Pam asked in a recent thread if people in countries outside the United States are patriotic. In Sweden where I live, it's not very "nice" to flaunt your patriotism, and it is frankly considered a bit ridiculous too. We don't wave our Swedish flag very much, except at high school graduations, when the flag suddenly becomes very popular. Our Fourth of July is the Sixth of June, except that nobody cares about the Sixth of June that much. Just the other day somebody wrote a column in one of Sweden's biggest newspapers about how ridiculous the Sixth of June celebrations are, since nobody is interested in them anyway. Sweden's true National Holiday, the columnist wrote, is Midsummer Eve, and then we celebrate our summer and our nature and our traditional festivites rather than our country.
Anyway, there was a nice article in the New York Times just the other day about parental leave for daddy's in Sweden. 85% of dads in Sweden take parental leave. Mothers and fathers who take parental leave actually get paid to do so - they are kind of "hired" by the government to be parents to their kids, you could say - and indeed the pay they get is, if I remember correctly, 80-90% of the pay they receive at their ordinary jobs. But unemployed parents get paid to stay at home with their kids, too. After their parental leave ends, those parents who had jobs before they left it to concentrate on parenting are guaranteed the right to return to their jobs.
Obviously we pay high taxes to finance all this parental leave. But, as the NYT points out, our national finances are in better shape than those of most other Western countries.
"Daddy leave" in Sweden Ann
