Paternity leave: a Holiday..

..was described as such by a prominent Indian politician recently. 

Given our work over the last 2 years building out BabyChakra; supporting millions of Indian families with the tough work of caring correctly for mothers and children, we respectfully & strongly disagree. 

The India we live in today is an India policy makers, the govt., employers and other institutions are only now grasping a sense of. India today is a land of nuclear families. As per the NFHS, as much as 70% of India lives in this structure. The shift has manifested itself not only in numbers, also in attitudes. 

We learnt this first hand while building BabyChakra. While we built BabyChakra keeping mothers in mind (mainly due to the passion of us founders to leverage tech. for women), we realised  25% of our user base came organically from fathers. These fathers were using us with a deep hunger and a level of unprecedented engagement to make better choices for their families. 

Unlike other platforms, we welcomed this development. We understood 3 things:

1. At a service level, we were democratizing information around parenting and parenting services that fathers did not have natural access to. Father are not part of online-offline mom groups or playschool whatsapp networks or neighbourhood / office convenings.

We are the only platform of our type reducing informational asymmetry around parenting services and knowledge using technology & fathers welcomed and swarmed to us for this reason. Today, we realise that we are equalizing the playing field for fathers to participate in care-giving and choices around childcare and this makes us more determined to support them on BabyChakra. 

2. At a family structure/dynamics level, for too long, the onus of care-giving has been exclusively on the woman. Today's father actually wants to be an equal care-giver. In fact, supporting a father in caring for his family is as critical a need as supporting a mother in caring for hers. In not supporting fathers who want to play their role in caring for their families, we would be crushing the intrinsic need for a man to be a father, to be a parent and a good husband. 

3. At a more tactical level, ensuring men care equally is quite simply,  the best strategy to care for our mothers. Its just common sensical that for all our  women-support policies to work : be it to integrate women back in the workforce successfully, or for a woman to re-claim her individual sense of identity, she desperately needs her husband to play an equal role in bringing up their child.

In not allowing or supporting men to play the role of care-giver in a family, we remove support for her at the most-basic unit of intervention for our women: the unit of her family. 

Paternity leave, or in general, care-giver leave for fathers, helps in 2 important ways:

1. In a nuclear family setting, this leave allows a woman's body to physically recover post childbirth by ensuring the responsibility for childcare is shared. Paternity leave, if handled correctly, can actually set the tone for the entire care-giving journey of the parents with their child.  This is an incredible opportunity to create and cultivate care-giving behaviours in both parents. 

2. Care-giving leave for fathers,  places men and women on an equal field re the workforce, insofar as childcare is concerned. If a child is unwell, a father should have the right to take time off and his decision should be respected and accepted as the norm vs. a woman bearing the responsibility and the financial repercussions of child-care. In hiring decisions as well, any biases towards a potential woman hire by an employer could reduce drastically. A man would undergo the same (albeit illegal or unconscious) scrutiny on whether he plans a family or not and hence may be taking time off for the same.

At an individual level, of course, both paternity & maternity leave may be utilized differently from the spirit in which they were intended. The debate for me rests where if we restrict the right and a major opportunity for our men to play an equal role in care-giving, we limit them, we limit our women and we limit ourselves as a nation. 

That is a mistake we simply cannot afford.