Make a baby. Get two months off—paid.
Looks like the descendants of the Vikings are showing their nurturing side. Katrin Bennhold of The New York Times writes that in Sweden, dads get two full months of paid paternity leave. As if the country’s famously beautiful women weren’t enough reason to lead the men to romance.
Swedish mothers still get about four times more time off than their husbands, but the country seems to be ahead of the rest of the world in the paternity leave department. Both the country’s female employment and birth rates are among the world’s highest. Paid time off for dads was a feature first introduced in Sweden in 1995. For the past forty years, the Swedish government—regardless of administration—has passed laws “to give women equal rights at work and men equal rights at home.”
So how does Sweden stack up against other countries? In the U.S., paternity leave isn’t unheard of, but the general distaste for the government telling a family what to do has resulted in little legislation on the matter. In Portugal, paternity leave is required, but only a week of it. In Iceland, they divide it this way: three months for mom, three months for dad, and another three months shared.
The story says that parental leave is a perk invoked by about 85 percent of Swedish fathers. Their families get concerned if they don’t. Hell, can you imagine? Son, why aren’t you taking a few months to stay home with your baby?
The mothers like it, too. From the article:
Sofia Karlsson, a police officer and the wife of Mikael Karlsson, said she found her husband most attractive “when he is in the forest with his rifle over his shoulder and the baby on his back.”
Sounds pretty good to us.
—Seth Putnam
Just to clarify. Swedish parents get 390 days paid leave. They get to decide by themselves how to split it. It’s the best Swedish invention since IKEA. Swedish women tend to take more leave than their men, but it is their choice to do it that way. It doesn’t come for free though, we pay a lot more taxes than most countries.
Matti