A father and child picking wood anemones in a park. Photo: Emmi Korhonen / Lehtikuva
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Fathers in Finland are using significantly more parental leave following a legislative reform that came into effect in August 2022, according to new data from the Social Insurance Institution, Kela.
Fathers of children born after the reform used nearly twice the share of parental allowance days compared to those whose children were born before the change. For children born in the final months of 2022, fathers accounted for just over 20 percent of the total parental leave days taken.
The 2022 reform overhauled the parental benefit system to make it more flexible and to encourage greater participation from both parents. Instead of fixed entitlements for mothers and fathers, the new law introduced a system where each parent is granted an equal quota of leave days. Parents are allowed to transfer part of their quota to each other if they wish.
Despite the shift, Kela’s statistics show that only four percent of parents split their parental allowance days exactly equally.
Before the reform, Finnish law provided separate and gender-specific leave categories, maternity, paternity, and parental leave, with mothers typically using the bulk of the available days. The new system removed gender-based terms and replaced them with a more symmetrical structure of shared entitlement, in which both parents now receive up to 160 working days of leave, of which 63 days may be transferred.
According to Kela, the overall uptake of parental leave by fathers has improved, but a substantial gap remains in how leave is divided in most families. The institution notes that the long-standing cultural expectation for mothers to take on primary caregiving responsibilities continues to influence decisions, even with the structural shift in benefits.
Kela’s data is based on claims filed for children born from late 2022 onwards, providing the first full glimpse into the behavioural impact of the revised leave system.
HT
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Source: www.helsinkitimes.fi
