On a recent Saturday, he played a mini-game of basketball with his two older kids in their Southern California home, shooting a ball into a hoop on the door, while his baby boy watched from his bouncy chair. This story was produced in partnership with KFF Health News. Campana took paid time off in May after the birth of his son — just as he did for his daughters.
It's sometimes called "bonding" or "family" leave, to distinguish it from the paid leave ("maternity" or "disability" leave) that mothers can take to physically recover from childbirth. "You need that adjustment period," he said. Campana, who works at an ad agency, said having the time off not to think about work — or worry about losing income during that time — was crucial for him and his family during a sleep-deprived period.
"My wife isn't doing it on her own," he said. "She doesn't feel like she's alone on this journey. She feels like she has support." He jokes that by kid No. 3, he thought he had nailed diaper changes without too much mess — but he was wrong.
"The benefits are I get to spend time with each of them when they were in the infant stage, the baby stage, and I get to hold them and, you know, change the poopy diapers," he said. " It's like the funny moments of, like, being a parent, like, 'This is it right here, you're in the thick of it.'" Campana is among a growing number of fathers who take leave to bond with a new child in the states that offer paid family leave programs — and are part of a larger cultural shift that has seen dads handle more caregiving duties. In California — as in several other states — men make up about half of bonding claim applications.
Last year, men even surpassed women — as in Colorado and Washington — for the first time in the state's history. This trend comes at a time when the federal government has said it wants Americans to have more babies, and families report affordability is an obstacle in raising them. There's no federal law guaranteeing paid parental leave, but California is one of 14 states, plus Washington, D.C., that have passed legislation to enact paid family leave programs — and in many of those places, more dads are opting in.
"We're in a very different place in terms of our understanding of gender roles, of paternity leave, of dads' roles than we were 20-plus years ago," said Molly Weston Williamson, policy director at Paid Leave for All, an organization that advocates for paid family leave policies. California's program offers, within a year, up to eight weeks of paid bonding leave for parents after a birth, adoption, or foster care placement. That's on top of six to eight weeks of paid disability leave that moms get to recover after birth.
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