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Happy Father's Day to all our readers who are celebrating the holiday today in the U.S. Being a responsible and responsive father and parent is many things, but at least in the U.S., one thing it typically isn't is easy. Most highly remunerated careers in the U.S. aren't very parent or family-friendly, with employees expected to be available by email and phone virtually any time, including weekends, holidays, and vacations. The pandemic's work from home time has thankfully introduced a more human, family element to Zoom calls, with workers' partners, families, and pets occasionally seen or heard in the background, but the U.S. still isn't the country many fathers with a choice would want to parent in, with no mandated paid parental leave (and forget paternity leave), extraordinarily high healthcare costs and health insurance tied to one's employer, and four years of college tuition, fees, room and board now over $340,000 at some private universities.
We can't help but compare this to Denmark, which we recently revisited:
- 2 weeks of paid paternity leave within the first fourteen weeks after the child's birth
- During the 32 subsequent weeks, the parents can freely share paid parental leave
- Nursery school/kindergarten for children <3 is just $540 per month, and just $297 per month for kids 3 and older, with subsidies for low-income parents
- University is free of charge for Danish students and students from EU/EEA countries
- 37 hour work week: most employees work from 8am-4pm Mondays-Thursdays and from 8am-3:30pm on Fridays, making it easier for parents to pick up children from daycare or school and have dinner as a family
- 5 weeks of paid vacation time per year, which most Danes take
One of our favorite things to do while traveling is to people watch, and we certainly observed many fathers out and about with kids (including very young babies), whether pushing them in a stroller (or double stroller–there seems to be a baby boom going on in Copenhagen) or more likely in a child seat on a bicycle, given that bikes are the main form of transportation for many Danes.
We also noticed that virtually everyone was calm and unstressed. On the few occasions when we were walking and saw people with anxious expressions and drew close enough to hear their conversations, they weren't conversing in Danish.
Of course, there are problems and tragedies in Denmark as there are everywhere, it's not perfect. But we do wish more fathers were afforded the societal support to be able to have more quality time with their children, with fewer worries about healthcare, childcare, and higher education costs, as is the case in Denmark.
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