The reason I took one-year parental leave

After the birth of our first child in March 2023, my wife and I are both taking one-year parental leave until March 2024. About two months have passed since the start of childcare, and I have just a little bit of time to output my thoughts, so I will write two articles on the reasons for taking parental leave and my impressions. I also hope to encourage more men in Japan to take parental leave.

Self Introduction

I am an IT engineer (he/him, 32 years old) working on machine learning at a Fintech company, Money Forward. I moved to Tokyo in 2018 and started working for the company in 2020. My parental leave started in Mar 2023 after the birth of my first son.
The calligraphy I am holding in the icon photo was written in January 2023 at the company's New Year's writing event. It represents my feelings, "Change with fun" before the birth of my first kids.

My first calligraphy in 15 years

What I originally thought

I thought it would not be correct to bias household chores.

I grew up in a family where my parents were a R&D engineer at a manufacturer and a housewife. As was common at the time, my father was responsible for work and my mother for housework, and my father did very little housework. When I began to help clean up after meals myself in elementary school, I realized that my father did not do much housework. At that time, I strongly remember thinking, "Everyone is cleaning up, so why doesn't my father do it with us?" This feeling remained in a corner of my mind, and by the time I was a college student, I began to think, "When I get married, I will become a husband who actively does housework".
(I should follow up by saying that my father, who is now already retired from work, has become more involved in the housework.)

I'm a guy who feels easy to housework

After I got a job and started living by myself, I realized that I do not dislike housework. Although it is tedious, I felt good about getting things done, and I was able to tackle housework with a neutral feeling. Only cooking was a strong feeling of tediousness, and at most I would do simple dishes like oyakodon (chicken and egg bowl) or curry.
（I am proud of the fact that I did not lose my level of housework from 2021 to 2023 while I was working and attending graduate school.)

Reasons for taking long-term parental leave

With the aforementioned background, it was not my intention to put the household duties of childcare on one side of the couple, so it was natural for me to take a long-term parental leave and raise our child together. My wife, though, had an agonizing 10-month pregnancy and a very painful delivery. In addition to these backgrounds, I'd like to organize and write down the reasons for my decision to take parental leave.

Relieving stress by reducing the childcare load per person

Our family would like to have two children if possible. Therefore, we did not want to have a negative impression of raising children with our first child. We expected that if both of us participated in childcare full-time, we would get many opportunities to relax ourselves by taking breaks, so we would be able to manage the household smoothly without accumulating a great deal of stress.

I want to be close with my children

During my childhood, I did not talk much with my father, who was busy with work, on weekdays. I was even afraid that my father would come home late at night and talk to me. Because of this experience, I wanted to communicate closely with my children and keep their impression of their father (me) more than neutral. I also felt that I would never have the opportunity to be in close contact with my children for such a long period of time, and I did not want to regret it when I died.
(Note: My father and I became closer after college, and we became friends enough to exercise together and come to see me when I studied abroad.)

I thought I could take a long-term parental leave at Money Forward

MoneyForward, where I work, has a 50% male employee leave rate, with an average of 100 days*1, making it easy for me to take parental leave. There was a precedent of a male employee who took almost a year of parental leave, and a colleague advised me, "I think it's a good idea for your family to take a year of parental leave."
When I told my boss and team that I wanted to take a year of parental leave, they accepted my request without any opposition, which made me very happy. I would like to repay this gratitude through my work after I return to work.

Full Commitment to My Family

Last year, there was an opportunity for new members to help establish an overseas branch for development, and I raised my hand because I had dreamed of working overseas since I was a student. I was happy to receive approval, but after consulting with colleagues and friends who had experience working overseas with their family, I made the decision to cancel the overseas assignment and have children, taking into consideration the age of my wife and me. Since I chose my family, not a great career opportunity, I wanted to make a full commitment to my family anyway.

Anxiety

As you can see, while there were many reasons to take parental leave, I was of course anxious about taking one-year leave. THe anxiety is about money and my career. I resolved my concerns about money by creating an income/expense plan that would take into account the decrease in income due to the leave until I reached the age of 100. The major concern was about my career. During the year away from work, not only would my skills become rusty, but the gap between my skills and the latest technology that is evolving every day would widen, and I would miss out on the experience that I could have gained. Personally, I felt that this loss of opportunity was a bigger challenge than the loss of income. However, despite these concerns, I made the decision with the feeling of "I'll figure it out and handle it", based on the thought that I would make use of the free time that I would get by cooperating with my wife, and also based on the fact that I had overcome major changes in my life.

These are my thoughts on taking long-term parental leave. In the next post, I will share my thoughts after two months of full-time childcare.

*1: Parental Leave Guidebook, https://people-forward-assets.s3.ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/fv01/moneyforward_parental_leave_guidebook.pdf