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Germany

Germany Measures Benefits Of Parental Leave For Fathers

Fathers who took parental leave spend an hour and a half more with their children every day during the first few years of their life compared to fathers who work continuously.

Fathers who take a break after their children's birth spend more time with them after going back to work
Fathers who take a break after their children's birth spend more time with them after going back to work
Julian Erbersdobler

MUNICH — German economist Marcus Tamm has looked into the effects of parental leave. His findings: Fathers who take a break after their children's birth spend more time with them after going back to work.

Is the role of fathers who go on parental leave changing? Do you spend more time with the child in the years that follow? Or are two months too short to change that? Tamm has looked into these questions in a recent study by the RWI Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Essen. The results surprised the economist by the degree of difference.

father_baby_germany_study_storytime

Parental leave is important for the future relationship between baby and father — Photo: Shari Murphy

According to his study, fathers who went on parental leave spend about one and a half hours more with their children every day during the first six years of the child's life than fathers who don't take the break. The change is also noticeable in the household: fathers who took parental leave and parental allowance did an hour more housework every day.

"We were able to work out the effect and results of the parental allowance," says Tamm, who has been doing research on the topic for more than 10 years. The parental allowance introduced in Germany in 2007 encourages fathers to take parental leave. The longest option, of more than 14 months only exists if both partners take parental leave. A single parent can receive full parental benefit for a maximum of 12 months. Although a different distribution is possible, in practice this often results in women taking twelve months and fathers two months. The two months on average taken by fathers often are then also used to take the whole family on a long vacation.

The positive effects apply even if the father only takes a short leave.

The positive effects that Tamm has noticed apply even if the father only takes parental leave for a short time. In his study, he compares the behavior of men who became fathers both before and after the parental allowance was introduced in 2007.

The evaluation is based on data from the socio-economic panel. This data is collected annually from some 11,000 households and a total of more than 30,000 people in Germany. The parental leave study used data from the years 2000 to 2015. Nowadays, about one in three fathers in Germany choses to exercise his right to parental leave. When it was first introduced in 2007, it was only three percent.

Above all, Tamm has been surprised by one aspect: "I did not expect parental leave to have such an impact on the second, third or fourth year of the child." In Scandinavia, paternal leave was introduced earlier than in Germany. Researchers there came to different results, according to Tamm: Some studies could have found a behavioral change of the fathers, others not.

But even with the German study, there are questions that remain unanswered, because of lack of effective measurements. "We can not say anything about the quality of the time spent, so we do not know if the father plays with the child or just takes care of it."

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Future

AI Is Good For Education — And Bad For Teachers Who Teach Like Machines

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

Journalism teacher and his students in University of Barcelona.

Journalism students at the Blanquerna University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

© Sergi Reboredo via ZUMA press
Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ - Early in 2023, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates included teaching among the professions most threatened by Artificial Intelligence (AI), arguing that a robot could, in principle, instruct as well as any school-teacher. While Gates is an undoubted expert in his field, one wonders how much he knows about teaching.

As an avowed believer in using technology to improve student results, Gates has argued for teachers to use more tech in classrooms, and to cut class sizes. But schools and countries that have followed his advice, pumping money into technology at school, or students who completed secondary schooling with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have not attained the superlative results expected of the Gates recipe.

Thankfully, he had enough sense to add some nuance to his views, instead suggesting changes to teacher training that he believes could improve school results.

I agree with his view that AI can be a big and positive contributor to schooling. Certainly, technological changes prompt unease and today, something tremendous must be afoot if a leading AI developer, Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of its threat to people and society.

But this isn't the first innovation to upset people. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wondered, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, whether reading and writing wouldn't curb people's ability to reflect and remember. Writing might lead them to despise memory, he observed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English craftsmen feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution would destroy their professions, producing lesser-quality items faster, and cheaper.

Their fears were not entirely unfounded, but it did not happen quite as they predicted. Many jobs disappeared, but others emerged and the majority of jobs evolved. Machines caused a fundamental restructuring of labor at the time, and today, AI will likely do the same with the modern workplace.

Many predicted that television, computers and online teaching would replace teachers, which has yet to happen. In recent decades, teachers have banned students from using calculators to do sums, insisting on teaching arithmetic the old way. It is the same dry and mechanical approach to teaching which now wants to keep AI out of the classroom.

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