There is nothing wrong with parental leave, but I don't see a compelling reason to have it be mandated by law. If company wants to offer it, good for them. It m

There is nothing wrong with parental leave, but I don't see a compelling reason to have it be mandated by law. If company wants to offer it, good for them. It may help retaining senior employees who reached the phase in their life when they want to have children. I don't think we should incentivise families with two working parents and young kids. It increases the pool of workers keeping wages down, benefiting employers, and increases stress in the family, likely contributing to the epidemic of broken families we're looking at - which have negative effects on these generations' mental health and crime history. If you're middle class and you manage well your spending and are willing to relocate / look into alternative career paths, it's possible to maintain a family on one career and I firmly believe it's better for the children. If you're having kids you can either outsource your kids early years education to the government or do it yourself. There are some studies (albeit I find social studies to be murky and hard to rely on) finding correlations between UK government programs paying for nurseries and increase in teenage crime roughly 15 years later. Study or not, I think that kids before 2/3 should not go to nursery, the social trauma of being unattended with other bigger kids needs to wait a bit longer, once they're ready. In our family, we didn't send the kids to nursery before 2.5/3 years and my partner didn't work (for an employer, she kept working on her own personal projects, for "entertainment"). They integrated in nursery very well, we never had detachment problems and they're fairly well behaved. We're both developers, so maintaining the family on one salary is trivial, but I've met people from all walks of life who managed to do it. Sure, some people are simply not creating enough value for society to break even on one salary and that's suboptimal. I'd advise to sort their life out to earn enough to support a new family, before making babies. There are plenty of studies that link stable family structures to success and unstable family structures to crime and mental health issues. The last time the government meddled with families, it didn't end up well for the black community: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/the_decline_of_the_africanamerican_family.html https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/the_decline... And nowadays the stats for broken families, across all ethnicities, is higher than ever.