I am all in favour of paternity leave, currently the subject of a Downing Street petition. But I cannot see why it should only be available so early in the child’s life. Especially if the child is still breast-feeding, what, with the best will in the world, is the father actually doing all day?
Whereas a teenager, in particular, might very well benefit enormously if his or her father were in a position to say, “That’s it, I’m taking that bit of paternity leave I’ve been owed all these years, and since I’m either back at work the following Monday morning or I lose my job, then this will be sorted out by that Sunday night at the latest, oh yes it will be!”
So let him be able to take it at any point up until the child is 18. And let there be a legal presumption of equal parenting, the restoration of the tax allowance to fathers for so long as Child Benefit is being paid to mothers, and the restoration of the requirement that the providers of fertility treatment take into account the child’s need for a father.
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It's true - apart from breastfeeding, babies are basically self-sufficient. There's nothing for fathers to do.
ReplyDeleteThat's what mothers are for. They have been doing it for ever, and it works.
ReplyDeleteWhat are fathers for, then? I take it you think changing nappies and playing with babies are women's work?
ReplyDeleteNot to mention looking after new mothers, Heath - an important job for new fathers to do.
ReplyDeleteI don't see how it takes two people to do them at any given time. Changing a nappy is a four-handed job? No, it isn't.
ReplyDeleteA government which really believed in fathers would do as set out here while securing the high-wage, high-skilled, high-status economic basis of paternal authority in the family and the wider community.
Jake, that's the softest thing I've ever read, a perfect expression of historically and cross-culturally illiterate decadence.
ReplyDeleteI think that paternity leave in early infancy is so supported by some people because they KNOW that it is just extra paid holidays for them and that they won't be required to do anything.
Paternity leave to sort out a delinquent teenager or what have you would be a whole other story.
This putative father who sorts out a wayward teenager in two weeks flat - what the hell has been doing over the past 16 years, other than waiting for this moment?
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame your father wasn't around to knock some sense into you when it mattered.
ReplyDeleteReally? I thought people wanted paterntity leave because they want fathers to spend time with their new-born child. I say "people" because not only do fathers want it, but so do mothers.
ReplyDeleteStill, what would they know, eh?
The wayward teenager in question ought, legally, to be in school for most of the day. I realise he may not be, but giving statutory time off so that somebody can collude with truancy doesn't exactly sound like joined-up government.
ReplyDeleteRandy, putting food on the table and a roof over the head, if he is the sort of father who would bother to take this leave when the need arose.
ReplyDeleteLee, my father worked entirely from home.
Anne, it is why fathers need to spend, not "time", but all day and all night with newborn babies that I don't get. Why, after all these thousands of years, has this suddenly become necessary for either of them, or for the mother, or for anyone else?
Bruce, I actually posted on that few days ago: especially in secondary schools, the school day is now so short, while the holidays are still as long as ever, that in fact children, especially teenagers, hardly spend any time at all in school these days.
ReplyDeleteOf course, you don't legally have to go to school, anyway. If being taken around art galleries by your posh parents or being placed with a future husband's family in order to learn how to perform domestic duties qualifies as "home-schooling" (and in practice they both do), then having your wayward ways shortly, sharply and shockingly curtailed by your father certainly does, too.
Yeah, just you try taking paternity leave to take your kid round an art gallery. They'd laugh in your face.
ReplyDeleteAnd what happens after the two weeks are up and Dad has gone back to work?
ReplyDeleteIf your recipe for re-instilling a sense of paternalism consists in asking nothing more of fathers than paying attention to their child for two short weeks circa 16 years after birth, I'm going to suggest that it will come up a little light.
But you can claim it's home-schooling.
ReplyDeleteThat sort of thing really does go on in the upper echelons - taking them out of school because they can allegedly be taught more by being taken around fashionable London and fashionable Europe to soak up the culture.
There were several articles about it in The Spectator a few months ago.
You can't get time off to do it, though.
ReplyDelete"And what happens after the two weeks are up and Dad has gone back to work?"
ReplyDeleteThat gives him two weeks, then. It has to be sorted out by then, or else he loses his job. So it will be. It really will be.
We are so used to even teenage boys being answerable only to nth-generation middle-class women and committees that we have forgotten that this sort of approach is possible. But, of course, it is.
The norm, for thousands of years of human history, is that fathers have had much more time and contact with their children than they do in contemporary Western society. Separate schooling, and the norm of work outside the home, both cut parental contact down. In previous centuries, in most societies, boys would often have started learning a trade from their father from an early age.
ReplyDeleteWell, they must be living on something, Ronnie.
ReplyDeleteSo, if the rich can assume the right to take their children out of school entirely in order to pursue cultural interests rather more their own than their children's, allowing for extremely occasional (indeed, specifically limited) occasional bouts of leave of this rather more necessary kind for everyone else seems very moderate indeed.
