Pappa leave: doing it better

Whilst Little Bear and I were in Sweden, we didn't just eat cinnamon buns and listen to ABBA (although this we did as well), we also got talking to people about parental leave, and noticed that there were a lot more dads around looking after babies than in London. I normally think of London as pretty forward thinking, but it's got nothing on Sweden.

​What's the best recipe for letting dads play their part in parenting? Given the benefits of shared parenting and the big public support for sharing parenting more equally, the UK should be looking at what can be done to make it easier for dads to choose a more active role in fatherhood. To do that we need to address the 2 problems raised in my earlier post on the lack of dads in baby-care London...

​Compared to most countries outside of Europe, the UK doesn't have a bad deal for dads wanting to care for new babies. In the US, mums get 12 weeks unpaid that she can give to dad if she has any left (unlikely). A little more generous, in Iran dads are given 2 weeks at full pay! A few developing countries have something in place for mums, but nothing for dads.

UK deal
Mums have the right to share 50 weeks of parental leave with their partner.
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​For 39 of these weeks, mum or dad (who's looking after the baby) gets just £140 a week. Employers sometimes top this up for the first few months, mainly for the mum to take

​But we shouldn't be comparing the UK to countries like the US or Iran. And we're not a developing country! We should aim for the best if we can afford it, and look to the best for how to get things done. We should be looking at the rest of Europe for guidance, not Angola.

​Turns out the UK deal isn't all that great. The problem is the number of dads on parental leave is really low in the UK, and money and employer prejudice seem to be big problems. £140 doesn't go far at all at covering someone's wages. When dad earns more, it doesn't make sense for a family to lose his wage rather than mum's when someone needs to look after the baby. And when dads feel their career might suffer a lot, their going to be reluctant to take the leave.

Looking back to Sweden and its Nordic neighbors, they seem to be doing something right. Speaking to parents, grandparents and on-lookers when I was there, they're saying dads are expected to take at least several months off, if not more, to look after their babies. Family and friends expect it, employers expect it, and mums expect it. So when a dad wants to spend some of those precious first few months with his little kiss-cucumber, sweet-nose, or charm-troll [love Swedish baby names], he's not pressured into skipping it. 

​What's more, for a large part of it, his wages are also protected! So the family doesn't have to make the tough financial decision to let him take the time. Dads are taking the leave, and people, including their employers, are expecting them to take it! A triple win for the family.

The Nordics use two ingredients to make their pappa leave work.

1. The sharable parental leave is paid at 80% of your salary for roughly 13 (Sweden) or 15 (Norway) months. This means that losing dad's wages if he decides to do his part in bringing up the baby isn't such a big issue.
2. Dads have some of this leave reserved just for them! Around 3 months in both countries is given to each parent, with the remainder being split however they want. This breaks down the expectations that dads shouldn't be taking the parental leave when mum's around. When they have their own leave, it's daft not to use it.

When Sweden introduced just one month for the dads alone, this had a huge impact on boosting the number of dads who felt they could take parental leave, with blokes taking around a quarter of all parental leave days. Recently the pappa-reserved leave has tripled, so the impact could be even bigger.
 
It's these two things, financial support for parental leave when it's dad's turn to take it, and time reserved just for the dad, the deal with the two problems shared parental leave is facing in the UK. It's worth us taking this seriously.