[Parenting Article] Let's Take Paternity Leave! How to Take It and How to Actually Spend It

I am a guy who took a total of about 5 months of paternity leave last year, and I will write about paternity leave.

About the paternity leave system

Even though we call it paternity leave, there are broadly two patterns.
・Post-birth paternity leave
・Childcare leave
Let's make good use of these two.

To briefly compare the differences between the systems

There are these differences.
I think many people don't know this, but post-birth paternity leave is extremely important!

What is good about post-birth paternity leave?

The merit of post-birth paternity leave is that the leave count is separate from childcare leave is the point.
You might ask, what does that mean?
Childcare leave has a rule that you can take it up to two times before the day the child turns one year old.

On the other hand, post-birth paternity leave has a rule that you can take up to a total of 4 weeks within 8 weeks of the child's birth, and you can take it up to two times.

In other words, what this means is that you can take childcare leave divided into up to 4 times.

Depending on your job, this number of times is extremely useful!

In my case

The birth was at the end of the year, and since my busy season is from the end of the year to the end of the fiscal year, it was a schedule where it was difficult to take time off all at once.

I took it like this.
If I were to suddenly take months off from January, someone would be ruined, so I divided it up and found a line where I could balance work and family as much as possible.

Honestly, depending on the company and the surrounding environment, I think there are people who say I'm too busy to take childcare leave!.

It's not like I was able to take it because my company was free.
Since I started consulting with my boss from the stage of reporting that we were having a child, from nearly half a year in advance it is the result of consultation and adjustment.

It is very important to discuss with your spouse in advance what to do when a child is born.
I decided to push through paternity leave on my own, though haha

I took paternity leave like this.
I will write about the actual paternity leave period next.

Differences in awareness regarding paternity leave

After I declared that I was going to take paternity leave, quite a few men said to me, 'You won't have anything to do if you take that much time off, right?'

As a basic premise

Except for breastfeeding, men can do everything else!!

Paternity leave is often thought of as something for taking care of the child, but I think it is something to spend for the mother's sake.

When they are newborns, they just sleep all the time, so there isn't really that much to do for the child, haha.

Rather than saying I'm going to work hard at childcare and housework!!, I decided to take paternity leave because I wanted to have plenty of time to be with my child and family!

How to spend your time during paternity leave

Basically, I made sure we could spend time relaxing as a family. Since life becomes a cycle where you can't sleep for long periods at a time, I made sure to work hard during the day.

At night, I left the main care to my wife because I wanted the baby to go back to sleep as quickly as possible after waking up crying. Since we switched to formula completely halfway through, I was often the one jumping out of bed to go make the milk. Instead, we coordinated so she could take a nap during the day.

It depends on the person, but
not being able to get enough sleep was quite stressful for me.

Thanks to the fact that neither of us had to go to work during paternity leave, we were able to take turns resting regardless of whether it was day or night, which helped reduce that stress significantly.

There isn't really much to do, but that's okay. I think paternity leave is about everyone being together so that the family can spend time happily.

Since you have weekdays off, it was quite helpful that shopping malls and parks were relatively empty and comfortable to visit.

The latter half is just me talking about myself, but regarding taking paternity leave in the first half, I really hope you will make use of it!

It is difficult for babies, mothers, and fathers to get used to a new life.
I would be happy if more people could find a balance with their time off and increase the time they spend with their families, even if it's just a little bit!

Thank you for reading!!