Allie, I'm a good Distributist and very sympathetic to this sort of thing. But if you can think of any way of making it work in practice in today's West, then do let me know.
ReplyDeleteTeaching a boy a trade is a totally different matter from watching the telly while your wife looks after a baby, of course.
Then it's a damn good thing that no teenager would ever have the naked guile to pretend to behave while his father is hanging around only to revert to form on Dad's return to work.
ReplyDeleteCertainly, nothing in 1000s of years of experience suggests that would happen.
Morgan rather proves my point:
ReplyDelete"We are so used to even teenage boys being answerable only to nth-generation middle-class women and committees that we have forgotten that this sort of approach is possible. But, of course, it is."
Pretend to behave, indeed!
It is such fun when you really annoy the pseudo-Left by pointing out that there is nothing remotely progressive their Blairite class privileges and nothing remotely Socialist about the underlying presuppositions. Keep it up.
ReplyDeleteKeep it up? They are so feminised that they can't even get it up.
ReplyDeleteFrom your post David, you wouldn't be against paternity leave in aerly infancy although you wouldn't see the point personally. But you think it should be availabel later on instead if people prefer it that way. Sounds good to me.
Your opponents are so cut off from the roots of the Labour movement that you might as well be speaking Swahili to them. "High-wage, high-skilled, high-status economic basis of paternal authority in the family and the wider community"? Apart from "of", "in", "the" and "and", you are speaking a foreign language to them.
"From your post David, you wouldn't be against paternity leave in aerly infancy although you wouldn't see the point personally. But you think it should be available later on instead if people prefer it that way. Sounds good to me."
ReplyDeleteExactly.
"you are speaking a foreign language to them"
Oh, I know. Which only makes them even angrier. They have spent their whole lives being told how clever they are just because their parents could afford the fees or the house prices for their schools. But they are not (well, as you can see). It is just that their parents could afford the fees or the house prices for their schools. And they seriously do not like to be confronted with this fact.
At least I haven't got onto women of that caste who give up work to have children and then expect to go back to the point on the career ladder where they would have been if they had stayed on.
Not least, because that would have led onto how Afro-Caribbean women simply have no such culture (by no means only because of absent fathers - the prevelance of taht in black gamilies is rather overstated) and so have no "pay gap", indeed on average out-earn their brothers.
Leading, in my case, to how my Saint Helenian widowed mother of four simply carried on working full-time without ever thinking of anything else (we all went on to university). And how her mother in Saint Helena worked full-time with eight children and while happily married to the dying day of her my grandfather, himself in full-time work on that day.
Reading things like that, I think that members of the whining, self-pitying "coping classes" might actually drop dead in front of their computer screens.
"the whining, self-pitying coping classes"
ReplyDeleteWhere are Jon and Break Dancing Jesus today?
Enjoying the second or third week of their Christmas holiday, no doubt. In other words, "coping".
ReplyDeleteDavid, you are the one suggesting that working fathers do nothing more than act as breadwinners until suddenly they drop everything for an emergency two week parenting session. Can you really not see why this is not a basis for restoring paternal authority, or why teenage males would be more likely to resent this than otherwise?
ReplyDeleteI am suggesting no such thing. On the contrary, it is people like you who think that fathers are only sperm banks and cash machines.
ReplyDeleteHow would you prevent fathers using the paternity leave to give themselves an extra-long family holiday?
ReplyDeleteAnd you didn't just say teenage boys. The other side have very successfully sidetracked this thread into that. You didn't just say teenagers (although you did emphasise them) and you definitely didn't just say boys.
ReplyDeleteEven now, the vast majority of teenage boys are not delinquents. What do you suggest their fathers do with their paternity leave? Should they take it just before their son's 18th birthday, and have a huge "My boy didn't knife anyone" party?
ReplyDeleteDefinitely indeed, Jack.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely, indeed.
Jack is right. The idea that there is even the merest suggestion of gender stereotyping in David's post is as absurd as it is offensive.
ReplyDelete"Gender stereotyping"? Is this a joke, or have you recently arrived in a time machine?
ReplyDeleteThomas, that way they'd be spending time with their children, so why not?
Ken, again, why not?
What Carlton calls gender stereotyping was the whole reason for paternity leave in the first place. "Men and women bring different skills to childcare."
ReplyDeleteIn other words men and women are fundamentally different, designed and built differently.
Your propsal reflects that beautifully, David. Forcing a new father to behave like a new mother does not.
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteAnd Ken, by the time that anyone is 18, then they will have been in some sort of situation where this would have been of benefit. Being anywhere close to knifing someone is not, so to speak, the point.
The people who would use it as you intend it won't need it, and the people who would need it will use it for a free holiday.
ReplyDelete"The people who would use it as you intend it won't need it"
ReplyDeleteWhy not? I think what you are really saying is that the offspring of the middle classes (whom you mean by "the people who would use it as [I] intend it") never have problems, including serious problems. Oh, yes, they do.
