New Paternity Leave Policy

Did you know that a new paternity leave policy allows married active duty service members up to 10 consecutive days of administrative leave after the birth of a child?  It was news to me.  Apparently the new policy was signed into law on Oct 14, 2008.  To say that not all of us are aware of this new policy is - I venture to guess - a gross understatement.

The policy states that paternity leave must be taken within 45 days of a child's birth, if the father is in the U.S.  If the father is deployed, he must take the leave within 60 days of returning from deployment.  Leave not taken within the established time-frames will be lost.  I shudder to think of how many military families have not been able to take advantage of this.  If you are pregnant and being seen at a military facility - have you been made aware of this new policy?

I read about this policy in a military magazine.  Has anyone else heard of this policy?  Has anyone used this policy?  Please share, if you have any further details!

Comments

[Apryl]

I think DH took 2 weeks of leave after DS2 was born...but it wasn't under this policy. He just has buttloads of vacation time saved up.

[Becky]

DH's CO is convinced that its for duel active duty couples only, because that just makes a whole lot of sense. We are still waiting to hear if they are going to give him leave or not.

[Leofwende]

Since I am expecting and due in September, I have definitely heard about this, several times. Unfortunately, my husband falls into the "deployed" category, and since he will have tons of leave saved up by next summer anyway, I don't expect that we will particularly need it, or, based on his job, that he will end up taking it. It's too bad we couldn't just tack an extra 10 days onto R&R (when baby is roughly 2-3 months old), but oh, well.

[Linda]

My husband, as a commander, was well aware of this policy and made sure his soldiers knew about it. Of course, he doesn't follow this policy...because he has always granted 2 weeks of leave to his soldiers...and even though they put in for leave, their form gets "lost" and no time is charged. When my husband was enlisted, his commander did the same for him and all the soldiers whose wives had babies.

[informed sailor]

A great source for this type of announcement is on www.defenselink.mil or even by logging onto www.pentagonchannel.mil. And if you're into the social networking stuff.... both the DOD and Pentagon Channel have Facebook pages. (PC has a twitter page and has it's own location on youtube)

Both sites do a great job of reporting this type of information right away when it gets approved. The only problem is that most servicemembers and their families don't go to these military sites for information! These articles are directly from DOD reports, written by DOD reporters! Best source of DOD information, hands down!!!

You can also check out each service specific website, they usually post this information as soon as it's been approved too.

[wifeunit]

We were totally oblivious to this when Little Man was born and found out about it too late. I have never heard about it specifically from the ob office or anything, and I am not sure Seadaddy's command makes a point to tell their sailors about it either. Definitely something that is great to take advantage of though!

[army_wife]

HA! I'll believe it when we get it. When our first was born, DH was on leave for Christmas (our first was born very shortly after Christmas). His CO visited us at the hospital and told DH in my presence that he would see about tacking on an extra day or two of leave even after Christmas leave was over. When DH got back to work after leave, he asked about it and was blatantly called a liar. His CO said that he never said any such thing (I HEARD him say it! And his wife was with him, also). I'm just glad my husband was on leave for Christmas, at least he got a few days to be with our child. If he didn't want to give DH any extra leave, he shouldn't have offered it just to look nice - we wouldn't have asked otherwise.

Our second was born three months into a 15-month deployment. DH got exactly zero paternity leave days when he got back. Again, I'm glad they routinely give leave at the end of deployments anyway or we'd have been completely out of luck in that regard.

I won't be surprised if this new policy changes nothing for us. We'll see what happens with our third - we're expecting this one in late winter/early spring.