The thread topic is openly hostile and isn't really instructive of the topic. It reinforces the gendering of roles in the household. It's hard to move past it because it is so inflammatory.
This is literally the opposite of what I am doing / trying to do. I apologize for being unclear.
We (in Norway) are de facto paying women to stay at home. We should not do that.
The thread title describes the de facto effect of a policy that is de jure paying whichever parent (if any) chooses to be at home with their young children.
You should be doing that. The alternative is either forcing people to do unpaid work or forcing them to send their kids to day care because they need the second income. The fact that paying stay-at-home parents ends up reinforcing traditional gender roles sucks, but the alternative is worse.
We should "force" them (by which I mean incentivise, not literally force them) to send their kids to day care.
Or we're cementing traditional gender roles. And isolating immigrants from the broader community (and vice versa).
Edit: The day care would obviously have to be subsidized.
[Expletive deleted] on
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Is issue comes down to packaging, from the OP title to the actual program in question. If it is "full time parent stipends" yes, we should offer that. For both genders. For anyone who is responsible for raising a child (and, potentially, anyone who does full time work caring for a dependent such as the elderly, injured, or otherwise physically or mentally infirm).
If it is presented as "this is women's work, for women only" then, yeah. That's a messaging problem. But as DaveNYC points out, the alternative is not getting support for childrearing which is a complicated, full time, high effort job, meaning doing that full time job while working several part time jobs or paying for super expensive daycare. Especially for the poorest of households, that makes having children financially difficult, if not impossible, to do within budget leading to greater social costs in terms of childhood hunger, health problems, and lack of safe, secure spaced for children to be raised.
This doesn't mean that there should always be a fulltime caregiver staying home with every child. But the option is especially meaningful for those with lower incomes who can't afford daycare before schooling ages.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
-Government mandated paid parental leave of at least 1 year for primary caregiver, 6 months for secondary, should the primary caregiver decide to stay at their job
-Government subsidizing stay-at-home parenting, should the primary caregiver decide to quit their job
-Government subsidizing daycare after the first year (or subsidizing for the first year, should BOTH parents decide to go back to work)
A newborn being home with their parent(s) for the first year is absolutely critical for their development. After that first year, the child should go to daycare for socialization and developmental learning.
The thread topic is openly hostile and isn't really instructive of the topic. It reinforces the gendering of roles in the household. It's hard to move past it because it is so inflammatory.
This is literally the opposite of what I am doing / trying to do. I apologize for being unclear.
We (in Norway) are de facto paying women to stay at home. We should not do that.
The thread title describes the de facto effect of a policy that is de jure paying whichever parent (if any) chooses to be at home with their young children.
That's great, but not really germaine to the topic. That the generations before mine were super sexist and had a bunch of gender roles they enforced upon themselves isn't really news. That a well designed policy didn't fight those traditions, but leaves open the possibility of ditching them is good. There's a bunch of other shit about society you're gonna need to change in order to get rid of those traditions. Leaving stay at home parents fucked till you fix all that other shit seems like a bad plan.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
no one is forcing anyone to do unpaid work because no one is forcing anyone to have children
No one may be forcing people to have children, but plenty of people in here are more than willing to force their perspectives on what is appropriate parenting on others it would seem.
The thread topic is openly hostile and isn't really instructive of the topic. It reinforces the gendering of roles in the household. It's hard to move past it because it is so inflammatory.
This is literally the opposite of what I am doing / trying to do. I apologize for being unclear.
We (in Norway) are de facto paying women to stay at home. We should not do that.
The thread title describes the de facto effect of a policy that is de jure paying whichever parent (if any) chooses to be at home with their young children.
That's great, but not really germaine to the topic. That the generations before mine were super sexist and had a bunch of gender roles they enforced upon themselves isn't really news. That a well designed policy didn't fight those traditions, but leaves open the possibility of ditching them is good. There's a bunch of other shit about society you're gonna need to change in order to get rid of those traditions. Leaving stay at home parents fucked till you fix all that other shit seems like a bad plan.
Bad policy doesn't help the issue though. Which is the whole point of the data we have on the policies the OP is referencing.
We know the kind of programs the OP is talking about don't really fix the issue. That doesn't mean "Do nothing", it means "Do something different".
Mandating equal leave for both parents could be a good place to start.
The thread topic is openly hostile and isn't really instructive of the topic. It reinforces the gendering of roles in the household. It's hard to move past it because it is so inflammatory.
This is literally the opposite of what I am doing / trying to do. I apologize for being unclear.
We (in Norway) are de facto paying women to stay at home. We should not do that.
The thread title describes the de facto effect of a policy that is de jure paying whichever parent (if any) chooses to be at home with their young children.
That's great, but not really germaine to the topic. That the generations before mine were super sexist and had a bunch of gender roles they enforced upon themselves isn't really news. That a well designed policy didn't fight those traditions, but leaves open the possibility of ditching them is good. There's a bunch of other shit about society you're gonna need to change in order to get rid of those traditions. Leaving stay at home parents fucked till you fix all that other shit seems like a bad plan.
I respectfully disagree.
But this is why this is a topic worth discussing. Ultimately it boils down to which values we place highest.
In any case, we should be absolutely clear on what effects, positive and negative, deliberate and unintended, that the policies we espouse have.
In Germany parental leave, parental subsidies and maternal leave are actually three different things.
maternal leave is 6 weeks before and 8 weeks after birth. The mother is generally not allowed to work during this time (she can if she wants too as far as I know) and she gets a subsidy equal to her average pay in the last three months or at least a set minimum.
parental leave is non gendered for both parents individually for up to three years in the first 8 years of the child's life (With a bunch of ifs and buts) to not work or work part time.
parental subsidies (about 60% of net income) are also non gendered but used to be a total amount of 12 months that could shared between parents. Studies showed that most of the time mothers took these 12 months while fathers kept working.
Some changes were made. Parents can get a further 2 months, but only if each parets takes at least 2 months. monthly subsidies can be split in half but paid over double the time to encourage part time work. Both parents can get an additional 4 month of this split subsidy if they both work part time at the same time for 25-30 hours per week.
These changes were made to encourage fathers to take parental leave and to encourage mothers to work at least part time. The result is that a lionshare of fathers take 2 month of completely and work 4 months part time.
