Why I Took Two Months Off When My Kids Were Born

Talking points: fatherhood, parenting, mindset, culture

Taking time off as a man seems perfectly normal—until it’s done for a newborn. While I don’t disagree that a father can (and should) work to provide for his family, I also think that your presence is a deeply important factor in your kid’s development. Here’s my rationale.

(00:00:00) – What inspired this episode
(00:03:10) – The real reasons I took time off
(00:07:56) – How I’ve learned to define success
(00:11:52) – I challenge men to think differently about things when their children are born

***
Pick up my book, Men’s Work: A Practical Guide To Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, And Find Freedom: https://mantalks.com/mens-work-book/

Check out some free resources: How To Quit Porn | Anger Meditation | How To Lead In Your Relationship

Build brotherhood with a powerful group of like-minded men from around the world. Check out The Alliance.

Enjoy the podcast? If so, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Podchaser. It helps us get into the ears of new listeners, expand the ManTalks Community, and help others find the tools and training they’re looking for. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify

For more episodes, visit us at ManTalks.com | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

All right, team, welcome back to the Man Talk Show. Conor Beaton here. And today, I’m going to be talking about why I took two months of paternity leave. My daughter was just born. My son was born three and a half years ago. He was born in March of ‘21. My daughter was born a month ago.

And I’m recording this now because I’ve seen a couple of videos. I saw this video by this guy, I think his name is Bedros Kulian, and he was talking about – I think it was Bedros Keuilian, it might have been somebody else – but they were talking about how ridiculous it is for a man to take time off when his kids are born. And that a father’s not needed there, and what a father needs to do is to provide and all of those things. And I don’t disagree with the fact that as a man, you can provide for your family, and that’s incredibly important.

But I decided to take time off when my son was born because of a number of things. And it’s so fascinating to me that there is this kind of rhetoric against men for taking time off when their kids are born. I remember when I worked at Apple, there was a guy that was up for a promotion into a leadership position who decided to take the full amount of paternity leave, and it cost him the promotion. He didn’t know that, right? That obviously couldn’t have been public knowledge, because you shouldn’t be held back for those things.

But he was. He was held back from a promotion because he took paternity leave. And he was punished for that, essentially, because the expectation in our culture still on men is that they don’t do those things. That you, as a man, you work. You go to work. And that’s still corporate expectations. That’s still the expectations that companies hold. That’s still the expectations that most women hold. That’s still the expectation that a lot of men hold.

And so it was interesting because I was talking to one of my men’s groups, and they were asking me how I was feeling about my daughter being born. I said, “good.” I said, “I’ve cleared my schedule. I’m going to be offline for two months, basically.” And one guy was like, “What?”

I was like, “Yeah. I’m not seeing clients. I’m not working. I’m not really having any calls. I’m not having any meetings.” I said, “I have a couple of things here and there that I need to take care of that will probably amount to three or four hours of work. But I have spent the last year arranging my business. And I scheduled this out.

As soon as I found out that my wife was pregnant, I started to work with my team to make sure that we could structure things in a way where I could take time off to be with my family.”

Now, I realize I’m in a unique position that I run my own business, and I can do that. And some of you, you work construction. You work in a corporation. And you can’t just design your job to take two months off when your child is born. Now, you probably can approach your company and say, hey, I’m going to have a kid, and I’d like to work from home for the first month and a half or reduced hours. I’m going to take paternity leave or whatever it is.

But I did this for a couple of reasons. Number one, it is important to me, after everything that I’ve learned about early attachment, one of the things that I’ve learned is how important it is for children to connect to their parents.

Now, yes, it is far more important in the first three years of life. A mother’s role is far more, not important per se, but the baby, the infant, especially for the first 12 months, their nervous system is essentially connected to their mother’s. And it’s not that the father doesn’t play a very important role, because as a man, you can, if you are present, support the mother in regulating her nervous system, in being calm and feeling grounded.

