Not that you can’t work toward both goals but it does seem like the idea of specifically paternal leave, for instance, presupposes a certain kind of family structure.

I’m fine with transferable leave. I can’t see the problem with allowing grandparents or sisters or brothers to take leave. Once you move away from a very strict biological definition of parenthood, the way leave is framed seems to inappropriately fetishise romantic relationships between adults for no very good reason. I’d throw it wide open.

You might be interested to know the UK criteria, which got me thinking about this. (1) You must take time off work to support the mother or care for the child. (2) Have or expect to have responsibility for the child’s upbringing. (3) Be baby’s biological father; or married to or in a civil partnership with the mother; or living with the mother in an enduring family relationship, but are not an immediate relative.

I just struck me that someone actual sat down to draw these lines and though: if you’re the mum’s dad you can’t have leave but it you’ve just married a woman who’s having someone else’s child you can.

O RLY. Have you never worked in a corporate environment where staff take long service leave? are seconded to new temporary positions? Attend conferences or study leave?

Why is childrearing so full of “cooties” it’s death to your career, while these others aren’t?

Take it from me, and I’m seeing this happen in my corporate environment: once the males in the organisation take this sort of leave, watch how quickly it becomes respectable / shakes off the cooties.

You are viewing the situation through a particular socio-economic lens that’s turning the majority of Americans invisible.

Once the dads start doing it, as I say, watch attitudes change…

Well, I haven’t thought about this seriously before, hence would love to hear others’ opinions, but here are some first thoughts:
If, when a child is born, the father is alive and present, and there are no criminal/pathological issues involved (the child was conceived after an act of rape, or there is violence within the household or these kind of problems), then he should have an unconditional right to this birth leave. Idem dito for lesbian co-mothers who are in an officially recognised relation with the biological mother and who have indicated that they will adopt the child.
I see two cases where I don’t know what the best or the fairest solution would be:

(1) the father has no interest in the leave, but there is another person who would be happy to do the caring during the leave (such as a grandmother). Or the father would rather want to give the leave to the mother, so that she can be 2 weeks longer at home. Well, my first reaction would be that a short leave, immediately after birth, can legitimately be an individual non-transferable leave, since it concerns a relation between two very specific individuals (the baby and the non-birthgiving parent). For parental leave (say the 3 or 6 or 12 months that some welfare states give) this is more difficult, since there the interests of the child are more important and may be overriding.

(2) the child is born to a single mother. Should she have the right to allocate this 2-weeks birth leave to another adult? If one of the goals of the leave is to support the mother, than one may be tempted to say yes. On the other hand, if one of the goals of the leave is to enable a parent or parent-like person to have some time to start bonding with the child, then perhaps the answer should be that she can allocate the leave to a person who is willing to play this role in the kid’s life. So perhaps in the case of single mothers the person who is willing to legally take on certain responsibilities should also be allowed this leave. But it’s clear that this raises tricky issues, since as far as I know there is no such category in family law, and it would require rethinking social/legal categories such as a parent, which leads to a whole range of difficult questions (for example, there are some people who question why a child can only have two parents; one could in principle imagine family law and social policy allowing more than 2 people to sign up for the role of parent.)

Leederick, how would you answer your own question?

The contradiction isn’t in my argument, but in reality. Alienated, deskilled labor does make it easier to enact policies like mandatory family leave. And in the short term—and in the context of specific debates like the one described in the original post—paid leave is a good way of recognizing & accomodating worker’s humanity.

In the long run, as you say, we’d like more workers to be engaged as human beings in the workplace and not as interchangeable parts. In which case, family leave would make less sense as a way to deal with work-family conflicts and family-friendly workplaces (nurseries, flexible hours, greater acceptance of breastfeeding and infants generally in the workplace) would become more important.

Nothing weird about all that—lots of bad things have certain benefits and lots of policies only make sense in a particular context. You just gotta think dialectically.

I’m not convinced this makes sense. You say yourself that the reason generous family leave policies are okay and don’t cause problems is because the vast majority of workers work in jobs where they are functionally interchangable, and this means they can easily be replaced. In other words: what prevents the damage being done is employers treating their their workers like machines, rather than human beings. I think then claiming ‘“workers are human beings” is overwhelmingly an argument FOR more generous family leave’ is a bit weird when you think family leave is possible because of workers’ alienation. If “workers are human beings” we shouldn’t be treating them like cogs and they shouldn’t be trivial to replace and family leave policies should cause problems.