Currently ca. 36% (up from 21% in 2008) of fathers in Germany take parental leave with subsidies for an average of 3.7 months (including part time work). In contrast mothers take an average of 13 months leave.
edit:
Studies also show that while these changes might've helped to let parents choose more freely, society is lagging behind in several areas like gender expactations and the pay gap which are some reasons of the difference between both parents. Also I'm sorry that I only said mothers and fathers so far. The parental leave rules do not distinguish by gender. My language in this post was more gendered that should be.
honovere on
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
The thread topic is openly hostile and isn't really instructive of the topic. It reinforces the gendering of roles in the household. It's hard to move past it because it is so inflammatory.
This is literally the opposite of what I am doing / trying to do. I apologize for being unclear.
We (in Norway) are de facto paying women to stay at home. We should not do that.
The thread title describes the de facto effect of a policy that is de jure paying whichever parent (if any) chooses to be at home with their young children.
That's great, but not really germaine to the topic. That the generations before mine were super sexist and had a bunch of gender roles they enforced upon themselves isn't really news. That a well designed policy didn't fight those traditions, but leaves open the possibility of ditching them is good. There's a bunch of other shit about society you're gonna need to change in order to get rid of those traditions. Leaving stay at home parents fucked till you fix all that other shit seems like a bad plan.
I respectfully disagree.
But this is why this is a topic worth discussing. Ultimately it boils down to which values we place highest.
In any case, we should be absolutely clear on what effects, positive and negative, deliberate and unintended, that the policies we espouse have.
The thread topic is openly hostile and isn't really instructive of the topic. It reinforces the gendering of roles in the household. It's hard to move past it because it is so inflammatory.
This is literally the opposite of what I am doing / trying to do. I apologize for being unclear.
We (in Norway) are de facto paying women to stay at home. We should not do that.
The thread title describes the de facto effect of a policy that is de jure paying whichever parent (if any) chooses to be at home with their young children.
That's great, but not really germaine to the topic. That the generations before mine were super sexist and had a bunch of gender roles they enforced upon themselves isn't really news. That a well designed policy didn't fight those traditions, but leaves open the possibility of ditching them is good. There's a bunch of other shit about society you're gonna need to change in order to get rid of those traditions. Leaving stay at home parents fucked till you fix all that other shit seems like a bad plan.
I respectfully disagree.
But this is why this is a topic worth discussing. Ultimately it boils down to which values we place highest.
In any case, we should be absolutely clear on what effects, positive and negative, deliberate and unintended, that the policies we espouse have.
The thread topic is openly hostile and isn't really instructive of the topic. It reinforces the gendering of roles in the household. It's hard to move past it because it is so inflammatory.
This is literally the opposite of what I am doing / trying to do. I apologize for being unclear.
We (in Norway) are de facto paying women to stay at home. We should not do that.
The thread title describes the de facto effect of a policy that is de jure paying whichever parent (if any) chooses to be at home with their young children.
That's great, but not really germaine to the topic. That the generations before mine were super sexist and had a bunch of gender roles they enforced upon themselves isn't really news. That a well designed policy didn't fight those traditions, but leaves open the possibility of ditching them is good. There's a bunch of other shit about society you're gonna need to change in order to get rid of those traditions. Leaving stay at home parents fucked till you fix all that other shit seems like a bad plan.
I respectfully disagree.
But this is why this is a topic worth discussing. Ultimately it boils down to which values we place highest.
In any case, we should be absolutely clear on what effects, positive and negative, deliberate and unintended, that the policies we espouse have.
That's fine, but your thread title is still way off the mark cause that's not what the actual policy proposal was or what this law is.
The effects of the law are not effects of the law they're the effects of centuries of social conditioning.
In fact the law leaves open the possibility of progressing past that social conditioning. Unfortunately it turns out centuries of social conditioning is hard to break.
Paying stay at home parents is a good thing any welfare or socialized state should do.
Fixing the social conditioning that means a lion's share of the benefit goes to women will likely take a century or more cause we're gonna need an awful lot of our current elders that reinforce those gender roles to die off.
The thing you're blaming on the law isn't actually caused by the law it's caused by centuries of tradition. Reporting on the law gives us some statistics of who's still going with the old gender roles, and possibly why, but it doesn't mean the law itself is necessarily reinforcing the role. It's not punishing folks for holding to them, and again it also doesn't actually enforce or necessarily mandate those traditions. Other factors may, but the solution is to fix those factors not insist that a good program is making everyone stay sexist. There's a whole fuckin world of things making people stay sexist. Paying stay at home parents, with no enforcement that it must be women that stay home, doesn't really seem like one of those things.
Except it's not just about people wanting to stay at home. Children and parents benefit from parents being able to stay at home (at least to some extent) with their children.
A lot of the issues around parenting are a lack of widespread societal support for parenting as an activity. We basically expect people to just, like, deal with it. Like it's just a thing that happens.
The research does not show a strong benefit for children from stay at home mothers (or fathers). Some shows a benefit for working mothers, some shows a negative but the effect is certainly not large.
Its certainly the more traditional route and that's fine. But the delta of even a fairly slanted reading of the research does not really justify a subsidy specifically to encourage the behavior even before you get the reduced labor participation downside.
The research shows strong benefits from children spending more time with their parents. This is especially true for fathers who, under traditional roles, tend to spend the least time on childcare for various reasons.
I mean, no it doesn't? Sure, that's what feels like its true, but that's why I linked actual research.
no one is forcing anyone to do unpaid work because no one is forcing anyone to have children
Ehhhhhh, between many communities having screwed up sex ed, making birth control difficult to get or unobtainable, and social pressure, it's not as simple as that.
I also don't like the idea of having children being the perogative of the wealthy.
I'm really confused why everyone has knives out for the OP.
It's a pretty clear unintended consequence of these programs, no matter how egalitarian they are written, that the burden will in most societies fall on women and that women will more likely than not be the recipients of these sorts of programs.
As many others have said, I'm in support of the general idea of these programs, as childcare (and eldercare, and care for the developmentally disabled) is a full-time job, and should be financially rewarded as such, at least until children are old enough to attend public school.
I'm also generally in support of the idea of a subsidized daycare program, although I think Norway does have the right idea- you can't offer one without the other.
Given that we "live in a society" as the memes go, and we know that offering childcare subsidies will in our current system lead to the burden being shouldered primarily by women, what changes can we enact at the same time in order to encourage a more egalitarian sharing of childcare?
