How I Navigated Parental Leave

Maybe it’s more about how you spend the time, not just how much

This is Dad//Citizen, a space where parenting and civicness come together. Where we try to make our communities a little bit better, every day.

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Before the boys were born, my wife and I had this quiet, recurring conversation at our kitchen table or on the couch or in therapy sessions.

What would those first months look like as new parents? Who would go back to work first? How would we manage the exhaustion, the feedings, the learning curve?

We kept coming back to the same conviction: we wanted to experience the early months together. My wife had 6 months of paid leave, so that became our goal: 6 months together. Over and over, we talked about keeping the promise to each other that we would fiercely protect this time, with our boys, as a family. Not in shifts or in relay form. And most importantly, not with one of us rushing back to a laptop while the other held down the fort alone with two almost certain to be crying, young children. We wanted to care for our boys side by side, to share the weight and the excitement equally.

What I never planned for was walking into that leave without a job to return to on the other side.

Last year was one of professional ups and downs. There were meaningful projects and promising opportunities, but also uncertainty and employment hardship, the kind that lingered in my late-night thoughts and caused me to lose some sleep. By the time our boys arrived, I was completely done with a paid consulting role and had fully paused my search. As fate would have it, though, just a few weeks after they were born, another paid consulting opportunity came my way. On paper, it made sense. It would have been a steady income and been in my field. It would have reestablished momentum.

But I said no.

Because we had made a decision, well before we knew what the professional landscape would look like, that these months were sacred. The early days of our sons’ lives were not something to multitask. And we knew financially we could figure it out for long enough that we didn’t need to make a decision that upended our plans, a huge blessing.

Declining that consulting job wasn’t heroic. It felt complicated. It meant sitting with uncertainty for months longer, lengthening that feeling of uncertainty. It meant trusting that work would come again. And it ultimately meant choosing presence over productivity.

What those first few months gave us was irreplaceable.

We learned how to soothe each boy in our own way. We split the night feeds when we didn’t have a night nurse (the blizzards made that harder than expected). We walked dozens of laps around the neighborhood and the park nearby. We figured out how to be parents together, not as a primary and a backup, but as real partners.

Four months in, that calculus shifted. We started to see an increasingly challenging job market, mixed with our growing financial demands, with two babies. And this time, a job opportunity came my way that we felt was something worth pursuing. As we talked before my interviews, I knew I was comfortable walking away from it if it didn’t feel right, and realistically, becoming the primary caregiver for our boys. Dad//Citizen, the nanny, haha. We talked it through the same way we had talked through everything else: at the kitchen table, on the couch, on our walks, honestly, openly, multiple times, and always together. What we found was that it wasn’t just a good opportunity. It was the right one. The kind that made sense for where we were as a family, and opened up new possibilities we hadn’t had before. Was it perfect? No, but it certainly had benefits that no other position has provided us to date.

So I took it and started working with them last week!

Taking that job also meant something we struggled with initially: my wife would now be alone with the boys most of the time. Because we initially budgeted for my search to last a little longer, finding a job more quickly had a new benefit: my wife could stay home with the boys longer, something she was desperately hoping to do. Had I not found something that felt right, I would have been the one staying. In hindsight, it seems like we were choosing which one of us could hold that presence a little longer, and making sure someone did.

It was still bittersweet. Six months became just over four. And I felt that. But it was our decision. Not something I was forced into, but one that ultimately expanded new opportunities for our family, even if now I’m spending less time each day with the boys than before. That distinction matters to me.

The more I settled into those early days, the more I realized how rare it is that families even get to have that conversation.

Research consistently shows that most fathers want to take more time off when a child is born. In the United States, more than 70 percent of American fathers return to work full-time within two weeks of the birth of their child. The primary reason? They can’t afford not to work, or they fear career repercussions.

That feels to me like dads are in a catch-22: you want to stay with your new family, but you face the necessity of returning to work because your family is more stable financially if you do so. But you are less present as a parent than you would like. Society, though, has almost completely normalized that phenomenon. Moms often face a similar bind, but essentially in the reverse: if you go back to work, your family becomes more unstable, the family’s financial picture doesn’t improve as much, and your personal wellbeing is thrown into upheaval because you’re still recovering from the effects of the pregnancy and delivery.

The U.S. remains the only rich country in the world without a national paid leave program for new parents. Seriously, what are we doing? Access depends largely on employers or a patchwork of state programs. Only 32% of U.S. companies offer paid paternity leave. Even when leave is technically available, it is often unpaid, making it a fantasy for many families.

That gap matters for families across the country because when dads are present early on, families change for the better. I’ve already seen it happen in my own and amongst friends.

Many families cannot even consider the choices we made, and the reason becomes concrete fast.

When we started looking for childcare in Brooklyn, the financial reality came into sharp focus. Center-based care for one infant in our neighborhood runs close to $3,500 a month. We have twins. Do that math. We quickly understood that sustaining our family would require two full incomes, and not modest ones. Thankfully, my wife is a higher earner than me right now, but childcare alone could consume what many families earn in total. That realization reframed everything. Paid parental leave, as essential as it is, is only part of the equation. Without affordable childcare on the other side of that leave, families are not choosing between work and presence. They are choosing between rent and rent.

This is the double bind: take meaningful leave, then return to a childcare bill that makes the math nearly impossible. For many families, the financial pressure begins way before the baby is even born.

Some countries have made intentional investments in both leave and care. Sweden offers parents 480 days of parental leave per child, with 90 days explicitly reserved for each parent, and when leave is use-it-or-lose-it, participation rates are high. Norway provides fathers either 15 weeks at full pay or 19 weeks at 80% pay, with the shared pool bringing total family leave to nearly a year. Spain offers 16 weeks of paid paternity leave, matching maternity leave in length and signaling genuine cultural parity.

The evidence from these countries is clear: when leave is paid adequately and protected culturally, men take it. And when men take it, caregiving patterns become more equal in the long term, and for each month a father takes leave, research shows a mother’s earnings increase meaningfully, too.

For me, shared parental leave was not about stepping away from ambition. It was about redefining it.

It was about believing that success includes being there for the first smile, the first time both boys fell asleep on my chest at once, the long afternoons when nothing “productive” happened, except bonding and cooing with one another.

We talk often about maternal recovery and maternal bonding, rightly so. But paternal bonding should not automatically be a secondary consideration. Dads’ brains change with caregiving too. Presence reshapes us. It deepens empathy. It rewires priorities.

And yet too many fathers are structurally prevented from having that experience.

Going into leave without a job to return to was not part of the plan. It forced me to confront questions about identity, about who I am if I’m not producing, earning, advancing.

What I discovered is that those four months were not a pause in my life. They felt more like a foundation.

They strengthened our marriage. They grounded me as a dad. They showed our boys, from day one, that caregiving belongs to both parents.

My hope is that one day, what felt like a normal and equitable conversation for us becomes standard. That dads don’t have to choose between financial security and presence. And that affordable childcare exists on the other side of parental leave, so that the choice to be there is actually a choice.

Because the early months are not just about surviving infancy. They are about setting a foundation for partnership, equality, and love.

That foundation is stronger when we build it together.

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