Everyone loves children. Everyone wants to be with their own children. But most people don’t have enough time. You can leave your child in child care, but that doesn’t feel good for a new-born baby. The best solution is to leave them with your own parents. After all, they have also raised you. Here’s the big problem, they’re working too. Grandparents aren’t always old and wrinkled, they have to work as well. Yet there is a new solution.
George Osborne, the English paymaster general, announced that a new legal right will be given to working grandparents to take time off to help care for their grandchildren. The plan is to extend the current system of shared parental care. This will involve grandparents as well as the child’s mother and father. The total of 50 weeks stays the same, but there will be a greater flexibility in the first year of the child’s life. They can split these 50 weeks. For example 20 weeks for the grandparents and 30 for the mother. 37 weeks will be paid, this is also something they have to split.
Especially single mothers will get profit from this new rule. They didn’t have the opportunity to share the caring of a child because there was no father, but now they are able to do so. They can keep working. Also grandparents will have this opportunity. Increasing numbers have given up their work for their grandchildren, but now they can keep working and being with their grandchildren.
This is the main reason why Osborne does this. He hopes this new rule will allow working (grand)parents to return to work more quickly and give them the time with their (grand)children, which they deserve.