I'm going to ignore the idea of a subsidized daycare, and speak from an American perspective. My reasons for this are simple- there are already significant issues with our current "public daycare", i.e. the public school system. This isn't to disparage public school employees, I teach at a University and have the utmost respect for the profession. But at least in America, it seems likely that extending public school all the way down through the first few years of life would run into similar issues in regards to pay rates for caregivers, variable standard of care across the nation, and significant understaffing. Thus while enacting a public-funded daycare program would be more egalitarian, I don't know that it is the right way to handle this without also investing a lot of time, thought, and money into ways to improve our current public-care and education infrastructure, and I don't really know how to solve that problem, and at least in America, that problem is beyond the scope of this thread, in my opinion.
Instead, let's address some of the reasons that, were we to enact a "childcare subsidy" for all children of a certain age not enrolled in a daycare, women and mothers would generally shoulder more of the burden.
In short, this is because our current workforce is not at all egalitarian in nature, in terms of earning potential.
You all may remember the Google Memo, that framed one of the current employment disparities - that women make up a smaller percentage of the workforce in technology and engineering jobs- as a consequence of base biology. This is a rather silly idea, debated and debunked by myself and more thoroughly (and with the same tools) by Erin Giglio.
Nevertheless, the facts remain. Women hold only ~7% of CEO positions. Only 20% of engineering degrees in 2016 were awarded to women. Roughly the same percentage of women received computer science degrees.
We can dig into this a bit deeper- of the degrees most commonly chosen by women, the median salary is approximately 50K. Of the degrees most commonly chosen by men, the median salary is approximately 60K.
Even worse, research has shown that as women move into fields, the average pay in that field tends to go down. Quoting from that article:
[..] studies seem to indicate that when more women move into a job field, the pay across the field goes down. Women nurses, doctors, and lawyers, for example, all get paid less than their male counterparts.
Apparently, the trend works both ways. For example, the field of computer programming historically was lower paying when it was dominated by women, and as more men became interested the pay and prestige has increased.
I'm not an economist (and ignoring single-parent, or same-sex parents here), but the writing is pretty clear here. If we were to subsidize childcare with a stipend to the parents, most people would choose the parent earning less to stay home and receive the stipend. Statistically speaking, it will be the mothers.
I think Syndalis here has the right actual solution- before trying to apply the bandaid of "we don't pay people for this full-time job, here's some money", we need to do something about wages of employees on a macro level (wages have stagnated across many fields, and women still generally earn less than men).
Until at the very least average earnings are roughly the same across men and women, any proposals for a childcare stipend is, in essence, a stipend for mothers and not fathers. Is this bad? I'm not entirely sure. It certainly enforces a very specific set of gender roles, whether it intends to or not. On the other hand, at the very least it provides some means of recompense in certain fields, such as academia, where having a child tends to depress earnings for women for a few years. Of course, the better solution is to first fix wages, and second to offer more egalitarian parental leave programs.
The US isn't Norway, sadly, but as (I think Quid?) pointed out, many US institutions still have larger allotments of parental leave afforded to women. Hell, I remember being at Universities when they changed their policies to extend parental leave to men as well. This has happened only in my lifetime.
All of this to say, I think the idea of subsidizing childcare is a very good idea, in theory, but we need to enact many other changes either before or alongside it before it can actually be a useful tool and not (essentially) a weapon against women entering the workforce.
I'm really confused why everyone has knives out for the OP.
It's a pretty clear unintended consequence of these programs, no matter how egalitarian they are written, that the burden will in most societies fall on women and that women will more likely than not be the recipients of these sorts of programs.
Women and mothers already shoulder more of the burden, we just don't pay them for it currently.
Continuing to not pay them isn't gonna change that.
@[Expletive Deleted you've mentioned a few times about how Norway's implemention is really well studied, are there stats on how it's changed the demographics of stay-at-home parents?
I'd be interested to see how/if it changed the overall number of stay-at-home parents and the gender balance of those parents.
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
The thread topic is openly hostile and isn't really instructive of the topic. It reinforces the gendering of roles in the household. It's hard to move past it because it is so inflammatory.
This is literally the opposite of what I am doing / trying to do. I apologize for being unclear.
We (in Norway) are de facto paying women to stay at home. We should not do that.
The thread title describes the de facto effect of a policy that is de jure paying whichever parent (if any) chooses to be at home with their young children.
That's great, but not really germaine to the topic. That the generations before mine were super sexist and had a bunch of gender roles they enforced upon themselves isn't really news. That a well designed policy didn't fight those traditions, but leaves open the possibility of ditching them is good. There's a bunch of other shit about society you're gonna need to change in order to get rid of those traditions. Leaving stay at home parents fucked till you fix all that other shit seems like a bad plan.
I respectfully disagree.
But this is why this is a topic worth discussing. Ultimately it boils down to which values we place highest.
In any case, we should be absolutely clear on what effects, positive and negative, deliberate and unintended, that the policies we espouse have.
That's fine, but your thread title is still way off the mark cause that's not what the actual policy proposal was or what this law is.
The effects of the law are not effects of the law they're the effects of centuries of social conditioning.
In fact the law leaves open the possibility of progressing past that social conditioning. Unfortunately it turns out centuries of social conditioning is hard to break.
Paying stay at home parents is a good thing any welfare or socialized state should do.
Fixing the social conditioning that means a lion's share of the benefit goes to women will likely take a century or more cause we're gonna need an awful lot of our current elders that reinforce those gender roles to die off.
The thing you're blaming on the law isn't actually caused by the law it's caused by centuries of tradition. Reporting on the law gives us some statistics of who's still going with the old gender roles, and possibly why, but it doesn't mean the law itself is necessarily reinforcing the role. It's not punishing folks for holding to them, and again it also doesn't actually enforce or necessarily mandate those traditions. Other factors may, but the solution is to fix those factors not insist that a good program is making everyone stay sexist. There's a whole fuckin world of things making people stay sexist. Paying stay at home parents, with no enforcement that it must be women that stay home, doesn't really seem like one of those things.
I am very aware of what the law is. It is explicitly stated in the OP, for one thing.
The thread title reflects the de facto effect of a law that de jure is something else.
That is why I chose this title. To highlight the unintended (but extremely predictable) effects of a piece of legislation that we've had for 20 years now.