"and the people who would need it will use it for a free holiday"
If they are thus spending time with their children, then why not?
It actually raises quite a complex theoretical problem: given that you cannot predict the future, is it rational to take the paternity leave at the point at which you have a crisis, or should you hold off, in the expectation that you will need it later? I suggest that it will never be rational to take it. In which case, you might as well take it at your child's birth, because you *know* it will be useful then, whereas you can't be sure you'll ever need it afterwards.
ReplyDeleteYou might never need all sorts of things. That's not a reason to go without the option.
ReplyDeleteAnd how is it useful to have the father hanging about after birth? I expect that most mothers in that situation just wish that he would go back to work.
"I expect that most mothers in that situation just wish that he would go back to work."
ReplyDeleteI wonder if any research has ever been carried out to see whether this expectation is correct.
Well, they are hardly likely to say, are they?
ReplyDeleteBut if you are the sort of person who needs to see such "research", then it would be wasted on you even if it were ever carried out.
The only "research community" in this sort of field is very heavily politicised against traditional family life Spock. You would never get funding, never get published or anything unless you were one of them, a professional purveyor of anti-family propaganda.
ReplyDelete"Well, they are hardly likely to say, are they?"
ReplyDeleteWhyever not? It's not as if you'd carry out the research with the father present.
There's a lot of truth in that, Anonymous. But at the same time, these are people fanatically hositile in the involvement of men in the socialisation of children.
ReplyDeleteSo if Spock did present a proposal for how to "prove" that mothers hated having fathers anywhere near babies and it did the babies no end of harm having them there, then lavish funding and coverage would doubtless be forthcoming.
Of course, I do not at all believe that mothers hate having fathers anywhere near babies, nor that it does the babies no end of harm having them there. But that is not the issue.
Wouldn't you, Spock? After all, the three of them are all supposed to be in the same room the whole time.
ReplyDeleteSuzanne Moore has being making exactly this case for several years, David - babies need their mothers, it is teenagers who might very well need their fathers. You are within the feminist mainstream on this one. Middle-class male scivers are not.
ReplyDelete"You are within the feminist mainstream"
ReplyDeleteWell, I've certainly never been told that before.
But thank you.
Having all three in the room at the same time would make it a pretty obviously flawed study, so I'd be astonished if any were carried out that way. This is pretty basic research design.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous 16.49 seems to know a lot more about this particular specialist field than I do, though - I'd be interested to know who the main researchers are, and to be pointed towards some examples of their work.
Of course, I do not at all believe that mothers hate having fathers anywhere near babies,
ReplyDeleteI expect that most mothers in that situation just wish that he would go back to work.
?????
"Having all three in the room at the same time would make it a pretty obviously flawed study"
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't stop people. The point of these exercises is to "prove" this or that predetermined thing.
The whole field is "pretty obviously flawed". Where social-scientific study is concerned, we are going to have to do as the other side did, and create our own disciplines with our own rules. As I say, that was what they did.
Yes, Tiberius, but not that he would never come home.
ReplyDeleteIt must be extremely tiring indeed attending both to a new baby and to a husband all day. Yes, my father worked from home. But he was in his study (effectively his office) or out round homes, schools, hospitals and so forth. So he really was at work.
"It must be extremely tiring indeed attending both to a new baby and to a husband all day."
ReplyDeleteWell, that puts an end to those petty accusations of gender stereotyping
"It must be extremely tiring indeed attending both to a new baby and to a husband all day."
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a particularly poor sitcom.
Fish, there is more truth about family life in one episode of a 1970s sitcom than in a thousand research studies.
ReplyDelete"This sounds like a particularly poor sitcom"
ReplyDeleteIn which some people are living, apparently.
"Well, that puts an end to those petty accusations of gender stereotyping"
They ended a good fifteen years ago. As has been said, that no one any longer accepted that these things were just "stereotypes" was why paternity leave was introduced in the first place, along with the fact that the "children don't need fathers" lobby was no longer having things all its own way (although, as my original post makes clear, that is by no means a won war).
So paternity leave as at present might not be quite the right answer. But it is certainly an attempt to answer the right question.
What? Paternity leave was introduced by people who thought that "looking after a baby and a husband all day" was not just a stereotype? Did they have something against mothers, that they wanted them working harder?
ReplyDeleteSurely they wanted the father to look after the mother?
They believed, rightly, that fathers were important.
ReplyDeleteBut somehow this became mixed up with early infancy only, perhaps from having been brought up by nannies themselves, perhaps from having handed over their own toddlers to hired help in order to climb the greasy pole, perhaps both.
So, wrong answer, but right question.
"But somehow this became mixed up with early infancy only, perhaps from having been brought up by nannies themselves, perhaps from having handed over their own toddlers to hired help in order to climb the greasy pole, perhaps both."
ReplyDeletePerhaps? This all looks pretty speculative to me. And implausible.
Why?
ReplyDeleteI can't imagine anything more plausible.