff at paternity leave here. On the contrary, colleagues will congratulate you for procreating lol

I WISH my husband had been able to take time off. Those first few weeks of sleep deprivation are fucking ROUGH on your own. I think you did the right thing and that the child is going to get dramatically better care because his parents are actually sonewhat rested.

In the U.S. we're taught to brag about how much we're exploited, as if it's a virtue.

It's a very sick culture.

You’re the smart one. Fuck the haters. Ignore them.

Take the paternity leave with pride

Pretty sure THEY are the ones missing something. They've been brainwashed into thinking you should be embarrassed NOT to shun your family so you can be at work 24/7 to make someone else rich. Take advantage of that program while it still exists.

What you're missing is some men legitimately hate their wives and children and dislike spending time with them. Others drank the coolaid of American capitalist propaganda. Your child will only be a newborn once and your wife will need the help. If anything you should be normalizing it by telling all your friends and colleagues how great it is and how happy you are to get to spend that time with your family. Never shut up about how awesome it is. Expound at length about the many benefits you personally enjoyed thanks to your time with your new child. Every man you convince makes the world a better place.

What moron would pass up on 85% paid leave??

Sounds like attitude of wage slaves that have been brainwashed into doing everything for the corpos and being fine with getting scrap. They live to work as opposed to work to live.

Can't change the slave mentality of some people. They were just born to be one.

Your coworkers are fucking idiots.

Take the full 12 weeks - you’ll never regret it. Superhero dads are there for their wife and children. You’re doing the right thing.

Their logic is from a POV of they dont get the benefit since they aren't expecting parents or didn't get that benefit if/when they wer, so why should anyone else. When really the proper evolved response is to be happy that new trends are being set and we're improving the cruel system that keeps new parents from critically important family time.

It's just hyperbolic masculine capitalism being parroted. Live in the U.S. south and have dealt with many friends and their relatives who have said the same shit. I've been around long enough to see those same people completely fall apart when the lives at home just crumble because they're too busy with work (illness, deaths in family, etc). They always eventually come to regret the decisions and times they've missed once they get in their later years.

There's nothing wrong with choosing to prioritize a work career in one's life though, but hating on someone else's choice is just ridiculous.

Americans are weird.

Honestly the time with your partner and kid is precious irreplaceable.

Anyone who's weird about it is insecure about their own paternal involvement.

My main thought on paternity leave is that it should be exactly the same as the maternity leave so that there is no difference between hiring a man or a woman.

Any man that thinks work is more important than spending time with the family is a bad father. I say this as the son of a bad father.

Enjoy it. A great number of people in the US have been conditioned to tie up their sense of worth to their job, and can’t comprehend there’s more to life.

I’d take 12 years paternity leave if I could.

You are surrounded with workaholic, misogynists. My company gives full pay for 12 weeks for mothers and fathers. Several of my coworkers, mostly men, have used their leave in full (usually 9 weeks together and the other 3 broken up). Nobody ever looks down on people for taking leave.

Maybe they would take all of it if it was for full pay. Ya'll motherfuckers need a union.

My man, you are literally getting paid to spend time with a tiny human being you helped make. You’d have to be pretty deep into the Kool-aid bottle to say no to that.

I had my mandatory 15 weeks last year and loved it, so from one dad to another: enjoy it!

And remember: if you die tomorrow, you’ll be replaced at work within a few weeks, but you can never ever be replaced at home.

I went through the same thing when I took my paternity leave. Other male coworkers bragged about how they went back to work the day after their kid was born.

It's a culture thing where our society is conditioned to be boot lickers for the ruling class. I responded to them at the time, "Congratulations on being a bad father, I'm going to take every day entitled to me"

Don't fall into their trap.

Don't listen to those morons. Paternity leave is a legit great way to stay with your wife and children when they need it the most.

@neomachino,

You will never get the time back to be with your offspring during these formative months into years. I would scoff at any "scoffers" and tell them their bragging about not taking time off to be with their family isn't the flex they think it is. Life is more than just your occupation. I'm an American living in the Netherlands with my Dutch wife these days, and I can guarantee with certainty my European colleagues would scoff at me if I didn't take the time off. Attitudes towards this are changing in the U.S., albeit too slowly in my opinion, but our culture is fundamentally sick. I primarily blame puritanical christian zealotry that made its pact with the devil (pun fully intended) with avaricious capital for much of the woes found in our society, for what its worth. The gods willing, this will die out in a few generations.

Take the time and cherish it; your future self and children will thank you.

Those first few months, especially with your first kid… man. The sleep deprivation alone makes it worth it. Not to mention all the firsts that happen so fast that you’ll otherwise miss… presumably to work for “the man.”

