We live in an era where men are called ‘New Age Dads’. They cook, clean, shop, change nappies, bottle feed….the list goes on.
Men are interested in their children, they want to be involved when their baby arrives, as they feel they have missed out on 9 months of baby baking! So why when baby arrives are so many of dads being forced to stand aside and go back to work without any leave?
What about the new mum? Becoming a new mum can be overwhleming and scary. Having a loving husband at home to take control and look after her and baby, is vitally important to entire family’s well being. Dads are an integral part of the family unit.
All too soon, dads return to work leaving mum and baby behind. Quite often, mums will tell me that they feel like single parents, as dads are forced to work long and unsocialble hours.
I feel we need to fight for a father’s right to stay home with his wife and newborn and benefit from full pay for at least 2 weeks!
It is sad to hear that 4 out of 10 fathers are not taking their entitiled paternal leave because they simply can’t afford it. In fact, there are still employers out there who simply deny fathers paternity leave at all.
Thankfully Working Families is launching a new campaign and aims to shed light on a father’s rights to paternity leave and will also look to encourage employers to ‘top up’ their employees statutory pay to full pay for the two weeks of leave.
Working Families, Dad.info and Netmums ran website surveys over the last month on this topic and discovered some concerning statistics.
You can read the full article here http://www.abeceder.co.uk/newsarticle_4905.php
Tags: family, fathers, paternity leave
I find many fathers who would love to have more time with their new baby, but working pressures do not allow it.
What I do in these circumstances, is to try and find a regular time when dad can get home and then teach him to bath his baby before bed.
This has two great achievements:-
One, dad has one to one quality time with his child and his baby gets to know that it is their special time of day, and
Two, this gives mum some time to do something else.
The fathers who do this, arrive home from work with a smile on their faces, looking forward to that special time that awaits them.