The effects were not at all unintended. The politicians who enacted it (religious-conservatives) claimed to want to give parents increased freedom in choosing how to arrange their lives, but they were lying. It was absolutely to entrench traditional gender roles.
It hampers integration of immigrants. Immigrant mothers stay at home (even more so than natives) supported by kontanstøtta, and their kids never go to day care and socialize with natives (or immigrants from other cultures) or learn Norwegian.
On this point, I think it would also apply to native mothers. Our first son is now 5 months old. My wife went back to work after 12 weeks (I went back after 6). She hates leaving our son even more than I do, but being a new parent is also very isolating. Most social interactions are very hard with a newborn or infant. Many babies can't handle restaurants or travel or movies or bars and thus a lot of normal social interaction is very limited. Becoming a parent is a huge shift in many/most people's lifestyles.
Work, along with contributing to society more generally, is a social experience where you interact with other people (generally). Its a way to interface with people outside your household, often of different age, demographic and social situations.
If someone wants to stay at home to take care of their offspring, great. It is definitely work. But so is gardening and I don't expect to get a farm subsidy for it. So is cleaning my home, but I don't think I should get a subsidy for it. If anything, we want to encourage the opposite. Food is more efficiently grown on farms. Paying someone to clean homes creates jobs. Labor specialization is central to how the economy works.
Parenting works a little differently, granted. Family is very important to many people including myself. Some people will stay home even without an economic reason. But I don't think there's a reason to create incentives to encourage people to stay out of the workforce. If anything, subsidies should exist to provide child care to those who couldn't afford it otherwise so they can choose to participate in the workforce if they so choose.
.
Comparing taking care of children to the hobby of gardening is quite the take.
Saying that raising children isn't part of the workforce, or is anything less than a vital role in the workforce, is a total bullshit claim that should be smashed to fuckin bits. It's one of the most vital fuckin roles in the workforce. This whole 'staying home to take care of kids isn't a real part of the workforce' philosophy is why teachers and shit don't get paid well enough. Taking care of children in any capacity is among the most important roles in the workforce. If you don't do it correctly, all of a sudden there's no more workforce.
The argument that taking care of children is labor is predicated on the equation of working with labor. There are lots of things that are hard work that are not labor. That's not the basis of when you get paid.
And pretending children in day care, or children of two income households more generally, aren't raised right to the point of non-existence is pretty laughably hyperbolic and unsupported.
No matter what kids need to be taken care of, the choice between daycare or staying home to take care of the kids shouldn't be an option only open to the vastly over compensated.
And why not? Everyone else has to make that choice more generally. Should both parents be able to stay home? What about people who don't want kids? Should parents who want to work be functionally punished for wanting to have a career?
It hampers integration of immigrants. Immigrant mothers stay at home (even more so than natives) supported by kontanstøtta, and their kids never go to day care and socialize with natives (or immigrants from other cultures) or learn Norwegian.
On this point, I think it would also apply to native mothers. Our first son is now 5 months old. My wife went back to work after 12 weeks (I went back after 6). She hates leaving our son even more than I do, but being a new parent is also very isolating. Most social interactions are very hard with a newborn or infant. Many babies can't handle restaurants or travel or movies or bars and thus a lot of normal social interaction is very limited. Becoming a parent is a huge shift in many/most people's lifestyles.
Work, along with contributing to society more generally, is a social experience where you interact with other people (generally). Its a way to interface with people outside your household, often of different age, demographic and social situations.
If someone wants to stay at home to take care of their offspring, great. It is definitely work. But so is gardening and I don't expect to get a farm subsidy for it. So is cleaning my home, but I don't think I should get a subsidy for it. If anything, we want to encourage the opposite. Food is more efficiently grown on farms. Paying someone to clean homes creates jobs. Labor specialization is central to how the economy works.
Parenting works a little differently, granted. Family is very important to many people including myself. Some people will stay home even without an economic reason. But I don't think there's a reason to create incentives to encourage people to stay out of the workforce. If anything, subsidies should exist to provide child care to those who couldn't afford it otherwise so they can choose to participate in the workforce if they so choose.
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Comparing taking care of children to the hobby of gardening is quite the take.
Saying that raising children isn't part of the workforce, or is anything less than a vital role in the workforce, is a total bullshit claim that should be smashed to fuckin bits. It's one of the most vital fuckin roles in the workforce. This whole 'staying home to take care of kids isn't a real part of the workforce' philosophy is why teachers and shit don't get paid well enough. Taking care of children in any capacity is among the most important roles in the workforce. If you don't do it correctly, all of a sudden there's no more workforce.
The argument that taking care of children is labor is predicated on the equation of working with labor. There are lots of things that are hard work that are not labor. That's not the basis of when you get paid.
And pretending children in day care, or children of two income households more generally, aren't raised right to the point of non-existence is pretty laughably hyperbolic and unsupported.
No matter what kids need to be taken care of, the choice between daycare or staying home to take care of the kids shouldn't be an option only open to the vastly over compensated.
And why not? Everyone else has to make that choice more generally. Should both parents be able to stay home? What about people who don't want kids? Should parents who want to work be functionally punished for wanting to have a career?
This suggests that poor people shouldn't have kids because they can't afford daycare, and that supporting them is an unacceptable burden for society. Certainly a modest proposal.
It hampers integration of immigrants. Immigrant mothers stay at home (even more so than natives) supported by kontanstøtta, and their kids never go to day care and socialize with natives (or immigrants from other cultures) or learn Norwegian.
On this point, I think it would also apply to native mothers. Our first son is now 5 months old. My wife went back to work after 12 weeks (I went back after 6). She hates leaving our son even more than I do, but being a new parent is also very isolating. Most social interactions are very hard with a newborn or infant. Many babies can't handle restaurants or travel or movies or bars and thus a lot of normal social interaction is very limited. Becoming a parent is a huge shift in many/most people's lifestyles.
Work, along with contributing to society more generally, is a social experience where you interact with other people (generally). Its a way to interface with people outside your household, often of different age, demographic and social situations.
If someone wants to stay at home to take care of their offspring, great. It is definitely work. But so is gardening and I don't expect to get a farm subsidy for it. So is cleaning my home, but I don't think I should get a subsidy for it. If anything, we want to encourage the opposite. Food is more efficiently grown on farms. Paying someone to clean homes creates jobs. Labor specialization is central to how the economy works.
