I do not believe that at any point paternity leave will work for men. I do understand push and how it’s beneficial to woman and to children, but in my opinion

I do not believe that at any point paternity leave will work for men. I do understand push and how it’s beneficial to woman and to children, but in my opinion the whole idea ignores men, how they feel about it and how men function in society in general. On paper everything looks great: Mother gets an opportunity to get back to her career, children gets some bonding time with father that might benefit for years to come and father gets insight in the life of the child and caring for his family. Reality, however, for many men is different. Often men's only friends are at work. Taking paternity leave not only detaches father from his friends but also creates a gap in father's group. If they have problem to whom they will come? Absent-at-work father will slowly get pushed out of the social group only because groups naturally seek opportunity to fill the void. Men aren't good at expressing emotions and everyone agrees that on paper paternity leave looks good. So what happens is that "oh yeah, relationship naturally deteriorated, and Tom really helped us with this project" but in reality it didn't and Tom hadn't. It's social dynamic that changed. Father knows what's up, his workgroup know what's up and yet no one will say "You know what, we missed you, you didn't even call us, so we were angry and decided Tom is our new friend and screw you". Yet while men don't really talk about emotions they can feel social dynamics and so it takes usually 1 or 2 fathers in workgroup and observation how social dynamics change around them after they come back. It's not ostracism, it's just when you're leaving your group for couple of months you cannot expect that they'll welcome you back even if you decided to leave them for a very sound reason. Second thing is that men aren't really wired to take for the child. They don't get the same hormones woman and because of that experience of caring for the child is by default vastly different[*]. Men's bodies don't help them preserve the specie by releasing a number of happiness hormones as mothers body do. For men it's quite often the chore without positive feedback. And of course no one will ever complain about it as strong men are responsible and caring so it's not right thing to do, but I have yet to hear a man in my circle who will describe it as magical experience [1]. We live in an age where some fathers already took paternity leave and their children are teenagers and not adults and even those parents don't speak out outside of the "parenting improvement circles". There are of course, many other factors, like the concept of breadwinner, strength of the partner relation etc., etc., but all of that combined makes me not believing it will ever take off on the big scale. Anecdotal note: I spent 18 months taking care of my child during day while their mother worked and then for 1 year I was working in the evenings. [1]: As with social dynamics there are always some outliers, response spectrums, variables and knobs so if that's you (and I do believe that HN hosts quite a lot of outliers on various topics) please take that into consideration :-)