How Taking Paternity Leave Can Strengthen Your Marriage

Article here. Excerpt:

'Just over two weeks ago, a law went into effect in Massachusetts that got little national press but will have potentially significant consequences for families: Businesses must now extend fathers eight weeks of unpaid paternity leave. Yes, the Family Medical Leave Act already does as much (it allows up to 12, in fact), but only if the father’s organization has 50 employees or more; with this new law, Massachusetts dads who work for companies with as few as six employees will be guaranteed eight weeks at home with their newborns.

Whenever this species of legislation is proposed at a national level, conservatives line up to oppose it, insisting it would penalize small businesses. There is, however, a conservative case to be made in favor of generous paternity-leave policies, and I’d like to make it now: They strengthen marriages.
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Yet today in the United States, men take precious little paternity leave. According tothe Department of Labor, 70 percent of the new fathers who make use of the Family Medical Leave take just ten days or less. (Meaning that if dad takes his leave on the day his baby is born, odds are he’ll be returning to work before his child can smile, coo, or tilt his or her head).

Ten days clearly isn’t a lot of time. But one senses that fathers pine for more of it. Indeed, most studies suggest that fathers experience as much work-life conflict as mothers, if not more. One of the reasons, I suspect, is that they feel reluctant to ask for time away from the office — whether it’s to spend time with a newborn or to duck out for a ballet recital — because it simply isn’t custom.'

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Also see: The valuable work benefit dads are missing out on