Parenting works a little differently, granted. Family is very important to many people including myself. Some people will stay home even without an economic reason. But I don't think there's a reason to create incentives to encourage people to stay out of the workforce. If anything, subsidies should exist to provide child care to those who couldn't afford it otherwise so they can choose to participate in the workforce if they so choose.
.
Comparing taking care of children to the hobby of gardening is quite the take.
Saying that raising children isn't part of the workforce, or is anything less than a vital role in the workforce, is a total bullshit claim that should be smashed to fuckin bits. It's one of the most vital fuckin roles in the workforce. This whole 'staying home to take care of kids isn't a real part of the workforce' philosophy is why teachers and shit don't get paid well enough. Taking care of children in any capacity is among the most important roles in the workforce. If you don't do it correctly, all of a sudden there's no more workforce.
The argument that taking care of children is labor is predicated on the equation of working with labor. There are lots of things that are hard work that are not labor. That's not the basis of when you get paid.
And pretending children in day care, or children of two income households more generally, aren't raised right to the point of non-existence is pretty laughably hyperbolic and unsupported.
No matter what kids need to be taken care of, the choice between daycare or staying home to take care of the kids shouldn't be an option only open to the vastly over compensated.
And why not? Everyone else has to make that choice more generally. Should both parents be able to stay home? What about people who don't want kids? Should parents who want to work be functionally punished for wanting to have a career?
No we should subsidize both stay at home childcare and collective childcare. Both options should be subsidized. If we're gonna subsidize one we need to subsidize the other or we're creating a gap where only the wealthy get the choice.
The argument that taking care of children is labor is predicated on the equation of working with labor. There are lots of things that are hard work that are not labor. That's not the basis of when you get paid.
And why has capitalism decided some things are work and some things are merely labor? Eh, we don't need to worry about it, the economy is well designed and functioning perfectly. :-)
My 2c:
- Legislate that both parents must stay home for a year after childbirth. Force employers to take them back afterwards, and have the government pay the parents an appropriate amount during.
- Nationalise childcare, and make it free. Allow parents to return to work maybe after the kid is in childcare.
- Tax rich people more.
My 2c:
- Legislate that both parents must stay home for a year after childbirth.Force employers to take them back afterwards, and have the government pay the parents an appropriate amount during.
- Nationalise childcare, and make it free. Allow parents to return to work maybe after the kid is in childcare.
- Tax rich people more.
haha what?!
edit: whaaaaat?!
whaaaaaaaaaat?!
edit2: I guess so this has more content, you want to force parents to stay home regardless of what various work duties are required at their job. Then their office has to keep them on payroll and reintegrate them into whatever is going on in a year (maybe!). What happens to the extra person hired to take over for you a year ago? Are they simply let go whenever a parent is permitted to work again?
and -maybe- allow parents to work again? How benevolent!
It should be possible in the future for one parent to stay home and care for a child or children without the family being "poor" or markedly poorer than the average 2 income household.
It should be a choice for either parent.
My wife hated staying home and is much happier working. I'm the opposite but it wasn't financially possible for me to be the stay at home parent.
One thing I'd point out is that rearing a child doesn't end at a year or 18 months. We're talking 3-4 years before they're ready for pre-school so there is a gap that, as far as I know, no country has governmental support for.
It should be possible in the future for one parent to stay home and care for a child or children without the family being "poor" or markedly poorer than the average 2 income household.
It should be a choice for either parent.
My wife hated staying home and is much happier working. I'm the opposite but it wasn't financially possible for me to be the stay at home parent.
One thing I'd point out is that rearing a child doesn't end at a year or 18 months. We're talking 3-4 years before they're ready for pre-school so there is a gap that, as far as I know, no country has governmental support for.
It should be possible in the future for one parent to stay home and care for a child or children without the family being "poor" or markedly poorer than the average 2 income household.
It should be a choice for either parent.
My wife hated staying home and is much happier working. I'm the opposite but it wasn't financially possible for me to be the stay at home parent.
One thing I'd point out is that rearing a child doesn't end at a year or 18 months. We're talking 3-4 years before they're ready for pre-school so there is a gap that, as far as I know, no country has governmental support for.
That's partly because many countries have community cultures designed to deal with this gap. I wonder what laws do to this culture
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
It should be possible in the future for one parent to stay home and care for a child or children without the family being "poor" or markedly poorer than the average 2 income household.
It should be a choice for either parent.
My wife hated staying home and is much happier working. I'm the opposite but it wasn't financially possible for me to be the stay at home parent.
One thing I'd point out is that rearing a child doesn't end at a year or 18 months. We're talking 3-4 years before they're ready for pre-school so there is a gap that, as far as I know, no country has governmental support for.
Subsidized daycare?
Yes that exists but I am talking specifically the parent or family unit.
I'm not wishing for the "good ol' days" where mom stayed home and dad brought home the bacon or whatever but I think a world where a family can decide which of them wants to raise their kid(s) those first few years is a better world than the one we have now.
Also, to be clear I am a HUGE proponent of socialization through sports or group activities like daycare or play places, parks, etc... so I'm not anti-daycare.
I just personally wish that I could have worked on raising my boys until school instead of working all day and trying to squeeze it in where I could before they slept.
My 2c:
- Legislate that both parents must stay home for a year after childbirth.Force employers to take them back afterwards, and have the government pay the parents an appropriate amount during.
- Nationalise childcare, and make it free. Allow parents to return to work maybe after the kid is in childcare.
- Tax rich people more.
haha what?!
edit: whaaaaat?!
whaaaaaaaaaat?!
edit2: I guess so this has more content, you want to force parents to stay home regardless of what various work duties are required at their job. Then their office has to keep them on payroll and reintegrate them into whatever is going on in a year (maybe!). What happens to the extra person hired to take over for you a year ago? Are they simply let go whenever a parent is permitted to work again?
and -maybe- allow parents to work again? How benevolent!
(Almost) this has been seriously suggested here in Norway. The right is against it, the left is for it. Not mandatory stay at home, but strongly incentivised.
Currently, we have 49 weeks paid parental leave. You're not allowed to be fired during that period. Your old work either hires a temp or offloads your work on your colleagues.
19 weeks are earmarked for the mother. She either uses them, or no one gets them.
