What's Parental Leave's Biggest Benefit? Building Confident Fathers

The state of parental leave in the U.S. is dismal. This, we know. And, often, that conversation can become a bit of a downer. If you’d prefer to talk about paternity leave from an empirical perspective, rather than an abstractly depressing one, then you will relish the work of Brad Harrington , director of Boston College’s Center for Work and Family. Harrington has spent the better part of the last decade authoring a number of illuminating studies that have quantified just how bad of a job our society is doing in helping new dads connect with their babies. His work is useful and important, serving to illuminate the desire many fathers have to be a part of their family, why they feel forced into certain roles, and that, while the legislative hurdles we must leap over, while high, lead to a better place . Here are some of Harrington’s largest points. READ MORE: The Fatherly Guide to Parental and Paternity Leave Dads Want to Be More Involved Than Society Allows In one of their studies, Harrington and his team asked about 1,000 dads how they viewed their role at home, on a continuum from breadwinner to caregiver. “You heard from fathers that they wanted to be more engaged than their own fathers were,” he said. Nearly three-quarters said they saw themselves as equal parts both. “That was a more balanced view than we expected. We thought fathers would have a bias toward breadwinning,” he says. But their actual role at home doesn’t quite fit that ideal: Even though two-thirds of guy…