Mandatory paternity leave! Can we do a straw poll of how many people think that if you have a child the government gets to tell you how long to quit your job for!?
I see your point, but here's the thing; moms _already_ have virtually-mandatory parental leave.
Giving birth ranges from "extremely exhausting" to "life-alteringly horrendous" (sometimes life-threateningly). Breastfeeding, something widely recognized as extremely beneficial to the infant, is incredibly demanding, and they will do it 10+ times a day when they're newborns. If nothing else, we're mammals - our infants really aren't ready to be dumped in to daycare when they're 2 weeks old.
As it stands, we do not have a way to take the burdens I named above and split them between fathers and mothers equally. In light of that, women will _always_ have to deal with employers worried about whether they'll have a kid. Making paternity leave equal levels the playing field.
Instead of making it "mandatory" you can make it "use it or lose it" and that might do the trick, unless you work for a horrible company (though many people do...). Nobody seems to mind mandated vacation days where I live. In fact, it's the only way to make sure vacation is actually taken (see also: BS "unlimited vacation")
Competitive woodcutting is extremely exhausting (I imagine) but we don't subsidize it or demand that non-woodcutters take equivalent time off to compensate.
Having children is a choice.
If you're about to say that women will be discriminated against on the basis that they might have children, it would be easy to allow them to be docked pay. This has an immediate "ugh" reaction because as a society we put mothers and bearing children on a pedestal. Having children is a bad thing for the world, and those who choose to have children are definitely the more privileged.
It depends on one's philosophy I guess. Having more than the replacement rate is bad for the world. On average, even having the replacement rate is bad for the world (for now). Maybe human extinction would be good for the world depending on your view of what good is (an unspoilt ecological Eden sounds nice - though I like the idea of at least a few people around)
However, it's worth noting that countries with high gender equality (including shared parental leave) tend to have below-replacement birthrates. It kind of makes sense that letting people have a kid and stay in the workforce means fewer kids - being a working parent with 1 kid is hard enough (even with leave). Even with fully shared parental leave, having a kid is more expensive if you have a career. By contrast, if having a kid knocks you out of the workplace entirely it makes the cost of having another lower. My wife and I have a kid and we have indeed thought "well, if we have two kids the creche fees nearly double, and the math doesn't work out, so if we're going to stay a two-income family we really can only have one".
And we all end up paying for crap we don't want to. Buying a house is a choice but before I left the US my taxes subsidized the insanely stupid mortgage interest tax deduction. I HATE paying for roads through taxes. I think they should be completely tolled and made to support themselves, and that if the externalities were priced in most travel would be via bike/ebike/walking/public transport. But I don't get much choice; my taxes pay for them. We have sprawling roads _everywhere_, there's no peace and quiet _anywhere_, and civilisation (including today's children) may die a horrible death as a result.
We are not at below replacement rate though, globally. And we could sustain it for a very long time, at least hundreds of generations. It's not a relevant problem
There are cultural differences here, specifically those that involve what the concept of "liberty" means in practice. Americans tend to focus on freedom "to", which is exactly what you're talking about here: employees should be free to choose whether or not they take maternity/paternity. Europeans tend to focus on freedom "from", i.e. employees should be from from worrying about whether the decision to take maternity/paternity will hold them back or not.
You can frame it the way you have if you want to, but to some cultures, having the government tell people what they can and can't do is the only way to ensure true liberty for all.
I'm British and pretty left wing, don't assume that it's all tribal. Granted my post sounded quite American. The government forcing you to take time off is absolutely mental to me. Think of the edge cases => what if I'm not planning to bring up the kid? What if I want lots and lots of children? What if it's an absolutely vital time for me at work, partnerships are coming up or something. What if I'm self-employed? Then think about how possible choices for these edge cases lead to messed up situations. I can imagine people pretending not to be bringing up their children so that the government doesn't mess with their lives.
I see how you can frame it as "freedom not to have reproduction affect your career". But for one thing that still won't work. Time off is time off and income correlates with total hours worked in your life. For another, I don't think all of society agrees that we should pay for your freedom to have children without incurring any costs. We don't need more children, the world population is still increasing. There's this strange train of logic now that because aging populations become poor (because we massively overpromised on pensions) we need native children. 1. We can use immigration. 2. If your system cannot support the decreasing population necessary for the world to get through the next centuries, you need to fix the system not encourage breeding.
Also what about incels, gay people, people who just don't want children? Why on earth are they paying for straight middle class peoples ability not to have their kids interfere with their law career.
That doesn't sound especially left on this issue. Welfare and safety nets are normally accepted as a good thing in the centre and on the left, in varying degree.
In practice if you're young, junior or working for a jerk (or a high hours constant death march startup) the choice becomes work through and let partner do it alone, or get fired. For the rest it is a case of how confident you are in your tenure, seniority and perhaps number of years in the workplace how you will react to your employer hinting strongly to just take a couple of days.
What's needed is strong enough legislation such that anyone who wants to support their partner can, and the few who have to work can do also. I'd much prefer for it become an accepted norm, and for those who don't to be the unusual case. It has benefits for both the parents and the child.
Your last point immediately begs the question what about all the rest? Why on earth are they paying for straight middle class kid's education, healthcare, child allowance etc. Why on earth are they paying for pensions of those no longer working? That way lies the abolition of all social safety nets and ultimately pay yourself or sink. I don't want to live there thank you. :)
Your last point is incoherent. Every single person benefits from education. The person benefiting from time off for maternity/paternity is the parent much more than the child.
If you're poor/young bad boss/start up and have kids it's tough yes. It's also tough if you don't have kids, and they're a choice.
It's kind of pointless to argue left/right, dismiss me with a label if you want. This only exists in a few very left wing countries so I don't think opposing it puts me on a fringe somewhere.
The point is that maternity/paternity leave is the rest of society subsidising parents, who are not doing anything useful by adding to existing overpopulation. Not whether I'm left wing or right wing. If you want to make life easier then I'd go for basic income over selective welfare that disproportionately benefits the already privileged.
> The person benefiting from time off for maternity/paternity is the parent much more than the child.
That's a very surprising claim. All the psychological consensus that I've seen says that the continuous presence of people of reference (preferably the parents) is a positive influence on the early development of children.
There has been big debates about this in Norway for as long as I can remember. One of the arguments for the "father's quota" is that when fathers were not "forced" to take at least some parental leave, there was an implied policy many places that as a father you left all the parental leave for the mother, with all the inequality that follows. Personally I am very pro the father's quota, as no employer can now (implicitly) force me to not take it.