19 weeks are earmarked for the father. He either uses them, or no one gets them.
11 weeks the parents can use as they choose. If neither parent uses them, no one gets them. In practice, the mother almost always uses these 11 weeks.
So, the proposal is to change it to
25 weeks use it or lose it for mother
25 weeks use it or lose it for father
No one forces you to take anything. But there are strong incentives for you to do so.
(One counter-argument is that this adversely affects male employees in small companies. The counter-counter-argument is that it simply levels the playing field and makes it (roughly) equally attractive to hire men or women.)
My 2c:
- Legislate that both parents must stay home for a year after childbirth.Force employers to take them back afterwards, and have the government pay the parents an appropriate amount during.
- Nationalise childcare, and make it free. Allow parents to return to work maybe after the kid is in childcare.
- Tax rich people more.
haha what?!
edit: whaaaaat?!
whaaaaaaaaaat?!
edit2: I guess so this has more content, you want to force parents to stay home regardless of what various work duties are required at their job. Then their office has to keep them on payroll and reintegrate them into whatever is going on in a year (maybe!). What happens to the extra person hired to take over for you a year ago? Are they simply let go whenever a parent is permitted to work again?
and -maybe- allow parents to work again? How benevolent!
Yes, and the maybe was for a shortened enforced period if the child is placed in childcare early, because a year is just a number and the parents maybe should be allowed to choose to put the kid in early.
In any case, I believe the gender wage gap needs a standardised resume time gap across both parents to be fixed.
The person who is taken on to cover the parent would be in a temporary position.
And if employers/jobs aren't able to accommodate, then they can be fined until they can accommodate.
It should be possible in the future for one parent to stay home and care for a child or children without the family being "poor" or markedly poorer than the average 2 income household.
It should be a choice for either parent.
My wife hated staying home and is much happier working. I'm the opposite but it wasn't financially possible for me to be the stay at home parent.
One thing I'd point out is that rearing a child doesn't end at a year or 18 months. We're talking 3-4 years before they're ready for pre-school so there is a gap that, as far as I know, no country has governmental support for.
Subsidized daycare?
Yes that exists but I am talking specifically the parent or family unit.
I'm not wishing for the "good ol' days" where mom stayed home and dad brought home the bacon or whatever but I think a world where a family can decide which of them wants to raise their kid(s) those first few years is a better world than the one we have now.
Also, to be clear I am a HUGE proponent of socialization through sports or group activities like daycare or play places, parks, etc... so I'm not anti-daycare.
I just personally wish that I could have worked on raising my boys until school instead of working all day and trying to squeeze it in where I could before they slept.
My brother works 80% to give him time to take care of his kids. He is their primary caregiver, both by choice and because his wife is ill. His employer is OK with this arrangement (in fact, my brother can demand this arrangement by law).
This arrangement is actually not uncommon. It's just almost always gender-flipped. Many women are happy to have a reduced workload to help with the kids. But many are pressured into the role by society.
I'm really confused why everyone has knives out for the OP.
It's a pretty clear unintended consequence of these programs, no matter how egalitarian they are written, that the burden will in most societies fall on women and that women will more likely than not be the recipients of these sorts of programs.
Women and mothers already shoulder more of the burden, we just don't pay them for it currently.
Continuing to not pay them isn't gonna change that.
I don't disagree, which is why I ended my post with (admittedly tepid) support for these kinds of programs
I don't think that discriminatory hiring and advancement practices cover family planning enough to minimize the risks of this proposal.
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
that seems horribly unfair to businesses and employees. I hope that they are compensated as well (more the employees than the business).
So your solution is no one gets parental leave and the mother stays home full time?
Because that's what happened before we instituted the current parental leave scheme. In fact, when we loosened the mother/father split, everything immediately reverted closer to the old days of stay-at-home moms.
The employer must have a slight over-capacity to handle parental leave, sick days, accidents, vacations, and other leaves of absence.
Family planning / care is almost always framed as "we should care enough to do the basics post-childbirth but how can we get the worker back to work asap?"
A single working parent household simply isn't in the discussion from what I can see and I think that's disappointing (personally).
Except it's not just about people wanting to stay at home. Children and parents benefit from parents being able to stay at home (at least to some extent) with their children.
A lot of the issues around parenting are a lack of widespread societal support for parenting as an activity. We basically expect people to just, like, deal with it. Like it's just a thing that happens.
The research does not show a strong benefit for children from stay at home mothers (or fathers). Some shows a benefit for working mothers, some shows a negative but the effect is certainly not large.
Its certainly the more traditional route and that's fine. But the delta of even a fairly slanted reading of the research does not really justify a subsidy specifically to encourage the behavior even before you get the reduced labor participation downside.
The research shows strong benefits from children spending more time with their parents. This is especially true for fathers who, under traditional roles, tend to spend the least time on childcare for various reasons.
I mean, no it doesn't? Sure, that's what feels like its true, but that's why I linked actual research.
Yes, it does. Strong parental relationships in the first few years of life (not coincidentally the many sections of time we are talking about with parental leave and such) are crucial for infant brain development. Along with many other things for both parent and child.
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We should "force" them (by which I mean incentivise, not literally force them) to send their kids to day care.
Or we're cementing traditional gender roles. And isolating immigrants from the broader community (and vice versa).
Edit: The day care would obviously have to be subsidized.
If it is presented as "this is women's work, for women only" then, yeah. That's a messaging problem. But as DaveNYC points out, the alternative is not getting support for childrearing which is a complicated, full time, high effort job, meaning doing that full time job while working several part time jobs or paying for super expensive daycare. Especially for the poorest of households, that makes having children financially difficult, if not impossible, to do within budget leading to greater social costs in terms of childhood hunger, health problems, and lack of safe, secure spaced for children to be raised.
This doesn't mean that there should always be a fulltime caregiver staying home with every child. But the option is especially meaningful for those with lower incomes who can't afford daycare before schooling ages.
Anyone who has kids knew what they were signing up for?
-Government mandated paid parental leave of at least 1 year for primary caregiver, 6 months for secondary, should the primary caregiver decide to stay at their job
-Government subsidizing stay-at-home parenting, should the primary caregiver decide to quit their job
-Government subsidizing daycare after the first year (or subsidizing for the first year, should BOTH parents decide to go back to work)
A newborn being home with their parent(s) for the first year is absolutely critical for their development. After that first year, the child should go to daycare for socialization and developmental learning.
