Joyce Fegan: Why taking paternity leave is an act of rebellion

We live in a working world that was designed decades ago. It was designed around a man who wouldn’t get pregnant, needing neither leave for early pregnancy loss or maternity cover, and it was designed without family in mind, full stop.

IN our public debates about care, we talk in terms of money: the cost of crèche; how many weeks and euros in maternity and paternity benefit the State gives; and if, or by how much, an employer will top it up.

In our private conversations, we talk in terms of care: how we want to do right by our children; wondering are we good enough parents and spending enough quality time with our children; figuring out how do you get them to eat broccoli. or anything for that matter; and asking ourselves if going for a run on our own is selfish.

In our private conversations we’re on the money; in our public ones, we’re way off the mark.

As Simon Harris, higher education minister, announced the birth of his second child with wife Caoimhe this week, he also announced he was taking paternity leave “to get to know this new little man”.

In 2015, Harvard Medical School Professor Kevin Nugent sat in front of our Oireachtas committee on health and children and told its members how the first 1,000 days of a person’s life shapes how they deal with adversity, the kinds of friendships they form, and their levels of success or happiness in later life.

“The process of building the brain is not genetically determined”, said Prof. Nugent. “The first 1,000 days are crucial to brain development.”

How we bond, connect and attach to our children in those early days is about the most important work you can do, and it’s about the most important investment you can make in the world.

Whether you’re a parent or not is irrelevant, because these well-minded infants might just grow up to be the kindest teacher your child ever knows, the most astute GP you will ever need, or the scientist who finally discovers the cure for cancer.

According to childhood development scientists, children who receive that early attentive care and have secure attachments grow into adults who can solve problems on their own and ask for help when they’re in trouble, who feel better about themselves and what they can contribute, and who can rebound from disappointment and loss.

A world of securely attached adults sounds like a world worth living in.

However, while the adults of the world busy themselves splitting hairs over weeks in leave or euros in benefit payments, these small human brains are developing at the most rapid rate of their lives.

Both in government and in the private sector, we need to ensure that we are doing everything we can to support parents and carers in this priceless, invaluable work, and not leave them twisted in knots about meeting their care-giving needs and their professional duties.

So when a minister with a seat at our Cabinet table announces his intention to take the two weeks’ paternity leave at €245 a week, it might not seem that big of a deal — but it is.

The most up-to-date figures from the Central Statistics Office show that 45% of new fathers do not take the two weeks of paternity benefit to which they are entitled.

This figure gets worse when you look at businesses of less than 10 employees — 62.1% of new fathers don’t take the leave.

How we bond, connect and attach to our children in those early days is about the most important work you can do, and it’s about the most important investment you can make in the world.

There are a lot of these businesses in Ireland, according to University College Cork’s School of Business. Micro businesses, with one to nine employees, make up 90% of all businesses in Ireland. There are a quarter of a million micro businesses in Ireland, which employ almost 400,000 people.

The idea that business and care-work are separate entities and never the two shall meet is about as stupid and unhelpful as our thinking can get.

As Melinda Gates wrote this week in Time magazine, people are both workers and caregivers.

“Instead of making it possible for US workers to be active parts of their families and the economy at the same time, our country has long operated on the wildly outdated assumption that we all have stay-at-home partners to handle the caregiving,” she wrote.

“This may be because so many of the people who set policy in this country are in precisely that position,” she added.

It took until 2019 for the first member of the 232-year-old US Congress, Colin Allred, to publicly take paternity leave. Ireland isn’t too different from the United States.

We live in a working world that was designed decades ago. It was designed at a time when one job was enough to make ends meet. It was designed around a man who wouldn’t get pregnant, needing neither leave for early pregnancy loss or maternity cover, and it was designed without family in mind, full stop.

The idea that business and care-work are separate entities and never the two shall meet is about as stupid and unhelpful as our thinking can get.

The design happened in private businesses’ boardrooms and around government cabinet tables, by people who neither represented nor had the full spectrum of human experience. It was designed around a time when the wisdom of the day was “children should be seen and not heard”.

Well, those days and that “wisdom” are well and truly gone.

The science of the day, when it comes to early childhood care, can now be summarised as: “You can’t spoil a baby.” 

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The more attentive, attuned, sensitive, and responsive you can be to a human infant in the first 12 months of their life, the more they will grow to trust that their needs will be met throughout their lives — and act accordingly.

Imagine being surrounded by humans who felt like that?

We live in a world where we do not support carers and care work. In doing that, we are failing not only them, but those they care for. While we might frame the debate around euros in benefits and weeks of leave, it’s actually about building the wellbeing, or mental health, bedrock of our society’s infants — our future generation.

Partners or dads taking a seat at the care-giving table, instead of just the boardroom or cabinet table, not only benefits them and their child, but it also benefits the whole of society. 

It shows employers the reality that almost all workers come with care-giving responsibilities, and it’s more than time the workplace was designed with that in mind. Covid showed us the challenging and unpredictable nature of care work, and the essential role of care-workers in our lives.

As we return to the workplace, let’s keep talking about the realities of our lives and the impossible choices we face everyday as we try to balance care work with paid work.

Taking two weeks’ paternity leave might not seem like much but, if every partner took it, industry and the work culture wouldn’t be long about taking note. It might just start to change how the whole workplace is designed.