[Experience Report 3] Taking Postnatal Paternity Leave (First Split): The Joy of Watching My Child Grow Every Day Through Trial and Error

Thank you for reading! I am Yuhei Tonosho, a travel and regional information writer.

On a personal note, my long-awaited first child was born in February 2024, and I took postnatal paternity leave (childbirth-related childcare leave) in February and March.

I have been taking time off work to focus on childcare for about three weeks in February and about one week in March. Today, February 29th, is the last day of my first split leave, so I would like to look back on it briefly as a memo.

Organizing my childcare leave and parenting schedule

Regarding the childcare leave often discussed these days, there are two types for men:

Depending on the company, there may also be unique childcare leave systems, and I utilized those as well to build my schedule!

Of the above, I have now finished the Postnatal Paternity Leave (1st time) shown in bold. Personally, I think I managed to set up a very good schedule.

During postnatal paternity leave, you are treated as unpaid and receive childcare leave benefits, which are about 2/3 of your standard monthly remuneration. However, by using the split leave option and scheduling it to cover the end of the month, social insurance premiums are exempted for two months. As a result, excluding overtime pay, my take-home pay was comparable to when I was working.

Also, by taking postnatal paternity leave, there were many benefits as introduced in the following article, and by saving my company's unique leave system, I was able to prepare an environment to aim for a long-term balance between childcare and work from this spring onwards.

First, I will do my best to learn childcare

Immediately after birth, both mother and child are hospitalized, so as a father, I started childcare from the 5th day after birth. While in the hospital, I learned childcare one step at a time, guided by my wife who was being taught various things by the midwives.

Although I write it simply, each item actually involves quite a bit of work! For example, for a bath, there is taking the temperature, preparation, bathing, disinfecting the umbilical cord, applying cream, and so on.

Also, a baby's life rhythm is irregular, and there are many scenes where you have to respond immediately, such as when they start crying or spit up. By taking childcare leave, I was able to spend time prioritizing childcare without thinking about work, and as a result, I was able to learn childcare to the point where my wife and I could rely on each other.

If I were doing this on the side of work, it would have been difficult to become this capable at childcare in such a short period, and above all, I was able to spend happy days taking care of my child as a father.

Deciding and getting used to the life rhythm

A newborn's waking and sleeping times are irregular. Milk or breast milk needs to be given every 3 hours, and diapers are changed more than 15 times a day.

For the first three days or so, both my wife and I stayed awake, roughly deciding, “Let’s make sure that if one of us falls asleep, the other can handle things!” But that approach ended up cutting into both of our sleep. And when we reached our limit, there were times when we both fell asleep at the same time, so we realized it was counterproductive.

So...

We decided to arrange it like this.

However, since it was difficult to switch exactly at 2 AM or the baby would sometimes be fussy, to ensure my wife got enough sleep, I would often just go ahead and handle the 9 AM milk feeding the next morning as well.

By organizing our childcare and sleep times this way, my daytime sleepiness was dramatically reduced! Since my wife was more of a night owl and I was more of a morning person, we were able to divide the roles smoothly.

Balancing Work and Utilizing Spare Time

A personal theme I had was working during paternity leave. The word 'work' might be misleading. To receive childcare leave benefits, you cannot perform work for salary (your main job), but there are no such restrictions that conflict with personal income. Of course, this is on the premise that you have submitted an application to your company and received approval.

This article is easy to understand, so I would like to post it here.

Of course, it is a prerequisite that you finish as much future work as possible before starting postnatal paternity leave. Using only the spare time from childcare, I was able to practice “How efficiently can I work?” as a theme to balance childcare and work.

Combined with the accumulation of efforts to be able to work from anywhere through things like workations, I think I was able to maintain a pretty good balance.

After returning from the second postnatal paternity leave, a hectic schedule balancing family, my main job, and a side job awaits. I want to take on the challenge of building a new lifestyle while having fun, making sure not to break my body.

Becoming able to handle childcare smoothly

About two weeks into my first postnatal paternity leave, I stopped overthinking and became able to smoothly handle what needed to be done. For example, here is one instance!

That's how it goes. Of course, if both my wife and I are awake, we watch what the other is doing and change who does what next. When you can proceed with childcare smoothly, there is no sense of confinement in the repetitive days of childcare, and it feels like the day passes rhythmically, which is fun!

The joy of seeing my child grow every single day

Finally, what I felt while spending quality time with my child by taking paternity leave at birth wasthe happiness of being able to witness my child's growth without missing a single day.

The amount of milk a newborn drinks, changes in weight, the variety of sounds and expressions they make, the umbilical cord falling off, their eyelashes becoming beautiful, and their little habits starting to emerge. The time spent facing the baby is full of countless cheerful discoveries.

They say the newborn period passes in an instant, and I feel that being able to spend that time together as a couple, without missing a single day, has become a treasure that will remain in my heart for a lifetime. There is still a second period of paternity leave to take, and parenting will continue, but I want to cherish every single moment.