> It's a privilege not available to single people at all. And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents.

> It's a privilege not available to single people at all. And getting more than 3 hours of sleep a lot is a privilege that's not available to recent parents. I don't know the exact details of what policies are correct for paid time off, but the fact is still true that we have a strong societal incentive to handle situations like this in a way that's beneficial both to the parents and (especially) beneficial to kids -- at least if we believe that parental presence helps early development, which seems reasonably well supported. I say this as a single person with no plans to ever marry or have children, but the reality is that being single or having kids each carries its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and I'm not sure that fairness between parents and childless individuals is necessarily the best lens to look at policy through. There's a lot of middle ground here between status quo and what GP describes, but even in that case raising a child is still an 18+ year commitment; I don't think that a single family vacation significantly changes that.