In recent years, there has been an advent of equal parenting or "sharenting." Although it would seem as if this concept of shared parenting would decrease the number of problems couples have with their children, there are still a couple of things they should avoid.
Most of the time, when a couple has a child one of them would have to be more hands-on with the child compared to their other half. This means there is a big chance that one of them would have to give up their career in favor of parenting.
"Women aged 35-44 are 67 percent more likely to suffer work-related stress than men of the same age group," according to an article posted on The Telegraph. These statistics come courtesy of psychiatrist, Dr. Judith Mohring.
Mohring states that another unfortunate statistic is the responsibility of parenting still falling mainly in the hands of the woman. There are set-ups wherein the father does most of the parenting work, such as in families where the mother has an on-call job, but these are still rare even to this day.
There is much promise for the new bill granting Shared Parental Leave or SPL. The British government back in April 2015 launched this. What Shared Parental Leave does is it allows the parents of a child to divide paid leave between in the first year of their child.
The parents can now decide how long they want both the maternal leave and paternal leave to be. According to the same report from The Telegraph, the British government is yet to release official figures about SPL. However, it is estimated that only 2 to 8 percent of the couples eligible for SPL (out of more or less 285,000) will make use of it.
Hopefully, sharenting will continue to grow in popularity in the next couple of years. Parents should be given equal chance to pursue their career while still spending ample time with their child. People are also optimistic that the concept of Share Parental Leave will catch on eventually.