Am American, but been lucky enough to work with people who understand this, and maxed out all paternity leave I could get.

Work is something I do, not who I am.

Americans have been indoctrinated to feel their work is their worth.

It is a no brainer dude. Absolutely take the leave. You know how the work culture is here in the US, it's pretty ridiculous. The "Live to Work" crowd is getting pretty old now though so I have seen a shift in corporate culture where I am at.

I’m all for paternity leave, but there is a conflict between taking time off to take care of your newborn, and taking time off to breathe.

Newborns aren’t exactly a vacation.

Paternity leave is a no brainer for families of all stripes. Both spouses should have time off to care for their children in the first year of their life, especially during the vulnerable first year before they are immunized against dangerous diseases. And I'm in a same sex relationship, so I'm definitely using it when we are ready to have kids, haha.

Honestly, each parent should have 6 mo of paid leave.

Edit: adding onto this, all men's bathrooms should have changing stations. It's insane that some women's do, but men's do not.

Ignore them. If you can, should you try and stagger the time off with your s/o. Don't take it at the same time.

12 weeks paternity leave at 85% salary? Damn, that's sweet, even by many EU standards.

I wouldn't think twice about taking it.

I have four kids and I took ~6 weeks of paternity leave for each of them (which was in my contract—I’m an Episcopal priest, though I still went in on Sundays because I was going to go to church regardless so I might as well lead services and save the parish money on paying what we call a “supply priest”). It’s absolutely worth it and don’t let anyone make you feel weird about it. You’re doing a great thing for your partner and child—as well as yourself. Babies are a lot of work for dads as well! Acting like dads don’t need paternity leave is a form of patriarchy.

Am American. Would take every day of it. Would come back and laugh at them when they picked on me for it, while calling them idiots for not taking advantage of the opportunity. "Have fun talking yourselves out of regret, losers."

The "work yourself to death" is a stupid boomer concept. It's a hugely negative aspect of traditional masculinity.

When people say weird stuff like this, I always question why. Why would you have a kid and then work so hard to be away from it? Why would you work for a company that will lay you off the moment it earns them a higher stock price to do so? (no modern company deserves your loyalty.) Why would you brag about suffering instead of relaxing?

I understand that we're all wired differently but those values literally don't make sense to me.

Life at home would have to be pretty bad for me to rather be at work.

What you're missing is full brainwashing from the patriarchy, from the bootlicking capitalists.

Any partner who can but doesn't support their partner and newborn is an ass.

Any partner who can but doesn't take advantage of the leave benefit they earned is giving free money to their employer overlords like an absolute cuck.

Be revolutionary, put your family over your employer.

When my daughter was born, I was blown away to find that my company offered 16 weeks paternity leave. A couple of weeks before my wife was due, I was talking to a coworker and found that his wife was also pregnant, but he didn't know about our company's parental leave policy. He had only been planning to take a couple of weeks. After we talked I found out he took the whole thing.

That four months was one of the greatest times of my life, getting to know my newborn daughter.

Three years later I was in a different job when my son was born. They offered three days. Six months later I found a new job, and I took an extra month off during the transition, just so I could spend every day with my son.

I don't regret any of that. I can't even imagine what that would feel like. I love my children and love being a dad. This is life. This is all we get.

I don't think you're missing anything. I think that your co-workers bragging is one of the toxic effects of how we tend to think about productivity nowadays, especially in America. I think that there's a tendency to glorify suffering (i.e. sacrificing time with your family to do so much work that by the time you get home to your family, you're too exhausted to be fully present with them).

I know fathers who effectively didn't have a choice about spending time with their newborns, because of a mixture of social pressures (especially gendered pressure from extended family) and financial pressure (such as not having access to paternity leave), who then go on to brag about how much they worked and sacrificed, framing it as if it's a choice they're glad they made. I think that for some people, this nonsense rhetoric is what they tell themselves to cope with the fact they were effectively coerced into something they regret.

Long story short, you're not missing anything. You are, in some ways though, going against the grain: even in places that have paid paternity leave, that alone isn't enough to change the tide of social attitudes. That change happens because of people like you who go "fuck this nonsense, I'm not making a martyr of myself to support my family when I can do a much better job supporting them if I'm there with them".

