Dads need more than four days to bond

THE EDITOR: Four days. That's how much time the public sector gives to new fathers to bond with their children, compared with at least 49 days for new mothers to do the same. Compare this to, respectively, the following countries' approximate safety ranking and paid paternity leave:

Japan (16, 12 months), Sweden (12, 480 days), Canada (6, at least five weeks); Norway (4, 49 weeks), Iceland (3, six months), Finland (2, 164 days). TT is more easily rated among the most dangerous countries in the world.

Space limitations don't allow me to fully elaborate on the importance of paternity leave to the entire family, but I'd at least like to highlight one psychosocial aspect.

Boys are generally raised to believe that "a real man" is capable of providing for his family. This is one reason why boys exit the formal education system early to pursue jobs, especially the ones that promise a high payout in quick time – legally or otherwise.

And why not? Many of them are the products of single-parent households and the proverbial "man of the house" and see it as their responsibility to take care of their families. Well, plenty of money with flaring hormones but no sense easily lead to a baby.

One problem is that, unlike women, there is no known hormonal or other impetus to cause a man to become attached to a child – it's supposedly purely instinctual. This is very important as a woman is at her weakest during and the few years (at least seven) after pregnancy, when the child is totally dependent on its parents for its survival.

A man's paternal instinct needs to kick in to encourage him to remain monogamous and tend to his progeny. Four days is an absurdly short period of time for that non-biological bond to form, especially if the father and mother don't live together.

The result? Some fathers eventually abandon the mother and child while he explores greener pastures. (And what's the worst society can do to him? Send him to court for child maintenance? That doesn't fill the missing father role at all). Many other households have a father that relegates most non-financial responsibilities to the mother (an almost purely matriarchal home).

Both instances result in little to no bonding between father and child, some really bad advice about men's roles in society being passed on from mothers (a woman can't teach a boy how to be a man; she can only teach him how to treat a woman), and boys looking for father-figure roles in all the wrong places, eventually taking up the role of father figure for themselves.

And that repeats the cycle of boys dropping out of school early, turning to crime from a young age, causing unplanned pregnancies, abandoning their families, and filling our prison cells or mortuaries. Needless to say, all of this has a knockoff effect on women's and children's mental health, the education sector, gender inequality in and outside of the workplace, and on the economy.

Yes, if I had the space I'd easily support every single one of those topics in detail, so well-researched are all of them.

If we're really serious about improving mental health and decreasing crime, what's the harm in encouraging fathers to, you know, be fathers? But with zero days in law and four days from the government, we're just mocking men's importance and input in the family and society. It's the Birkenhead drill in permanent repeat.

Guess I should brush up on my Japanese...
arigato (thank you).

SHABBA DE LEON

Arima