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 12-week 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.
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 six-month-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.
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 three-month 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 child-rearing around the demands of work. “Dads always think their jobs are the most important and the company can never run without them,” she says.
For those who take leave together, the discrepancies can be glaring, says Instagram parenting influencer Zach Watson, 33, who took parental leave for four months alongside his wife. Witnessing his wife’s breastfeeding challenges meant that he would sometimes sleep on the carpet in front of the rocking chair when she was feeding their daughter to keep her company. Other times he just doomscrolled his phone because there was not much he could do while rocking the baby. “I was more leaned in and hyperaware of how much I was screwing up,” says Watson, a former teacher who lives in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Julian Watkins, an attorney in Cairo, Illinois, says the two weeks of paternity leave he took after his wife made the different experiences more evident. (He also took another two weeks alongside his wife.) During his solo leave, Watkins was able to get his mom to visit and take on babysitting responsibilities, allowing him to catch up on work. On the other hand, his wife spent most of the first eight weeks dealing with their newborn on her own. “I felt bad complaining about how hard it was,” he says.
Since paternity leave in the US has yet to feel like the default, mothers – myself included – are hesitant to express anything but appreciation. Of course, I was thrilled that my husband had pieced together two months of paternity leave when our oldest was born. But when I watched him build empires while playing hours of Civilization on his work-issued laptop, the thankfulness had disappeared.
As my daughter slept near our dining table, he reminded me that babies slept an average of 18 hours per day (it’s roughly between 14 and 17 hours) and he had time for it all. I hardly noticed the cooking or the other caretaking responsibilities he slipped into. And I felt that surely there was more that he could do, like wipe down the kitchen counters or check her diaper an extra time. After all, he wasn’t struggling like me to figure out what to do with a postpartum body, unstable hormones and the challenges of breastfeeding.
In retrospect, I wished my own maternity leave could have afforded me an opportunity to wade into the role of mom. It would mean more walks exploring the city or figuring out how to distract her during tummy time.
But even if it seems more carefree, fathers deserve to have this time which leads to more engaged parents in the long run. The better route may be to acknowledge the differences and bridge the gap between a stressful hectic early maternity leave and what, in comparison, can seem like a less stressful paternity leave, says Petts, the professor.
“This idea that leave is vacation time or leave is leisure time is a myth – most fathers don’t see it that way,” he says.
Looking back, the two months off my husband took allowed him to start his role as our in-home chef (he’s now plucking our veggies from our hydroponic garden). It also impelled him to leave the consulting job that required him to be away from our child each week. Those two months cemented a bond that’s enduring and is reflected in our shared responsibilities at home.
I’ve also realized that in the decade since, there were few times when playing video games was possible. I’m glad he recognized it and seized the moment. I wish I would have done the same.
