Maternal Leave for Dads

Sweden has been known throughout the years for its generous time handed out to mothers for maternity leave. A woman gets 480 days off of work with 360 of them paid at 80% of her normal salary, every time she has a baby. But it's not only the mothers that get 480 days leave from work. The father does too. While very few men actually use all of the days and  only 12% of them use half of the days, Sweden has made it so that the dad must spend 60 days with the baby and his wife or else the 60 are lost from the 480 days of leave given to them. Some Swedish fathers were interviewed about the numerous days of leave they receive to take care of their children, and most of them agreed that they felt that it was good for the Dad to be involved in the full time job of caring for children. They also felt that it is good for all men to sit back and think about their direction in life while taking care of children instead of quickly returning back to the hustle and bustle of work life.

A common scene in the American media is dad coming home from a long day of work and flipping on the television after mom has taken care of the kids all day and taken them to school soccer and everything in between. The father of the family is not very involved in these scenes. He might go out and play catch with the kids or mow the lawn with his son but really there isn't a lot of contact between the father and his family portrayed in our modern society. The father is very important to the family dynamic, and provides a male influence that is lacking in many young people today. But instead of being taken seriously now a days we see the goofy dad, like Phil Dunphy from Modern Family. Dads are great for their humor but they have a lot more to offer than their comical presence but they have more important duties. The first step we need to take to instilling the serious father role is creating a system that is conducive for the father to be close to his children. And one way we could do this is to give American fathers just as much maternity leave as mothers get. This way from the point of birth the dad and mom are equally viewed as caretakers of the children instead of the mom being the caretaker of the children and the dad the provider for the family. The father and child will be closer than they could have been before. A child might call for its dad as much as his mom. The dad might become more involved in what his child is involved in throughout his childhood. And hopefully the family will become closer because of the time spent together between mom, dad, and child in the infant years. It's time we take some notes from Sweden on what to do with our dads when they have newborns.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/05/living/cnnphotos-swedish-dads-parental-leave/index.html