Unfortunately, based on reports from friends who are fathers, this is just scratching the surface of people being weird about men who are enthusiastic and engaged fathers. It sounds like you've got your priorities in order though. Your coworkers are very silly, and even if you don't feel it appropriate or necessary to tell them how absurd they are, you should at least internalise the fact that you are the sensible one here. An analogy that comes to mind is how, if your employer matches your 401k contributions, it's a no-brainer to take advantage of what is basically free money. If someone has "spare" salary and asked for financial advice online, one of the first and most basic suggestions is often that if you're not already taking advantage of any 401k match your employer offers, you definitely should be. It's free money! Similarly, taking advantage of the paid paternity leave is a no-brainer. This isn't a challenge run in a video-game, so there aren't any prizes for making things needlessly harder for oneself.

Edit: Also, I bloody hate it when people say shit like this:

"Most men are hard working and want to support their families so they don't take leave".

The subtext they're saying here is "I don't acknowledge parenting (and other caring labour) as being hard work, and I certainly don't acknowledge how critical essential this labour is for the world to function. I assume that this work is primarily for women, because this allows me to ignore it and the people who do it, which allows me to feel more important. The only way I can maintain my self identity as 'hardworking' is if I implicitly demean others' hard work".

It's bullshit, and your instincts are right to flag this shit as weird. Parenting is bloody difficult, and anyone who makes comments like this are actively reinforcing old systems that led to many fathers not being given the opportunity to be active fathers.

Anyway, rant finished. I'll finish this edit with something I forgot to say in my main comment: congratulations, and good luck in the weeks to come. And well done on taking this paternity leave, because that helps to disrupt the existing, outdated systems of traditional family structure that make everyone miserable. The impact of one person's choice is only small, but if enough people opt for their family over slaving over the altar of capitalism, I hope that we can build a world where a father wanting to actively be a father is treated like the normal thing it is.

Absolutely take paternity. Why wouldn't you?

Do it. Be with your offspring as much as you can. Anything else is barbaric corporate slave mentality.

In our country, both parents are allowed to spend 6 months (each) at home with the newborn.

Honestly it took me years to lose the American work mindset. It was destroying my brain.

Take the leave and feel no shame. Others are reacting because you taking leave challenges their understanding of work. Something that is exceedingly rare in the US.

You are experiencing gender based persecution. Think of men who can't be a stay at home dad, work as a nurse, or can't show emotion, etc. Women who want to do construction work or STEM. LGBT and especially trans discrimination is also that taken to an extreme because the perceived gender divergence is more drastic. For whatever reason, there are many people in society who want to enforce strict artificial gender roles on other people.

Most men are hard working and want to support their families

... which is exactly why you should take paternity leave and support your family, instead of abandoning them for 8 hours a day at work. I'd feel like a total asshole if I just took off and said, "Good luck with the baby, honey. I'm gonna go hang out with my friends at work."

That group you overheard were reinforcing their excuses for ignoring the needs of their child along with the needs of the mom, and reinforcing beliefs that have overwhelming evidence of being false.

Kids needs dads in their lives, the earlier the better. Moms need dads to help out and support them.

You're not taking time off work to laze about, you're switching from one job to take on several related jobs for a while so that you,your child, and your woman have a brighter future than any amount of money could buy.

You're only missing out on taking the easy, shortsighted route. You're missing out on ignoring the future cost your family has to pay in or for you to get back to the familiar routine of work as soon as possible. You're missing out on staying with the known game of work to avoid taking on something new.

You're not missing out, they are.

Good for you! That time with your family is really important.

I'm from the US and I caused quite a stir when I took 4 weeks off; 3 days paternity leave and the rest was accrued vacation. HR was trying to convince me to break it up because "it would self a bad precedent." But my boss was supportive and approved it anyway.

The traditional view that the father needs to work is strong. In Denmark we have had the opportunity to share the maternity/paternity leave between parents for several years, but most often the mother would take the majority, with only 2 weeks being specific for the father.

This is due to the imbalance in pay, since the cut in pay would be larger for a man (generally), so men voluntarily gave the leave to their wives. This is obviously not the intention of the leave and also based on the flaw of unequal pay. Keep in mind that the wage difference is often explained as being caused by the mother taking more leave and thereby not advancing her career during the years when they have small children.

So, to fix his, the latest law make more weeks untransferable. The father now has 11 weeks that can not be transferred. Use it or lose it.

One would expect such a removal of flexibility to make people upset, because technically it will cost the families more potential income, but it hasn't.

It turns out that most men actually wanted the additional weeks of paternity leave. They just needed it to be normalized and/or the legal framework to demand it, so they don't have to have this discussion with their employers or wives. No man is ever asked why they're taking it now. Use it or lose it makes sense to everyone.

In addition we still have 26 (13+13) weeks that can be transferred however the parents want. Still very flexible.

Swede here. Taking care of your family means being an active parent and a sharing partner.

I took 18 months paternity leave with our firstborn so my partner could finish their degree.