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That's great, but not really germaine to the topic. That the generations before mine were super sexist and had a bunch of gender roles they enforced upon themselves isn't really news. That a well designed policy didn't fight those traditions, but leaves open the possibility of ditching them is good. There's a bunch of other shit about society you're gonna need to change in order to get rid of those traditions. Leaving stay at home parents fucked till you fix all that other shit seems like a bad plan.
No one may be forcing people to have children, but plenty of people in here are more than willing to force their perspectives on what is appropriate parenting on others it would seem.
Bad policy doesn't help the issue though. Which is the whole point of the data we have on the policies the OP is referencing.
We know the kind of programs the OP is talking about don't really fix the issue. That doesn't mean "Do nothing", it means "Do something different".
Mandating equal leave for both parents could be a good place to start.
I respectfully disagree.
But this is why this is a topic worth discussing. Ultimately it boils down to which values we place highest.
In any case, we should be absolutely clear on what effects, positive and negative, deliberate and unintended, that the policies we espouse have.
maternal leave is 6 weeks before and 8 weeks after birth. The mother is generally not allowed to work during this time (she can if she wants too as far as I know) and she gets a subsidy equal to her average pay in the last three months or at least a set minimum.
parental leave is non gendered for both parents individually for up to three years in the first 8 years of the child's life (With a bunch of ifs and buts) to not work or work part time.
parental subsidies (about 60% of net income) are also non gendered but used to be a total amount of 12 months that could shared between parents. Studies showed that most of the time mothers took these 12 months while fathers kept working.
Some changes were made. Parents can get a further 2 months, but only if each parets takes at least 2 months. monthly subsidies can be split in half but paid over double the time to encourage part time work. Both parents can get an additional 4 month of this split subsidy if they both work part time at the same time for 25-30 hours per week.
These changes were made to encourage fathers to take parental leave and to encourage mothers to work at least part time. The result is that a lionshare of fathers take 2 month of completely and work 4 months part time.
Currently ca. 36% (up from 21% in 2008) of fathers in Germany take parental leave with subsidies for an average of 3.7 months (including part time work). In contrast mothers take an average of 13 months leave.
edit:
Studies also show that while these changes might've helped to let parents choose more freely, society is lagging behind in several areas like gender expactations and the pay gap which are some reasons of the difference between both parents. Also I'm sorry that I only said mothers and fathers so far. The parental leave rules do not distinguish by gender. My language in this post was more gendered that should be.
I'm glad we resolved that, then.
Looks like we can close the thread, folks!
You can just not post in threads, you know.
That's fine, but your thread title is still way off the mark cause that's not what the actual policy proposal was or what this law is.
The effects of the law are not effects of the law they're the effects of centuries of social conditioning.
In fact the law leaves open the possibility of progressing past that social conditioning. Unfortunately it turns out centuries of social conditioning is hard to break.
Paying stay at home parents is a good thing any welfare or socialized state should do.
Fixing the social conditioning that means a lion's share of the benefit goes to women will likely take a century or more cause we're gonna need an awful lot of our current elders that reinforce those gender roles to die off.
The thing you're blaming on the law isn't actually caused by the law it's caused by centuries of tradition. Reporting on the law gives us some statistics of who's still going with the old gender roles, and possibly why, but it doesn't mean the law itself is necessarily reinforcing the role. It's not punishing folks for holding to them, and again it also doesn't actually enforce or necessarily mandate those traditions. Other factors may, but the solution is to fix those factors not insist that a good program is making everyone stay sexist. There's a whole fuckin world of things making people stay sexist. Paying stay at home parents, with no enforcement that it must be women that stay home, doesn't really seem like one of those things.
I mean, no it doesn't? Sure, that's what feels like its true, but that's why I linked actual research.
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Ehhhhhh, between many communities having screwed up sex ed, making birth control difficult to get or unobtainable, and social pressure, it's not as simple as that.
I also don't like the idea of having children being the perogative of the wealthy.
It's a pretty clear unintended consequence of these programs, no matter how egalitarian they are written, that the burden will in most societies fall on women and that women will more likely than not be the recipients of these sorts of programs.
As many others have said, I'm in support of the general idea of these programs, as childcare (and eldercare, and care for the developmentally disabled) is a full-time job, and should be financially rewarded as such, at least until children are old enough to attend public school.
I'm also generally in support of the idea of a subsidized daycare program, although I think Norway does have the right idea- you can't offer one without the other.
Given that we "live in a society" as the memes go, and we know that offering childcare subsidies will in our current system lead to the burden being shouldered primarily by women, what changes can we enact at the same time in order to encourage a more egalitarian sharing of childcare?
I'm going to ignore the idea of a subsidized daycare, and speak from an American perspective. My reasons for this are simple- there are already significant issues with our current "public daycare", i.e. the public school system. This isn't to disparage public school employees, I teach at a University and have the utmost respect for the profession. But at least in America, it seems likely that extending public school all the way down through the first few years of life would run into similar issues in regards to pay rates for caregivers, variable standard of care across the nation, and significant understaffing. Thus while enacting a public-funded daycare program would be more egalitarian, I don't know that it is the right way to handle this without also investing a lot of time, thought, and money into ways to improve our current public-care and education infrastructure, and I don't really know how to solve that problem, and at least in America, that problem is beyond the scope of this thread, in my opinion.
Instead, let's address some of the reasons that, were we to enact a "childcare subsidy" for all children of a certain age not enrolled in a daycare, women and mothers would generally shoulder more of the burden.
In short, this is because our current workforce is not at all egalitarian in nature, in terms of earning potential.
You all may remember the Google Memo, that framed one of the current employment disparities - that women make up a smaller percentage of the workforce in technology and engineering jobs- as a consequence of base biology. This is a rather silly idea, debated and debunked by myself and more thoroughly (and with the same tools) by Erin Giglio.
Nevertheless, the facts remain. Women hold only ~7% of CEO positions. Only 20% of engineering degrees in 2016 were awarded to women. Roughly the same percentage of women received computer science degrees.
We can dig into this a bit deeper- of the degrees most commonly chosen by women, the median salary is approximately 50K. Of the degrees most commonly chosen by men, the median salary is approximately 60K.
