More dads are taking parental leave than ever. Moms aren’t always happy about it
Last year, Sam Rose ran his first ultra-marathon, a 50km race that took him seven hours, eight minutes and two seconds to complete. But he didn’t need to take days off work for the arduous training. Rose, 37, was on a 12week paternity leave that allowed him to train with a running stroller near his Austin home.
In retrospect, he feels he needed both – time with his son and time spent on himself – as he used the leave to officially usher in fatherhood. “It helped to have that external validation and accomplishment in the middle,” says Rose, who placed 16th in the race. “Maybe I needed to feel that this time was more than just watching a baby, which maybe says something about myself or manhood.”
Eryn Schultz, Rose’s wife, says her parental leave felt nothing like her partner’s. Shultz, who runs her own business, spent time recovering physically and focusing on the logistics required to become a parent. Breastfeeding was challenging and she spent hours using a breast pump. “When I was the primary caregiver, I felt like I had not moved off the couch in days,” says the 37-year-old certified financial planner.
In the US, parental-leave offerings have grown steadily since the pandemic, especially for white-collar workers at some of the world’s top companies. In 2023, 32% of fathers reported getting paid paternity leave, up five percentage points from the year prior, according to data from the Society for Human Resource Management. But their experience of parental leave can differ significantly from that of the birthing spouse.
Part of the reason is just common sense. Birthing mothers take their leave first to allow for their own body to heal, try – and sometimes fail at – breastfeeding, and recover emotionally. Their partners take the second shift a couple months later, delaying the need to start daycare or find a nanny. At the same time, the baby is meeting their own milestones. In other words, fathers who take paternity leave typically inherit a cute little blob, but one that can likely already hold their neck, smile and giggle. The differences between the two parental leaves can feel like an elephant in the room.
For mothers, watching their partner unwind and enjoy leave often foreshadows the inequities yet to come, says Margaret Quinlan, professor of communication studies at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who studies how parenthood is presented in the media. Fathers who take paternity are more strategic about theirs since it’s not tied to physical recovery. Many opt to take it at any point within the first year of their child’s birth, which allows them to consider how the leave affects their career. “Men can pick to take it when it’s convenient for them or when it will benefit them the most. Some even take the time off in a way that won’t impact their [annual] bonus,” she adds.
In her research – much of it on cisgender heterosexual couples – Quinlan finds that even for fathers who are the main caretakers during their leave, it’s the mothers who continue to bear the brunt of developmental milestones or who get calls from the pediatrician’s office – even when the father is listed first.
The inconsistency of parental leave for fathers can worsen inequality and breed further resentment regarding a mother’s mental load. Most of the fathers also know their time in charge is temporary, she says. “It’s very functional,” she adds.
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Varinder Singh Punia, a director at a biotechnology company, says taking a portion of his paternity leave after his wife meant he was fully in charge when his son was not sleeping through the night as a three-month-old. But the two months off also gave him the space to deal with challenges that seemed too big to approach when he was working full-time, including purchasing a larger home in nearby Decatur, Georgia, and handling the logistics of moving the family out of their Atlanta home. He also caught up on his favorite neurology podcasts while rocking his son to bed. Without the physical healing, Dr Singh Punia felt that he had time to be present. “Having that space allows you to marinate in new parenthood,” he adds.
But even though Dr Singh Punia joined a parenting group enabling both him and his son to socialize, and spent time dealing with his son’s sleep regression, the leave still didn’t feel as intense as it had for his wife. “There were times she told me: ‘I need you to step it up,’” says Singh Punia, who adds that it meant being more focused on household chores, including the cooking and refilling her water bottle, so she could stay hydrated while breastfeeding.
Part of the problem is that paternity leave still feels like it’s optional, and there’s often pushback from older colleagues who never took leave, says Kelly O’Connell, 38, who works in aerospace operations in San Diego. Though he took leave with both of his children, with the first child he was worried about being away from the office. He took his month off in pieces, an initial two weeks and two more separate weeks later in the year. In the end, it was difficult to feel fully responsible. “It took me a week to even separate from work,” he says. “I was way more stressed making sure work stuff got done.”
The second time, O’Connell took leave for an entire month and once the family already employed a nanny. It allowed him more time to secure his sixmonth-old onto one of his bikes and cycle along the ocean. There was more time for bonding. Years later, he says the couple still splits daily tasks, but he handles less of the mental load. “Having a complete shared responsibility for parenthood comes from your leave,” he adds.
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There’s no question that paternity leave has long-term benefits for the entire family. It allows fathers to become instantly more engaged and the bonds continue through the childrearing years.
“Becoming a father is a transformative experience and we see consistent evidence that taking leave leads men to act differently,” says Richard Petts, sociology professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. But what happens during the leave and how responsibilities are divided, especially when the family staggers the leaves is less studied, he adds.
For fathers who do take paternity leave to pursue hobbies or get fit, it can also fall in line with their vision of becoming a “complete father”, says Petts. Rather than viewing it as a time of fun or distraction, these traditionally leisure-focused activities are initiating them into fatherhood, he says. “Thinking: ‘I’m going to do this for myself’ falls in line with being more engaged in fathering,” he says.
On the other hand, mothers have so much of the physical and mental stuff to contend with during their leaves that there is not time for them to even consider themselves holistically, he adds.
The true accomplishment would be to make maternity leave as liberating, says Linzay Davis, a parental leave consultant who quit her own demanding job soon after she returned from maternity leave. For many women, that would entail being able to extend their leave past the three months mark so they have more time to recover. The ideal would be to allow for time spent enjoying life with the baby.
“There’s a point [after the threemonth mark] when things start to flip and you feel a little more like yourself. This time period in your life is not just to survive, but to actually thrive through parental leave,” she says.
Davis’s gold standard is to get both parents to take side-by-side leave for at least a month to deal with the adjustment period. Then Davis recommends staggering the leave to allow both parents to take on a significant responsibility for the child during their leave. While fathers inherently have a flexibility of when they take parental leave, allowing some to take it much later, it can veer too much into orienting their