Sundarrajan Santhanagopalan, from Chennai, is an evangelist for Swedish-style parental leave.
For him, the seven months he spent looking after his son strengthened his bond with the child and helped him integrate into Swedish society.
So, when he looks at the ten or so Indian families he knows well in Gothenburg, and sees that not one of the other fathers has done the same, he wants to try to change that.
“I had quite a great experience with my first one, my son is now almost five,” he said. “I wish people had a more relaxed approach towards this and trusted the system, rather than only trusting themselves. I wish that one day I could enjoy parental leave with one of the other Indian fathers who is also taking care of a child and, you know, we could go for a stroll with the children or something like that.”
Jignesh Sindha, another Indian father who took four months’ leave as the main carer, says that he feels grateful to have been able to take advantage of Sweden’s generous system, so that he could take his son out into undisturbed nature.
“I think it was the best time of my life,” he said. “From the day I started it, I would take him out into nature and then spend two or three hours in these kinds of places, then come home and cook for him, feed him and make him sleep.”
He also wishes more Indian fathers took leave.
“I have a daughter, and when she gets married, if she does not get the opportunity to work, it will be hurtful to me. It’s very much needed that she gets equal opportunity to be an excellent doctor, and fulfill her ambitions, and not only be a homemaker. I’m not talking about feminism, but about equal opportunities. This system should be there. It should provide you that chance.”
Sweden boasts one of the most generous systems of parental leave in the world, brought in 50 years ago this year. Couples get 480 days of leave to share between them, 390 days of which are based on their salaries, and three months of which are dedicated, use-it-or-lose-it, for each parent (they’re often called the “daddy months”, although in theory they could be claimed by the mother).
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In practice, fathers take on average around 30 percent of parental leave and mothers 70 percent.
Later this year, Sundarrajan plans to do it all over again, taking a further five months off to care for his five-month-old daughter.
“I am looking forward to taking parental leave for the daughter, my second one, hoping to start in November. Our plan is that she goes back to her work in two months, and then I go off for like, five or six months.”
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The initial decision to take parental leave more than four years ago came partly because of circumstance. Sundarrajan and his wife arrived in Sweden and the priority was to give his wife a chance to look for and find a job, so he took leave to allow her to do so.
But he thinks he was also influenced by his own father back in Chennai, who himself stopped work some months to look after the children to enable his mother to find a job.
“Once she found a job, they could run the race again, so that’s where I take my inspiration from. Not many fathers I’ve known have taken unpaid vacations in India just to spend time with their kid.”
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Both men believe the time they spent as the main carer for their baby has had a lasting impact on the relationship.
“Whenever I had trouble, at this age, I called my mom first, not my papa, because mom has taken care care of me in the first three, four years,” Jignesh said. “Now, when I’m with my child, I see that when he wakes up in bed, he says, ‘Papa, Papa, where are you? Where are you?’ I don’t remember ever having done that.”
“I try to do my best to educate people, make them aware of the benefits I enjoy aside from money, the sort of bond it creates,” Sundarrajan said. “I think that’s pretty valuable.”
Like Jignesh, Sundarrajan also took advantage of Sweden’s parks and large expanses of nature, but he also took advantage of all the support offered by the local municipality, particularly Öppna Förskolan, literally “the open preschool”, drop-in centres where new parents and their children can meet, get support, and pass the time.
“We went to the Öppna Förskolan. It just gives you the community, the ability to blend in and also helps you understand how Swedes handle a child and what they do in their leave. How they kill the time. We would also look at the Göteborg.se website for anything that’s happening, like a state-run activity, and then we would just take our child.”
Even without the paid leave and support, it is much easier for a father to take care of a young child in a Swedish city than in an overcrowded, polluted Indian one, he believes.
“I can take my daughter outside or when she wants to sleep, but they can’t do the same in India. So it’s also the culture that surrounds Sweden that promotes or encourages the ability to take such vacations.”
When they talk to friends and relatives outside of Sweden about taking time off, they report mixed reactions.
“There are two groups who react differently,” laughs Jignesh. “There are people from villages who are more patriarchal and they think ‘why you are doing this?’ And there is another type of person with a professional setup in the cities, and they think it is amazing. ‘I really want that kind of life, do you know of any jobs in Sweden?’.”
“We have cousins in the US and UK, and I have a very close friend who is currently expecting in Ireland, and I can only tell tell you how much they envy this benefit, because it’s so relaxing,” Sundarrajan agrees. “They can take leave, but it’s not paid so much, it’s not so extravagant.”
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The two fathers believe that the fact that, even with a system as generous as Sweden’s, most Indian men don’t take leave, is partly down to the career anxiety they’ve brought with them from India’s more hierarchical, competitive workplaces, and partly simply due to a wish to make and save as much money in Sweden as possible.
“I believe it’s the job aspect: you just think that you’re losing the race,” Sundarrajan says. “I know that if I go on parental leave in November and come back at the end of March, I know that the leverage that I have, the domain expertise I have in the product that I’m working on, is going to lag six months, and that’s a huge thing to catch up with in the fast-evolving software industry that we are working in. So that’s the insecurity you need to overcome.”
“This would be devastating if you were in India,” Jignesh agrees. “In those companies, if you go for nine months, many of your contacts are gone. People have changed jobs, and the work has gone far ahead. In India, ladies usually cannot join back easily. They have difficulties. There are repercussions.”
While the same can be true in Sweden, he continues, there’s much more understanding here of people returning from leave and help to get them back up to speed.
“When you go back after four to five months, the train has moved on quite a lot, so it makes it difficult. But I think that’s not only for me. It’s for everybody. It is well-accepted in the work culture, so the manager knows that those who come back will take some time. It is not that there is a big impact on your appraisals or anything. So that is really amazing.”
But he conceded that he had still felt worried himself.
“You feel that pressure a little bit because you feel a little left out. Maybe that’s an effect from India that I am carrying, because fathers from Sweden, they don’t care.”
The other deterrent for Indian fathers is financial, particularly if the mother has not found a job in Sweden.
“Historically, the examples that I have been set is people moving to the US and then coming back, like, billionaires,” Sundarrajan says. “So there is an expectation that, if you go outside of India, you get rich quickly.”
He said that he and his wife had weighed up the impact of reducing his salary to the maximum day parental leave payment of 1,218 kronor a day.
“We know that we are earning relatively less than if we had worked, and so we could save less. But then what’s the trade off? And then we weighed it out, and we chose the memories that we can make with our child.”
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One of the best articles of the Local. Coming from India and relate to so much of this 😊
I haven’t used parental leave as when I moved to Sweden with my daughter she was 9. However I think a similar generous system is VAB which I also haven’t used. The US can be similar to India in that if you aren’t working you’re making a huge mistake, and for fathers even more so. For single fathers it’s even worse. That mindset sticks with me even after living here for over 3 years. I just work from home to care for my 12 year old instead of even thinking about any kind of leave.