Even worse, research has shown that as women move into fields, the average pay in that field tends to go down. Quoting from that article:
I'm not an economist (and ignoring single-parent, or same-sex parents here), but the writing is pretty clear here. If we were to subsidize childcare with a stipend to the parents, most people would choose the parent earning less to stay home and receive the stipend. Statistically speaking, it will be the mothers.
I think Syndalis here has the right actual solution- before trying to apply the bandaid of "we don't pay people for this full-time job, here's some money", we need to do something about wages of employees on a macro level (wages have stagnated across many fields, and women still generally earn less than men).
Until at the very least average earnings are roughly the same across men and women, any proposals for a childcare stipend is, in essence, a stipend for mothers and not fathers. Is this bad? I'm not entirely sure. It certainly enforces a very specific set of gender roles, whether it intends to or not. On the other hand, at the very least it provides some means of recompense in certain fields, such as academia, where having a child tends to depress earnings for women for a few years. Of course, the better solution is to first fix wages, and second to offer more egalitarian parental leave programs.
The US isn't Norway, sadly, but as (I think Quid?) pointed out, many US institutions still have larger allotments of parental leave afforded to women. Hell, I remember being at Universities when they changed their policies to extend parental leave to men as well. This has happened only in my lifetime.
All of this to say, I think the idea of subsidizing childcare is a very good idea, in theory, but we need to enact many other changes either before or alongside it before it can actually be a useful tool and not (essentially) a weapon against women entering the workforce.
Women and mothers already shoulder more of the burden, we just don't pay them for it currently.
Continuing to not pay them isn't gonna change that.
I'd be interested to see how/if it changed the overall number of stay-at-home parents and the gender balance of those parents.
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I am very aware of what the law is. It is explicitly stated in the OP, for one thing.
The thread title reflects the de facto effect of a law that de jure is something else.
That is why I chose this title. To highlight the unintended (but extremely predictable) effects of a piece of legislation that we've had for 20 years now.
And pretending children in day care, or children of two income households more generally, aren't raised right to the point of non-existence is pretty laughably hyperbolic and unsupported.
And why not? Everyone else has to make that choice more generally. Should both parents be able to stay home? What about people who don't want kids? Should parents who want to work be functionally punished for wanting to have a career?
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This suggests that poor people shouldn't have kids because they can't afford daycare, and that supporting them is an unacceptable burden for society. Certainly a modest proposal.
No we should subsidize both stay at home childcare and collective childcare. Both options should be subsidized. If we're gonna subsidize one we need to subsidize the other or we're creating a gap where only the wealthy get the choice.
- Legislate that both parents must stay home for a year after childbirth. Force employers to take them back afterwards, and have the government pay the parents an appropriate amount during.
- Nationalise childcare, and make it free. Allow parents to return to work maybe after the kid is in childcare.
- Tax rich people more.
haha what?!
edit: whaaaaat?!
whaaaaaaaaaat?!
edit2: I guess so this has more content, you want to force parents to stay home regardless of what various work duties are required at their job. Then their office has to keep them on payroll and reintegrate them into whatever is going on in a year (maybe!). What happens to the extra person hired to take over for you a year ago? Are they simply let go whenever a parent is permitted to work again?
and -maybe- allow parents to work again? How benevolent!
That is both an assault on personal freedom and wildly impractical for many professions.
It should be a choice for either parent.
My wife hated staying home and is much happier working. I'm the opposite but it wasn't financially possible for me to be the stay at home parent.
One thing I'd point out is that rearing a child doesn't end at a year or 18 months. We're talking 3-4 years before they're ready for pre-school so there is a gap that, as far as I know, no country has governmental support for.
Subsidized daycare?
That's partly because many countries have community cultures designed to deal with this gap. I wonder what laws do to this culture
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Yes that exists but I am talking specifically the parent or family unit.
I'm not wishing for the "good ol' days" where mom stayed home and dad brought home the bacon or whatever but I think a world where a family can decide which of them wants to raise their kid(s) those first few years is a better world than the one we have now.
Also, to be clear I am a HUGE proponent of socialization through sports or group activities like daycare or play places, parks, etc... so I'm not anti-daycare.
I just personally wish that I could have worked on raising my boys until school instead of working all day and trying to squeeze it in where I could before they slept.
(Almost) this has been seriously suggested here in Norway. The right is against it, the left is for it. Not mandatory stay at home, but strongly incentivised.
Currently, we have 49 weeks paid parental leave. You're not allowed to be fired during that period. Your old work either hires a temp or offloads your work on your colleagues.
So, the proposal is to change it to
No one forces you to take anything. But there are strong incentives for you to do so.
(One counter-argument is that this adversely affects male employees in small companies. The counter-counter-argument is that it simply levels the playing field and makes it (roughly) equally attractive to hire men or women.)
Yes, and the maybe was for a shortened enforced period if the child is placed in childcare early, because a year is just a number and the parents maybe should be allowed to choose to put the kid in early.
In any case, I believe the gender wage gap needs a standardised resume time gap across both parents to be fixed.
The person who is taken on to cover the parent would be in a temporary position.
And if employers/jobs aren't able to accommodate, then they can be fined until they can accommodate.
My brother works 80% to give him time to take care of his kids. He is their primary caregiver, both by choice and because his wife is ill. His employer is OK with this arrangement (in fact, my brother can demand this arrangement by law).
This arrangement is actually not uncommon. It's just almost always gender-flipped. Many women are happy to have a reduced workload to help with the kids. But many are pressured into the role by society.
I don't disagree, which is why I ended my post with (admittedly tepid) support for these kinds of programs
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
So your solution is no one gets parental leave and the mother stays home full time?
Because that's what happened before we instituted the current parental leave scheme. In fact, when we loosened the mother/father split, everything immediately reverted closer to the old days of stay-at-home moms.
The employer must have a slight over-capacity to handle parental leave, sick days, accidents, vacations, and other leaves of absence.
It's only hard because you don't want to.
A single working parent household simply isn't in the discussion from what I can see and I think that's disappointing (personally).
Yes, it does. Strong parental relationships in the first few years of life (not coincidentally the many sections of time we are talking about with parental leave and such) are crucial for infant brain development. Along with many other things for both parent and child.
Random link on some of this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5330336/
Shit, just look up the research on premies. Parental bonding and contact has large measurable health gains.
Giving parents the ability to spend more time with their children, especially early in development, is good for everyone.