Like you guys just have to go back to work ASAP or not get paid? Or is it left up to the company you’re working for and OH WELL if they don’t offer some kind of mat/pat leave?

This just boggles my mind.

This quote from Anne Manne’s thought-provoking article, “Children’s Lib: Elisabeth Badinter’s ‘The Conflict: Woman and Mother’” (thanks blue milk), reminded me of some news I’ve been meaning to share:

Anna Wahl, from the Stockholm School of Economics, argues that Swedish paternity leave, which cannot be transferred to the mother, “moves the norm a little … It creates pressure on young men; now they have to explain why they’re not going to be at home … It’s not just anyone taking care of the child; it’s the father. It says he is irreplaceable.”

Italy’s Labour Minister Elsa Fornero said something similar upon the announcement of Prime Minister Mario Monti’s new controversial labour reform, which was approved by Italy’s cabinet last Friday and includes mandatory paternity leave:

It’s a way to change mentality: maternity is not just for women. We need to reconcile our time at work with family time.

The reform still needs to be presented to parliament and will probably be modified, but it’s another reason to hope things are turning around for the better in this post Berlusconi era.

Gordon Dahl, Katrine Loken, Magne Mogstad - “Social Interaction Effects in Program Take-up: Regression Discontinuity Evidence for Parental Leave” (in progress)

Social interactions could play an important role in the take-up of government social programs.  However, estimating the causal effect of peer groups has proven challenging given the well-known problems of reflection, correlated unobservables, and endogenous group membership.  We overcome these identification issues in the context of paid paternity leave in Norway using a regression discontinuity design.  Our approach differs from the existing literature which attempts to measure social interactions by exploiting exogenous assignment to peer groups; in contrast, we study naturally occurring peer groups, but exploit variation in the “price” of a social program for a random subset of individuals.  Fathers of children born after May 1, 1993 in Norway were eligible for one month of governmental paid paternity leave, while fathers of children born before this cutoff were not.  There is a sharp increase in fathers taking paternity leave immediately after the reform, with take-up rising from 2% to 24%.  While this quasi-random variation changed the cost (or price) of paternity leave for some fathers and not others, it did not directly affect the cost of taking leave for the father’s brothers or coworkers (who were all eligible for paid paternity leave when they had children in the post-reform period). We find strong evidence for substantial interaction effects in paternity leave take-up in both family and employment networks.  Around the reform cutoff, brothers of fathers who were eligible for leave are 4.4 percentage points more likely to take paid leave after the birth of their first child compared to brothers of fathers who had children before the reform.  Weaker effects are found for the brothers-in-law of fathers.  For the employment network, we focus on smaller firms where there is a single birth among all employees in the 12-month window surrounding the reform.  We find that coworkers are 3.4 percentage points more likely to take paternity leave if their colleague was eligible for paternity leave around the reform cutoff.  Our results suggest an important causal role for information transmission and/or changes in social norms operating through family and employment networks.

this made me think about how he has a baby

and is married

and how 10 months ago they were having sex

having sex

sex

my teacher

my teacher had sex and now i cant stop thinking about it coz he is like 34 and my teacher

the things she could have done to him he could have done to her…

This weekend is Brian’s 3 day work weekend. He is supposed to work Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night. Well, since I am scheduled to get induced Sunday night, he asked his (new and totally awesome!) supervisor if he can start his paternity leave that day (Sunday). His supervisor said that our squadron (it may be every squadron, I don’t know) just changed it so that way the leave doesn’t start until the day he is actually born. So Brian asked if that meant he had to come into work Sunday night or just use some of his emergency leave for that day and his supervisor told him not to worry about coming into work Sunday evening. It won’t count against him and it won’t take away one of his leave days!!!

He (the new supervisor) also said that if Brian wants to take extra time (he wants to take an additional 2 weeks since he has so much leave saved up) after the paternity leave is up, just let him and the Ssrgt know and they will make sure it goes through. 

I am so excited. I love how understanding his new supervisor is (he better, he has 4 kids of his own) and how sweet he is. His wife even offered to come keep me company some nights if I didn’t want to be alone. 

Not only will Baby B and I get Brian home for 10 days, but we’re pretty much going to have him for an entire month. Words cannot express how happy I am.

Sundays are rather mundane, but I’m starting to like the comfort that Sundays bring.

Sleeping in, homework in front of the fire, skype with my parents, and then with my boyfriend. 

Today my brother (who is coming to visit me over spring break) and I created a skeleton of our travel plans. I did not realize how stressful it is to plan trips. SO stressful. It is so relieving to know which cities we’ll be going to, in which order, and the modes of transportation we need to take to get there. We’ll be seeing Morocco and Spain, and I couldn’t be more excited. I love Denmark, but these two countries will be vastly different and I’m craving that contrast. I need to start thinking of places to show him in Copenhagen and Roskilde too…I want to find a good mix of both touristy and more local things to do. I think that’s the approach we’ll be taking on our trip.

Otherwise, today consisted of lots of research on parenting in Denmark…I’ll be writing a paper on this topic, probably focusing on family structures and gender roles within the Scandinavian family. Paternity leave exists in all of the Scandinavian countries, which I think is cool.

After dinner my host family and I curled up in the living room for a movie night, and watched Melancholia, yet another beautifully artistic, depressing, and ambiguous movie. I can’t decide if I liked it or not. I’m leaning toward liking it. The portrayal of major depression in this film was really phenomenal…but painful. It illustrated how people suffering from depression tend to stay calm under highly stressful situations—because they are already expecting bad things to happen-an interesting example of how negative thinking can sometimes have positive results. That idea is particularly interesting to me at the moment, as I’m studying positive psychology here in Denmark, where the benefits of positive thinking is stressed.

In other news, one of my childhood best friends had a baby this morning, and oh how I wish I could meet her.

I took six weeks off work for paternity leave which, combined with the two weeks I got for winter break, makes eight weeks of solid Boo Boo time. Today marks the halfway point in our time together.

Getting a little verklempt over here.

I’m gonna miss our mid-day naps, trips out on the town with Wyatt the Wolf, and experimentation with different solid foods.

But listen to me go on like my grandmother, who once picked me up from the airport (I was to spend the week with her) with the first words out of her mouth being, “I’m going to miss you when it’s time for you to go.”

Gotta remember to soak it up … ‘preciate … ‘preciate.