This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Paul Sullivan — a former New York Times columnist and founder of The Company of Dads — about his experience with paternity leave and his reaction to professor and podcaster Scott Galloway’s comments that he wasn’t sure there should be mandatory paternity leave and that dads are a “waste of time” in the first few months of a child’s life.
Galloway recently told Business Insider, “The comments on paternity leave were meant to be funny. They weren’t … Against paternity leave? No, that’s absolutely not the message I want to communicate.”
The following interview with Sullivan has been edited for length and clarity.
In 2013, after our second daughter was born, my wife, who’d been working for a large asset management company, decided to start her own firm. I told her, “You’ve got to go do it.”
When you start a business like that, you have to put 170% into getting that business going. I’d been working as a columnist with The New York Times since 2008, and we had two young kids. I decided I’d become a “lead dad.”
We used the term as kind of an inside joke, but it’s now become a mantra of my media company, The Company of Dads, a community platform and workplace educator for fathers.
I’ve come to define a “lead dad” as the go-to parent, whether he works full-time — as I was doing at the time — or part-time, or devotes all of his time to his family.
I took parental leave for each of my daughters
I got better at taking parental leave with each child. When my first daughter was born in 2009, I took about two or three weeks off, but I wrote a stockpile of columns ahead of time, so it was almost as if I weren’t gone.
When my second daughter was born in 2013, I was feeling a little more confident about my abilities, and I took two to three weeks off without bothering to write a whole bunch of things ahead of time.
By the time my third daughter was born in 2017, I had more confidence in my position; I’d been writing my column for nine years at that point, I’d written two books, and I’d run some of the special sections. I took a month off.
While on parental leave, I was doing a combination of bonding with my daughters, supporting my wife, and handling the logistics of our other children. When our second daughter was born, she was such a horrible sleeper. I’d take the night shift so my wife could work. I remember writing a chapter of my second book in my head while walking around the island in our kitchen at 2 a.m. because our daughter wouldn’t sleep.
I worried my column would be taken away — the horror that I think any parent, man or woman, fears when they take leave: What if I’m gone and I lose my job?
Fortunately, I had a lot of great support from a colleague, a single dad of three whose wife had died, who said, “Don’t worry about it. Enjoy your parental leave.”
I was able to come back and have another four great years writing my column before I left to start my company.
Those first few months formed the foundation of my relationship with my daughters now
Scott Galloway recently said that dads aren’t really needed for the first part of the baby’s life. But the reason I can sit on my 16-year-old’s bed at night, and the reason she can tell me something really difficult, is because I’ve been sitting on her bed since she was a baby. We built that bond year after year.
If you’re not there, you’re missing out. You can’t just swoop in 15 years later and think it’s going to work.
And that’s the key to what Galloway ultimately wants to do: raise responsible adults. In his crude, joking way, Galloway has talked about how he wants people to get off video games, get off the couch, and go be more involved human beings.
He wants people to be more engaged and present in the lives of their children, and I do agree with that.
It goes beyond taking parental leave — ongoing support builds trust between a company and its workers
Parental leave was just the foundation of what it would mean for my wife and me to both be working parents and how we’d have to make trade-offs.
Each generation of fathers has gotten more involved, but we still haven’t reached parity with moms. There’s still a long way for dads to go. Research also shows that giving paternity leave is a retention benefit for companies, because it retains those fathers much longer than if they didn’t offer them paternity leave.
Well-meaning companies create parental leave policies, institute them, and brag about them — but it only takes one manager saying something like what Scott Galloway said to discourage people from using parental leave. If somebody joined a company because they believed that the policies and the values of that company align, suddenly, that implicit contract, that bond, is broken.
At The Company of Dads, we also talk about care days and care shifts. They’re not PTO, vacation days, personal days, or bereavement days; they’re days that you’re using for care emergencies — whether it’s because your child has the flu, or she’s getting bullied in school and you need to be there for her.
It’s not just for parents. It could be for people caring for a spouse, a parent, or a sibling. They’re going to need time off.
Giving people the ability to take a care day and not be juggling their responsibilities is super important. Because, guess what? People are doing it anyway, but now you have somebody who’s wildly distracted and becoming resentful.
A manager or a company that understands that and allows people to take three days off when they need to do something with their 13-year-old is critical to maintaining that bond between the worker and the company.
Editor’s note: After learning of this story, Scott Galloway told Business Insider, “Nobody has spent more time and energy than me highlighting the importance of engaged fathers.” He said there’s no data to support the idea that workers could hear comments like his and become less likely to take leave, adding, “This discussion is sequestered to the 1 in 5 Americans (like Paul) who have access to paid parental leave. 90% of workers are legally entitled to unpaid leave, which means we should be more focused on how to put more money in the pockets on new parents (Child Tax Credit, Universal Pre-K, Single Payer Health coverage), versus manufactured tiffs amongst the privileged 20% that are eligible, such that more families have the economic ability to do what’s best for their family.”
