When our first daughter was born, in the autumn of 2021, she couldn’t nurse properly. For my wife, feeding her was an every-few-hours exercise in pure pain. Lactation consultants were consulted, to little avail; a minor tongue-tie operation, newly trendy in such cases, didn’t help either. We thought of switching to formula, but my wife was dead set on seeing nursing through.
So we triple-fed: She would nurse the infant through gritted teeth for so long as she could stand it, while I attempted my best to distract her—singing songs, reading, putting something on the TV. Then I’d take the child and finish the feeding by bottle while my wife pumped. As it turned out, the infant just needed to get slightly larger. By eight weeks, my wife’s pain was gone.
When our second daughter was born last yr, the method looked as if it would restart—then unexpectedly cleared up in week two. The larger challenge, it turned out, was managing the emotions of the now-toddler, who found herself, unexpectedly, not the middle of the known universe.
After a period of protest, she settled right into a recent equilibrium. Yes, mom had a recent baby, but she still had dad. For those first few weeks, the toddler and I were inseparable. (I made time for mom and baby too!) Soon, she had grown to love her little sister enough for us all to reintegrate as one pleased family.
Both these stories have a key subtext: I used to be on paternity leave. Under my then-employer’s heroically generous, deliberately pro-family policy, I used to be free to take as much as 12 weeks off per child to assist my wife get better from childbirth and to bond with our recent arrival.
I used to be lucky; that arrangement is rare. Most American fathers take only a brief stint of paternity leave when their children are born, if any. Despite a growing variety of corporations and states offering some type of time without work for dads—Washington implemented a 12-week standard for all federal employees back in 2022—and surveys finding that a majority of Americans support the practice, the median US father still takes only a single week of leave. Seven in ten take two weeks or less.
Some of this is straightforward corporate policy; many fathers would take more leave if their place of job accommodated it. But there’s also a reason so many corporations get away without offering much: There’s still an excellent deal of complicated cultural resistance to recent dads taking time without work too, with masculine anxieties about being seen as insufficiently driven at work coming into play. Even in countries with generous government-funded paternity leave—South Korea and Japan, for example—many fathers don’t take time without work.
For conservative US Christians particularly, the concept of paternity leave can appear to cut against a lot of our own political and cultural instincts. Some might roll their eyes at employers—to say nothing of taxpayers—being asked to foot the bill for a dad’s stay at home with a newborn. He’s not the one recovering from childbirth, in spite of everything, a crucial and essential biological distinction.
Others might see in a society that prioritizes maternity leave particularly a healthy assertion of traditional gender roles. That holds true whether a toddler is biological or adopted. Moms stay home with their kids—playing and nurturing, washing and feeding. Dads get back on the market and work.
But the largest driver of many Christians’ skepticism of paternity leave is similar as within the culture at large: easy inertia. People didn’t use to have the luxurious of paid paternity leave, they reason, they usually managed to make do. Having dad at house is an extravagance the infant won’t even remember.
Dads who do take leave often encounter this inclination even from well-meaning friends and acquaintances: How’s your time without work treating you? Managing to replenish the hours? Bet you’re itching to get back to it, huh?
It’s past time for Christians to revisit this attitude. We know that fatherhood is not any low calling, no secondary role. Fathers are primarily tasked not with paying for groceries and college educations—though that’s good too—but bringing up their children within the “discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4, ESV throughout). The Book of Proverbs is one long fatherly instruction in righteousness: “Hear, O sons, a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you might gain insight, for I provide you with good precepts; don’t forsake my teaching” (4:1–2).
Scripture shows us good fathers who’re immediate and intimate, sensible and compassionate—welcoming home a prodigal son with a feast (Luke 15:20–24), prepared to die in peace after seeing a beloved child’s face one last time (Gen. 46:29). Ultimately, in fact, fatherhood is an obligation modeled for us by God our father—no absent provider, but a father who warmly invites us to approach him in love.
Do fathers need paternity leave to meet this calling? Of course not. But obliging a father to rush back to work just per week or two after birth stacks the deck against that vocation in all styles of ways, even when, to start out, there’s more diaper changing than “discipline and instruction.” All without delay, a joint effort becomes a solo project on mom’s part to find, navigate, and surmount the varied challenges of early parenthood—the challenges through which one learns what it’s to be a parent.
Almost by default, dad becomes a bystander to this process. Far from providing spiritual leadership to his family, he can find himself retreating into the role of secondary parent, any person who’s pleased to depart all of the hard parts of the job to mom, the battle-tested expert who knows where the diaper rash ointment is and the way to pick up a slippery infant from a shower.
I’m sure we ultimately would’ve muddled through the small challenges I discussed above without the blessing of paternity leave. Triple-feeding our first daughter wouldn’t have been an option, so we might’ve just switched to formula. Nothing improper with formula!
Still, after giving up on breastfeeding the primary time, odds are we might have done the identical the second time around too—and after two such failures to launch, why even hassle to try again in the long run, should we be blessed with more children?
Our toddler would have found other ways to address early sisterhood, as my wife with the thousand little struggles of early motherhood.
But I’m grateful each to God and to my former employer that, in those formative first few months, my family wasn’t obliged to determine the contours of a recent life by which I used to be only an occasional presence from the jump. I’m grateful that I had the chance to pause my life as I knew it then for a couple of short weeks to accommodate our brand-new one—that as a substitute of learning the way to cram fatherhood into whatever gaps in my work, I used to be capable of take my crash course in rudimentary fatherhood, then go determine how my job was going to slot in with that.
So, corporations: Offer it! Christians: Embrace it! Dads: Take it—after which spread the word!
Andrew Egger is the White House correspondent at The Bulwark.
