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Men should take paternity leave because they should care for their children, and experience the love that grows out of caring for their children. To miss that is to parent (and live) in grayscale, not color.

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I've seen a lot of older men who have no idea how to care for babies. They can't change a diaper, they don't know how to quiet a tantrum. They hold the baby for a minute and pass them back. They want to connect and build a relationship, but they can't. It's a lifelong loss.

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Alison Gopnik changed how I think about love

This is something

@AlisonGopnik

says, and it's among the most important lines I've ever heard: We don't just care for others because we love them. We love them because we perform acts of care for them.

vox.com

The professor came on The Ezra Klein Show to talk about parenting, friendships, marriage, and schooling.

6:04 PM · Nov 8, 2021

Replying to

This is a way that shitty ideas about masculinity really hurt men too. We tell men that missing out on infant parenting is escaping gross work. We don't tell them what they're missing.

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Tucker Carlson mocks Pete Buttigieg's paternity leave as 'learning how to breastfeed'

That's what was so telling and sad about Tucker Carlson's comment, among others: To think all a parent does for a baby is breastfeed is to reveal pretty clearly you've been on the outside of the experience, looking in through a foggy window.

businessinsider.com

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, adopted baby twins before he recently returned from paternity leave.

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But a lot of fathers (and mothers!) never had a choice. They weren't given the time to care for their infant children. They weren't given the cultural permission to do it. They still aren't.

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Parents have done remarkable, heroic work under these circumstances. I'm not saying, in any way, that you can't be a great parent if you didn't get or take leave. It's the acts of care that build love. But we shouldn't have made it so hard for you.

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That's a policy choice that we are closer to fixing. Many states, like California, have fixed it. We should fix it nationally, too. That there's no chance of Congress passing a strong, well-designed parental leave program this session is heartbreaking.

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What you see in all this, though, is bad policy is supported by bad culture. Watching adult men with children struggle to imagine what a man might do with parental leave, or what parental leave might do for them, is a brutal commentary on fatherhood in America.

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