French fathers will now get 28 days of paternity leave

28 days? That&#x27;s barely enough to get your head off from work tbh. I just finished 133 days (at 80% pay) of paternity leave here in Norway, and the last part was def more rewarding than the start as you hit your new stride and regular work life grew ever more distant.<p>All the organised toddler activities shut down because of covid19. Bought one of those child carrier backpacks, and we&#x27;ve been exploring forests and mountains almost every day this summer&#x2F;fall, it&#x27;s been a great bonding experience with the now 1 year old :)

Here in &quot;flyover country, USA&quot; I was looked down upon for asking to use two weeks of my own PTO after my company&#x27;s new &#x27;generous&#x27; two week paid parental leave. That request was constantly pushed off until the week of my wife&#x27;s induction, when it was formally declined. I was told the request was &#x27;excessive&#x27; and that generally the woman needs more time to recover but the father doesn&#x27;t need much time.<p>I guess our mental health during a global pandemic isn&#x27;t really of any concern to the bottom line. I&#x27;m grateful that we have a healthy 4-month old baby, but this country has a long way to go to realizing that compassion can be profitable. Better parental rights, better funding for education and health - better take care of your workers and your future (children) and they will be able to take better care of you.

Compare this to 480 days of shared and paid parental leave in Sweden at 80% salary.<p>The fathers are looked at negatively if the <i>don’t</i> take some of this time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;sweden-maternity-leave-paternity-leave-policies-latte-dads-2018-4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;sweden-maternity-leave-pater...</a>

I work at one of the large U.S. tech companies and am currently on parental leave. Fathers get four months of leave at 100% pay, and my health insurance covered every penny of the $500k birth (there were a lot of complications). My wife and I feel extremely lucky to have this perk at this company, and I don’t take it for granted at all. It’s mind-blowing to me that U.S. companies are not required to offer <i>any</i> leave to the fathers. My previous company did not offer leave, so a lot of my male coworkers just used a few vacation days and then were back at work.<p>My wife and I are very busy taking care of the baby essentially all day, so I have no clue how this work is so often done by one parent, much less having both parents working full time.<p>The U.S. needs to get its act together in the 21st century. A lack of mandated PTO and a lack of leave cannot be good for the long term mental health of the country. I would gladly pay more taxes to ensure everyone had this perk.

It really irked me that here in Canada the options were generally skewed towards mothers remaining home. You can split 40 weeks of parental leave, but many employers won&#x27;t provide parental benefits and those that do often only provide parental benefits to mothers. For instance, my employer at the time provided wage top-up for women on leave but nothing for men.<p>Just one of _many_ structually sexist policies in society at large that ultimately contribute to the wage gap.<p>Of course I stayed at work, and of course my wife now has enormous gaps in her work history, and so of course my yearly gains in income have outpaced hers.

Spain found that parental leave resulted in fewer children. Ha.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S0047272718302299" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S00472...</a>

Paternity leave can be a great thing for father&#x2F;child bonding, and for equalizing opportunity for women (who face greater social&#x2F;practical pressure to take their leave), who can fall behind male colleagues by taking their leave. Unfortunately, it&#x27;s hard to force men to take their leave, and in the US a lot of men don&#x27;t because it is frowned upon socially in many companies.<p>One possible way to incentivize men to take paternity leave is to do so indirectly, by rewarding companies where a large percentage of eligible fathers take the full leave. This would reverse the current dynamic, which is: if you take the full leave, you&#x27;re putting your family above the company, and not being a team player. Instead, taking the leave would make you a team player and help the company fulfill the goal.

I am french. With two childreen. This is a wonderfull news, as this 28 days of paternity leave will affect the child during ALL his life.<p>So many old father say before they die this : - &quot;The only regret I have is not to have not been more around my child(reen) young&quot;.<p>You never eat someone say : - &quot;I regret not having worked more when I was young &quot;

I support long paid family leaves, but I find this framing odd:<p>&gt; The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants some mothers and fathers the ability to take 12 weeks unpaid leave and return to a protected job, depending on the size and type of the company. But the law leaves many parents at the mercy of the state in which they live (only three, California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, grant paid leave) or their employers’ individual plans.<p>Why shouldn’t different states have different leave policies. It’s no weirder for different states to have different leave policies than for Germany to have a different leave policy than France.

Meanwhile the Swiss people voted to have two weeks of paternity leave instead of one day. The icing on the cake is that the actual initiative asked for four weeks but the parliament made a counter-proposal of two weeks after which the intiative committee withdrew their proposal of four. 60% of the voters were in favor.<p>Two weeks in one of the highest gdp per capita countries of the world. Two. Measly. Weeks. It was just one single day up until now. Let that sink in.

Meanwhile in Germany people get 14months paid leave. Where neither parent can take more than 12.

