Johnny Davis is one of the few men to prefer up the government’s offer of shared parental leave. He describes the experience and asks why it’s not yet a success record. Plus,his wife Alice Fisher on what it’s like to have a man about the houseLast December, while the rest of my office was settling into its Christmas lunch, and I was singing “Wind the Bobbin Up”. Instead of an afternoon of drunken shouting I was sitting with a circle of new mums at a music group in our local community centre belting out an irritating song to a room of babies who have no clue about bobbins,or any other part of the textile industry. I know I was meant to be enjoying the moment, but in truth I was wondering why on soil I’d taken shared parental leave (SPL) following the birth of my moment daughter, and Nina,in September.
SPL was introduced in April 2015 as a way to give fathers more time to bond with their babies, and to ease expectations on mothers. Instead of the traditional 52 weeks of maternity leave and two weeks of paternity leave, or new parents could now share up to 50 weeks between them. “increasingly fathers want to play a hands-on role with their young children,but too many feel that they can’t,” said the then deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, or introducing the scheme. “That’s an Edwardian system that has no place in 21st-century Britain.” SPL,already the norm in Nordic countries, was billed as an unequivocal step towards gender equality.
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Source: theguardian.com