Shared Parental Leave – My experience as a new Dad in the corporate world

By Josh Bayford

Disclaimer – This is my view, I wanted to avoid more AI generated dribble and just give my take.

If you don’t know what Shared Parental Leave (SPL) is, you are not alone. Stats show nearly half of all Dads in the UK were not even aware it existed. Simply and ambiguously put, SPL allows mothers to ‘give’ part of their maternity leave to the other parent. At this point I’m going to assume you have access to Google, and will avoid using the article explain SPL in more detail.

Decision time - the pro’s & con’s

My partner and I were in a fortunate position to even consider SPL. She works for a large business with excellent enhanced maternity, and I work for a small business that are extremely supportive with a number of the employees having young families. We broke it down into two main considerations – practical and emotional.

The Practical

The financial implications of SPL will be totally individual to each family unit. For us, our household income was split almost 50/50, with some fluctuations due to the nature of my job and commission. This made it way easier to consider. Financially, it actually made a lot of sense for us to utilise SPL. My partner has a very successful career, so her returning to work and reducing the amount of time on statutory pay actually brought us more financial stability.

I was initially quite reluctant to do SPL, partly due to the financial and job implications for myself. In recruitment, if you aren’t working your income will be impacted significantly. I felt internal pressure, of taking time out of a competitive and high-performance job. Even though my company were totally onboard, I feared being ‘left behind’ and having to start again. All-in-all this view was quite selfish, and implied my career is more important that my partner’s. If anything, the opposite is true.

The Emotional

In the earliest of conversations, I really didn’t think much of this. I thought I would see my child plenty so didn’t really see much of the benefit on that side. I think it only really dawned on me late in the pregnancy and with a newborn how amazing it would be to spend lots of time with my son. I have to credit my wife with really pushing me on the benefits of SPL.

The SPL

I took the last 4 months of our son’s first year. Firstly, it’s not a holiday! The mid-night wake ups, night feeds, illnesses – these were the new daily action items. Longer-term projects were now weaning and development of motor skills. I’d like to think most fathers today are much more active in early-stage parenting than previous generations, but being the primary parent is a real step-up. It was amazing to spend everyday seeing my son develop, take him to baby classes, see the joy on his face when the bubble machine came out.

I did struggle with some elements. I don’t enjoy cooking, so I found baby-led weaning very tough. It felt like some days all I did was cook food and then clean up most it from the floor, three times over! You don’t have the luxury of breaks, aside from naps which is when you need to get stuff done. If you are avoiding sticking your child in front of a screen, a full day without another activity or class can be really draining.

Opportunity Cost 

I write this now, a few weeks back into ‘normal’ work and our son absolutely loving nursery. It’s the ting of sadness I feel that reminds me how worth it SPL was. Returning to work is tough, I feel out of the loop and somewhat low on confidence in a job I’ve done for nearly a decade. But, even if it takes me months to get back into the swing of things, it will all have been worth it. Those 4 months away from a decade-long career allowed me to bond with my son and become a better parent – you will never get this time back. It would take me years to build-up that same amount of interaction had I been in full time work, and in all that time my child would be growing and changing. For all my talk about money and careers, you can’t put a value on that time - it is truly priceless.