&gt;only three, California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, grant paid leave)<p>This is false. New York has paid family leave which can be used by both parents for new borns. In 2021, you can get 12 weeks at 67% pay. [0]<p>It&#x27;s interesting how uninformed people are about basic laws like this in the US. The author apparently lives in New York too.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ny.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;ny.gov&#x2F;files&#x2F;atoms&#x2F;files&#x2F;PaidFamilyLeave_EmployeeFactSheet.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ny.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;ny.gov&#x2F;files&#x2F;atoms&#x2F;files&#x2F;PaidFamily...</a>

Earlier this year we established 16 week parental leave (all types of parents). For a small company like ours, this is not an easy decision, but I believe it will eventually pay off in the long run.<p>I&#x27;m originally from Europe and moved to states as an adult. My home country Slovakia, has very generous parental leave (up to 3 years[0]). I always struggled with the &quot;ruthlessness&quot; of US policies around healthcare, parental leave, education, etc.<p>I was very happy that the company finally matured enough that we could offer a parental leave without suffering the loss of a productive employee for an extended period.<p>We also adopted other European practices, like guaranteed severance after 3 months of &quot;test&quot; period with guaranteed healthcare (COBRA) for 2 months.<p>I honestly wish that these were a standard in this country, that this wouldn&#x27;t be a differentiating factor for us, but I think we have quite long way to go.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globalization-partners.com&#x2F;globalpedia&#x2F;slovak-rep&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.globalization-partners.com&#x2F;globalpedia&#x2F;slovak-re...</a>

Misleading headline. It&#x27;s not French fathers. It&#x27;s fathers in France.

In Poland there&#x27;s 1 year of combined maternity&amp;paternity leave, which can be split between the parents (within some constraints).

Good. I consider 14 days of paternity leave the absolute minimum; less than that is just irresponsible, because you really shouldn&#x27;t leave the mother alone during that time. Official maternal care is rarely full-time. Also, those maternal care people can teach you a lot of useful things about how to take care of your baby that are also important to learn for a father.<p>More time is better because of extra bonding with the new family, and it can be stressful for the newborn to go to fulltime childcare before they&#x27;re 6 months old (after that, I think at least some childcare is good for socialisation).<p>I love the generous paternal leave Scandinavians get. When I had my kids, Dutch paternity leave was only 2 days: one for the birth itself, and one for registering your baby&#x27;s birth. Only in 2019 did they expand that to a whole whoppingly insufficient week.<p>For both kids, I took 3 months off. For the first, it initially was two weeks; not sure if I took it as days off or sick care or something; I hadn&#x27;t planned to take time off originally, until I suddenly realised I simply couldn&#x27;t go to work, so I called in and said I couldn&#x27;t work. After those two weeks, I went back to work, and after my wife&#x27;s maternity leave had ran out and she was eager to get back to work, I took 3 months parental leave (might have been unpaid; not sure). For the second it was unpaid, because I&#x27;m a freelancer, but I don&#x27;t care. This stuff is more important.

That&#x27;s insanely short, especially for a European country.

&gt; The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants some mothers and fathers the ability to take 12 weeks unpaid leave and return to a protected job, depending on the size and type of the company.<p>Sure, you&#x27;ll still have your job. And your employer might even have its own leave program to pay you for time off. But you could just never receive assignments again, so if you&#x27;re working for a consulting company your billable rate will tank and then you&#x27;ll get PIP&#x27;d for &quot;lack of productivity&quot; and then &quot;laid off&quot; because you can&#x27;t do anything about your boss gatekeeping work away from you.<p>No, I can&#x27;t <i>prove</i> this is what happened to me...

In Sweden each parent can get up to 240 days (8 months). It&#x27;s still being debated if the duration is too long, causing more problems than the benefit it brings the child and the family.

Our former CTO was asked what paternity leave he thought tech employees should have (in a country with no legal requirement for it) and he said, &quot;4 months&quot;, which then made it into everyone&#x27;s contracts.<p>Only he thought he was being asked about Maternity leave and now the company is honouring that deal even a 18 months after his departure. It makes me want to have a child real soon before they rewrite that clause.

Meantime mothers in the USA get 12 weeks, below the minimum recommended by the WHO (16 weeks).

I think my brother who had his first child two months ago is going to be a little disappointed that it wasn&#x27;t passed a few months ago. (though he used a bunch of PTO to stay with his wife and their child)

In Switzerland we just voted Sunday for 2 weeks of paternity leave!<p>Of course that&#x27;s lower than the 28 days for French fathers, but it&#x27;s going in the good direction (at our slow swiss pace) :)

I took over half a year off of work, but I did smaller jobs in that time, while my partner was taking off and getting money from state.

Some countries have a nice symetric splittable system between mothers and fathers.

There seems to be some confusion between paternity leave and parental leave. Figure 1 (page 6) in document [1] gives a good comparison between among EU countries., where paternity leave is represented by a black bar.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;social&#x2F;BlobServlet?docId=16676&amp;langId=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;social&#x2F;BlobServlet?docId=16676&amp;langId=e...</a>

that&#x27;s great, of course.<p>But do fathers get same treatment in courts, during custody disputes? Property separation disputes, statistically ?

I&#x27;m dumb and don&#x27;t know anything about maternity&#x2F;paternity leave. What prevents someone from being hired by a company, taking leave due to a child in X days, taking the salary the government forces the company to give you, and quitting Y days after you return? What if X and Y are a month or even one day? Could companies could be scammed for a year of salary while getting only a few days of value out of their employee?

I love my dog probably more than some parents love their kids. Its too bad you can&#x27;t get doggy leave if you don&#x27;t have children.

&gt; Studies have shown that paternity leave can set the tone for fathers’ long-term relationships with their children and families. Children whose fathers took at least two weeks of paternity leave reported feeling closer to their dads even nine years later, according to a joint study of sociology professors at Ball State University and Ohio State University, which also found that paternity leave is linked to lower divorce rates.<p>Causation&#x2F;correlation.<p>Coming from a country where the father can take 30 days. Honestly for the vast majority of births the father is unnecessary to be there after two weeks. The child spends the first month basically eating and sleeping. The father needs to be there to help the mother while she recovers and two weeks is enough.<p>Of the fathers I know who took the full 30 days, they did so for home improvement projects not because they were actually needed that much.