There is the odd abstract economic theory where the marginal benefit is set equal to the marginal cost, including the administrative costs and dead-weight losses of taxation. But no one calling for such a project seems to actually do the statistical work to locate when marginal benefit equals marginal cost.

because it shifts the perception of the society

I am confused. If it is the perception of society that taking care of kids is the job of the father, why would a democractically-elected government in that society support parental leave anyway?

let me ask you this question: assuming a society has decided that the amount of paid parental leave is not zero, which is best, that couples can choose freely how they split parental leave between them or that the mother always gets a fixed amount and the father another fixed amount (presumably much smaller)?

I don’t know. All my friends and relatives who have had kids have wound up in far more complications than the question of a few weeks of parental leave seems relevant to. Working part-time, Mum at home, Dad at home, the birth was so bad that Mum can’t go back to work regardless of what she planned, baby was born at the same time the calves were being born so Dad kept working, Dad earns so much money that it just made sense for him to keep working, Mum timed the pregancny so the babies arrived two weeks after university exams finished, Mum quit one job, had baby, then started a new job, Mum went straight back to work (okay, this wasn’t a friend or relative, but Ruth Richardson, who was an MP at the time and a snap election was on).

I really don’t live in a society where people just stick to the mandates of government.

But perhaps this increase of the age women get children is less strong in the US.

Not being an American, I don’t know everything about what happens in the US and I can’t be stuffed hunting for stats on the web. I quoted the NYtimes article because I read it months ago and it interested me, not because I am an American. The age a woman has her first child has gotten older in NZ. However, when it comes to grandmothers helping out, what strikes me as relevant is the total spread of years of childbearing. A mother who has just had her fifth child strikes me as much in need of a helping hand around the house as the mother of a new-born baby. I don’t think the upper age of childbearing has risen significantly, laying aside the odd case of a woman past menopause being able to have a baby due to modern medicine advances.

The traditional grandmother-helps-out system was very much based on the idea that she lived nearby

Indeed. However the world has changed. When I was a child, one of my grandmothers lived about 400km away, and the other lived further. They still travelled to give my parents a helping hand. They either flew or drove (I don’t remember which). Travelling has gotten cheaper and faster over time. Social standards should evolve to stay with it.

child raising should be women’s only important task.
I think that in modern times we can agree that child-raising is an important task that it is worth spending time on by people of both genders. Look at it this way, if child-raising is so unimportant that it isn’t worth while a grandparent spending time to give a helping hand, why should the government spend money for that purpose?
Traditionally a grandmother would have personal experience in breastfeeding which a granddad wouldn’t, which for most of human evolution was the only way of feeding small babies (leaving aside the rich who could pay for wetnurses). Since the invention of formulae, and the medical fad for it for a significant chunk of the 20th century, grandmothers may more often lack this experience, so the arguments for it being the grandmother rather than the granddad who comes to give a hand are rather less compelling now.

In my family it was the case that the grandmothers came to help because one grandad was dead and the other a farmer who couldn’t leave the farm at short notice.

It’s striking how wildly atypical all of Tracy’s examples are. The vast, vast majority of people (certainly upwards of 90%) work at jobs where they are entirely interchangeable with others and there is zero non-pecuniary cost to their employers (and none at all to their coworkers) from their absence. Call-center operators, janitors, salesclerks, bus drivers, nursing home aides—these are the people who would be affected by more generous family leave requirements (especially since th kind of flexible, relatively high-status jobs Tracy mentions generally already give family leave above the legal minimum.)

I don’t know if Tracy’s choice of examples was deliberately misleading or if he/she just has a grossly distorted idea of what most people do for a living, but the fact remains that “workers are human beings” is overwhelmingly an argument FOR more generous family leave policies, not against them.

On the other issues I think you are going a bit fast. The traditional grandmother-helps-out system was very much based on the idea that she lived nearby, even in the same town, and didn’t have much to do anyway, since her own children were grown up and child raising should be women’s only important task. Even if this picture wasn’t correct for many actual granmothers, it is the picture from which the social norm that grandmothers should help was derived.

