I’m about to start my 12 week paternity leave next week thanks to a state program and almost everyone that I’ve told has had their jaws on the floor that I would even want to do that.

Today I witnessed a group of coworkers almost bragging how little time they took after their kids were born. I’ve heard stuff like “Most men are hard working and want to support their families so they don’t take leave”.

To me it was a no brainer, I’m getting ~85% of my normal pay and I get to take care of my wife, our son and our newborn for 3 whole months. and for someone who hasn’t taken a day breathe in the past 3 years I think I deserve it.

I’m in the US so I know it’s a “strange” concept, but people have seemed genuinely upset, people it doesn’t affect at all. Again, it’s a state program available to almost anyone who’s worked in the past 2 years, I’ve talked to soon to be dads who scoffed at the idea and were happy to use a week of pto and that’s it.

I feel like I’m missing something.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
    31·
    3 hours ago

    there needs to be a cool down period

    This seems like a solution in search of a problem. I’m sure Republicans will take it and run, like with “welfare queens, “anchor babies”, trans people in sports, etc, but is there even a point? How many women will there be willing to pump out baby after baby, just so the father doesn’t have to work? While I’m sure it’ll happen, I just don’t see it happening enough to worry about. Plus someone will gamigpfy it by timing things to the cooldown period: you can’t win but sometimes the edge cases are just edge cases

    Or maybe, do you think this is a legit scenario? We have two kids. We intentionally had them close together to both simplify our lives and give them a “peer” to grow up with. Should I have been allowed paternity leave, or is two children close in age somehow a problem?

    • Surp@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 hours ago

      First of all I’m left. I’m just trying to meet the people in the middle that would vote against this. That’s the democrat’s first problem as to why we got in this hot mess with these Republican jerks is that the loudest of y’all want the farthest left shit possible and it fucked us in the election because the Republicans used that against us. Open your eyes and realize Democrats are weak right now and only way back is meeting more in the middle to start.