First published: 02/08/2024
By Jillian Whitlow
It's been nearly 7 months since I had a baby.
And we still need to talk about parental leave.
After much hmm-ing and haw-ing over the smartest route for us to take, my husband returned to work less than a week after our daughter was born, and I was devastated.
Yes, I’m a strong, empowered mama who can do anything, but a short seven days after giving birth, I was also delicate, vulnerable and frankly, a bit pissed off.
"Yes, I’m a strong, empowered mama who can do anything, but a short seven days after giving birth, I was also delicate, vulnerable and frankly, a bit pissed off."
My husband works as a machinist for a large corporation. They’d led him to believe he’d have six-weeks paid paternity leave, which we were thrilled about. He’d have the chance to navigate the newborn phase with us, bond with his daughter, assist with our toddler boy and be there for mama as I put myself back together following the miracle (and major medical event) that is childbirth.
Unfortunately, it turns out that because he hadn’t quite been in his position for a year, he was completely ineligible to take parental leave by his company’s standards - a little detail the new HR generalist had overlooked. Not only did he not have a single hour of paid time related to the birth of one of his children, but he would soon become penalised for taking time away from work.
As the policy stands, he must take all of his “vacation” time (a total of 80 hours for the entire year) before even becoming eligible to take any unpaid time. Smartly, with two under two, my husband wanted to reserve some of that vacation time not for family fun in the sun this summer, but in the event that our adorable little petri dishes get us sick, and he needs to miss time.
You may be thinking “could they not afford for her husband to take a few days unpaid?” We can. That’s not the issue. Days taken outside of “vacation” are penalised as attendance violations as part of a rigid policy that leads to termination following the accumulation of three attendance points.
So, we were stuck. It was the middle of January. My husband had used 50/80 vacation hours for the entire calendar year and he went back to work, exhausted and torn about leaving me to care for a newborn on my own.
I had a best-case scenario birth and recovered quickly, but consider the position we would have been in if I’d needed a C-section, was experiencing PPD, was struggling to breastfeed, had concerns with our newborn’s health, etc.
We shouldn’t be put in the position as men or women to make counterintuitive choices for the sake of keeping our jobs.
"We shouldn’t be put in the position as men or women to make counterintuitive choices for the sake of keeping our jobs."
You may say we need to do better as a nation, and that’s true, but in the meantime, folks at the organisational level need to step up and make human decisions to care for the people who make their businesses run.
That's why I'm excited to stand behind pumpspotting's partnership with Parento in promoting their #BreastsNeedRest campaign. We are proudly working together to advocate for parents demanding Paid Parental Leave.
Jillian Whitlow is the head of customer success at pumpspotting, an early-stage, VC-backed B2B SaaS startup providing maternal health solutions to employers, higher education institutions, hospital systems, and communities.
Comments