Posted on 12. Oct, 2005 by Brian Reid in General
Uh Oh. The pile of stuff to post on is growing, but things are calming down, so I should be better able to shovel it out to you in the days to come.
For starters, I ran across this bit from the UK suggesting that men may get a right to six months of paternity leave, which comes on top of the two weeks of paid leave they get. According to the Times, 60 percent of men take the paid leave. That’s encouraging, I would think. Sounds like businesses are a bit upset about all of this, and if I have any readers on that side of the pond who can keep me posted on how this plays out, I’d be curious to keep up with it. Longtime readers know that I believe that getting men to take paternity leave is key in boosting the number of involved fathers (and at-home dads), so any move in the right direction, anywhere in the world, gets applause from RebelDad headquarters.
Look, I know most of you hate the parenting mags and their relentless mommy focus, but I have to (for the second month in a row) give a shout-out to Parents, which published snippets of Eric Snowdeal’s blog about his micropreemie. The blog was (and is) fantastic, and I’m thrilled that Parents found the site and excerpted it. It’s not a “mommy article” or a “daddy article”: it’s just a wonderful story with a happy ending. So check it out, or save the money and just read Eric’s blog.
The same issue has some reviews of dad-oriented diaper bags, but I’ll get to that later.
AdventureDad
12. Oct, 2005
It’s a great idea but onfortunately not many fathers will use it. First of all it’s “not manly” in UK to stay home with your kid. Somehow it’s more manly to stay home two days with your kid and then go back to work. Sounds tupid to me. Another reason is that it will be way too expensive. It’s almost the same as taking unpaid leave. Over here in greatest-country-for-a-family fathers or mothers are compensated the same all of the 480 paid working days we get per child. But, and this is a big but, only up to a certain limit which is basically the average yearly salary . Some companies, mine included, do chip in the difference so that you do get about 85 percent of your REAL salary. Let me put it this way, if you only get 85 % of the average yearly salary of 25 k and you are making 350 k it’s expensive to stay at home and you might as well take unpaid leave.
But it’s definitely a step in the right direction
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The Zero Boss
12. Oct, 2005
Of course the parenting rags are mom-centric. That’s why we have Blogging Baby.
I love Eric’s site. Good call by Parents. Now, if they would do more than token dad content…
Rebel Dad
12. Oct, 2005
But Jay … token coverage is waaaay more than we usually get. (My excitement is the product of the soft bigotry of low expectations.)
Eric C Snowdeal III
19. Oct, 2005
thanks for the nice words about the site. of course, i tried to convince parents that it would be in their best interest to run a series of articles so that readers could get a more detailed glimpse of the nicu and it would at least temporarily add more “dad content” to the mag, but for some reason they never took me up on the offer