I regularly read calls by people for more government spending for one matter or another [...] and I’ve realised that there are very few times when I’ve heard anyone produce an argument that the government has done enough. More is always called for.

Surely you have heard calls for less spending in the military, if not in your country at least abroad. Spending less on social programs is also the default position of most conservative/right-wing governments currently in power in the western world, but maybe you meant “calls from the left”.

Ingrid’s proposal is to be welcomed, but it would not be likely, in my estimation, to detract from the ‘fatherhood premium’. And we would need far more concerted effort (I have no doubt you’re onto this too, Ingrid!) to tackle the so-called motherhood penalty.

On the whole, I don’t believe you. – Life expectancies have risen over time. Especially for women due to drastic falls in the fatality rate of childbirth. – Comparing people who were alive at, say, age 60 to people who are alive now at age 60 shows that people are far less disabled now in the US. See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/health/30age.html?ex=1311912000&en=eea0952d60448481&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Are you telling me that the Dutch health care system is worse at results than the US health care system? (NB, measured disability rates may indeed have gone up, as the medical system has gotten better at diagnosing more minor problems. But I don’t see any reason to believe that the health of the Dutch is on the whole degenerating in reality, and if it is, fixing the Dutch health system strikes me as a more urgent problem than parental care). – Living far away is not a problem as travel is cheaper. – Holding jobs – does no one in the Netherlands get holidays?

z, I’ve been doing some maths. Assuming that you already get two days off a week (weekend), and two weeks paid holiday a year, and in the year you have a newborn child you devote all your weeks and your paid leave to caring for said child, you will have 114 days a year (52*2+10) to spend taking care. If you, on top of your existing days off, get two more weeks of paid leave this will take you to 124 days, or an increase of 9% in time available. Will an increase of 9% really make a difference between you caring for your newborn child or not? (NB, I have ignored public holidays, time spent after work, etc).

my wife, as a mother, has to pay an extra cost because she will likely be discriminated against on the basis that she is more likely than a man to take parental leave

Well yes, as pregnancy can be quite hard on the female body. One of my female friends was so sick when she was pregnant she had
to stop doing her PhD – she was sick for about six months. If employers are going to discriminate against women of child-bearing age then they are going to do so unless one calls for parental leave of about 8 months pre-preganancy and, what, a year post-pregnancy? (Note, I am a woman of child-bearing age, employed in the private sector).

Indeed. I assume that z does something that his employer finds useful. Since I have no idea what z does for a living, I don’t know what exactly. But if z is, say, a teacher, then his students are going to be disrupted by every day of leave he takes, and the school must find and pay for an alternative teacher, who won’t know the class as well and will have to spend some time getting up to speed. If z is a foresensic scientist then the other scientists in the lab are going to have to cover his workload or some court cases are going to be delayed because the police can’t get the tests done. If z is a vet, then again the increased workload falls on others.

There are jobs where of course this doesn’t happen. If z is an artist, then the difference in his lifetime output if he takes a couple of weeks off each time he acquires a new kid is pretty minimal. And I’ve already stated my opinion about the need for politicians to work full-time.

Of course people do get sick, or resign, or get pregnant (well, maybe not ‘z’) and in various ways do impose extra workloads on their fellow colleagues. Every extra right of leave adds to this burden. To dismisss this burden as “poor employers, so burdened by the fact that their nasty employees aren’t machines, but in fact, human beings” strikes me as rather harsh as a generality.

By the way, it seems to me legitimate that I offer some arguments without having to have an opinion or a well-thought-through view on every aspect of the topic of the post; if that’s what you’re demanding, I should perhaps stop writing.

I was asking, not demanding. When reading your post, something crystalised in my mind that had been hanging around for years and years without me really realising it. I regularly read calls by people for more government spending for one matter or another, say to support fathers in becoming involved in their children’s education, or to support the arts, or music, or sports, and I’ve realised that there are very few times when I’ve heard anyone produce an argument that the government has done enough. More is always called for.

I think it is interesting that you don’t have any theory that provides an answer as to when the government has provided enough support to the parents of children. I do not think you should be obligated to think through everything thoroughly before posting, I was simply curious as to whether you had or not.