Remember those months of caring for and adjusting to your first new born? You are feeding the baby all hours of the day, sleep deprived, responding to someone who cannot speak, and generally worrying about keeping the baby alive. This is a challenging period for anyone, let alone the baby’s mother who is also recovering from giving birth. Yet the struggle of working through these challenges, observed one mother, was what enabled her competency as a parent and fierce connection to her child. And if happiness can be defined as enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, according to Arthur Brooks, satisfaction is about achieving something through struggle. If you cheat on an exam and get an A+, you do not get the satisfaction of a job well done.

From this perspective, a gendered parental policy actually deprives the father of this experience of struggling to care for his baby. In Hsiao-Fen Li’s case, although she and her husband worked at the same institution, she received 2 months of paid leave, whereas he, a paltry 7 days.

Working long hours from 7:30 am to 5:30 pm, the father was not able to share in the care of the baby and was understandably tired to help with nighttime feedings. In missing out on Weeks 2 to 8, the husband was unable to similarly establish an early foundation of caring for the baby. While Hsiao-Fen perceptively pointed out that such gendered parental leave policies are patriarchal and reinforce the burden of care on the mother, she also observed that the opportunity to struggle, and indeed suffer, was a blessing in disguise. In retrospect, one might even argue that the struggle was a key ingredient to growth, satisfaction, and ultimately, happiness.