Someone has to pay for it

and I am wondering just who will pay for it.

One of the major political parties in Downunder wants to extend the paid parental leave  to six months. There are also demands for more money to be spent on child care and child care workers.

It all sounds perfectly reasonable. We need people to have babies. The population is growing older. There will be a need for people to care for older people...and so on.

But there must surely have to be limits to all of this. I also wonder how much parental leave disrupts workplaces.

My mother did not go back teaching full time until the Black Cat was three. At the time that happened we also moved back to the bush, to a remote community. There was a two teacher school there. My mother had the youngest children. The Senior Cat had the oldest children. The Black Cat was considered too young to sit in the classroom so she wandered in and out and played while Mum taught. It wasn't an ideal situation but the Education Department was very short of trained teachers and they asked her to return full time. Nobody gave any thought to providing any sort of child care for the Black Cat. 

I wonder what would happen now? 

Across the street from us the mother of T.... and H.... is a paediatrician. She took time off to have both her boys and did the minimum required hours and study to keep up her registration. She wasn't eligible for paid parental leave. On the other side HJ works in a hospital and she was eligible for paid parental leave. Further down the street another mother works for a tax firm. She was eligible for leave but had to make herself available to answer queries. Someone else was employed for a short time to take her place but obviously didn't know all the ropes. 

The system doesn't seem to work evenly. The system may never work evenly. How do you replace workers for short periods like this? The paediatrician couldn't simply take time off. She needs to keep up her registration. For her to do that someone else has to look after the children. The other hospital worker found she had to go back to "day courses" or be completely left behind. The mother who works for the tax firm told me "I might as well have stayed at work". 

There are obviously jobs from which it is easier to take leave than others. There are also jobs which are probably easier to fill than others - generally poorly paid and unskilled jobs. But how do you fill the roles of professional and semi-professional people or people in whom you have invested a lot of training?  Is it fair to say to someone else, "Yes, you can have this job for six months while X is on parental leave but you have to go when they come back"?  

Is it fair to say to an employer, "You must grant parental leave. You must keep the position for them. You must pay them." Is it going to prevent employers from employing people? Who is going to pay for all the expenses involved?

I have no answers to those questions but it also makes me wonder whether  we value parenthood enough as a career choice. Do we really value parenthood at any more than six months of paid leave?