Shared Parental Leave: what do you think?

Shared Parental Leave: what do you think?

“Parents are now able to apply for Shared Parental Leave after new regulations came into force on Monday 1 December.” Great news! I think that it’s wonderful that mums and dads can share the parental leave. In my home country Sweden, this has been the case for a very long time and most parents that I know there, share the leave quite equally. You even get a bonus if you do it that way to encourage gender equality. In Sweden you get more time off though, about 18 months, and you can choose to use it all right after having your baby or you can save the days/pay for when your child is older. This is great if you run your own business and need to keep working while your baby is little or if you don’t currently need the extra income but might in the future.

The new rules say that mums will still need to take at least 2 weeks of maternity leave immediately after birth, but after that working couples have the opportunity to share up to 50 weeks of leave and up to 37 weeks of pay.

In my family, my husband is the main breadwinner and I do freelance work part time and look after our daughter. For us it would not make sense to share the parental leave due to financial reasons and because I breastfed our daughter and will breastfeed all our future children, too. Since the parental leave is so short in the UK, I hadn’t even started weaning my daughter of the breast by the time my maternity leave was over. We want to move to Sweden in the future and then it will make sense to share. There, mums often take the first half so that they can recover from the birth and breastfeed their babies, then dads take over and do the second half.

Read more about the new rules on parental leave on the government’s website.

What do you think? Will you share your parental leave?