And you can also just be present for your kid or your children. And one of the things that I wanted to do when my daughter was born was to take time off to spend time with my son, to take him on some adventures, to go hiking, to just hang out, to be around, to really experience life with him and to help him transition into being a big brother. And when he was born, I did the same thing.

I took a month and a half off, I think almost two months, month and a half off to just be with my wife and my son. And for me, that was one of the most formative times. This is why I say that.

I watched this video of this young man talking about how his father handed him down a Rolex. And this Rolex was very important. His father had purchased it at a time when this young man was quite a bit younger.He was like eight or nine or something like that. And the dad had bought this Rolex, and it was this signifying moment, this sort of signature moment in his life where he had kind of made it, right? Financially, he was doing well enough, he was successful enough in his career that he could go buy this watch. And it was very important to him.

And the guy is talking about how he remembers being there. He was there when his father bought this Rolex. And for a lot of guys, there’s these moments in life where you kind of make it, right? You get this promotion, you build this company, you sell this company, you can afford to buy something or take your family on a trip.

There’s these moments that kind of stand out as like, ah, like I’m really having this type of success right now. Anyway, this young man gets this Rolex from his father, and with it, there’s a note. And he expects the note to say something along the lines of, you know, this is my most prized possession, and I’m handing it down to you.

I hope that, you know, I hope you do success, blah, blah, blah, blah. Instead, the note says something along the lines, and I hope I don’t butcher it or botch it, but it says something along the lines of, I’m giving this to you as a reminder that you, you my son, not this watch, are the single most important piece of success in my life. You are the standard of success.

And this watch was not the standard of success. And the time that I got to spend with you was arguably the most important and most successful thing that I did with my life, was building the relationship with you, helping you become the man that you are today. And yes, the watch is nice.

Yes, the, you know, the material things are nice. Being able to do those things, provide those things for you, being able to provide those things for our family, they were important, but you superseded all those things. You were far more important than those things. And for me, that really hit home, and it hit home because I’m a very ambitious person. I like to build. I’ve built a successful company.

I’m doing better financially and in business than I ever thought that I would, certainly in my late 20s or early 30s. You know, I’ve done well, and there’s more to go. And part of it, as I’ve grappled with this notion of what is success, how do I define success, what I’ve come to realize is all of the financial success for me personally, all of the business success for me personally, is to give me the time and the freedom to be with the people that I love and create memories and experiences with and for them.

I love this idea that part of your role as a parent is to make memories for your children. And it’s not that you can’t make memories for your kids, you know, if you aren’t financially well off or if you don’t have a lot of money. You absolutely can. I took my son camping earlier this year. That cost almost no money, you know, it was like 30 bucks a night to camp. We were in like one of the most beautiful campgrounds on the East Coast in Maine in Acadia National Park. Memories that he’ll hold with him that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life, you know, as long as I have my cognition with me. And it didn’t cost a lot of money. But creating the flexibility, being able to just have undivided time and attention and presence for my wife, for my son, for my daughter.

These, for me, are the mark of success for a man because if you have hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars, but your kids have no idea who you are, they don’t really know what you stand for. They don’t really know what type of man you are outside of the irritated, rundown, overly exhausted human being that walks in through the door at the end of a 12 or 13 hour day and doesn’t want to be bothered. That for me is not the type of success that I personally want to have.

Now there are men that that’s their aim, right? They’re dedicated to their mission in the world to such a degree that they will sacrifice everything and anything in order to achieve it. And we need men like that. The truth is that we actually do need men like that. We need men who are willing to say, nothing is more important to me than this mission in my business or in the world, this problem that I’m trying to solve in whatever it is, the economy, the climate, roads, whatever, whatever the problem is. But for me, I really value being able to play the game of how successful can I be monetarily and financially while also being incredibly successful as a father and as a husband. That, to me, is a very interesting game because that chess seems super fucking hard.

It seems super hard. I can feel the part of myself that could check out from family a little bit and could put in the 12 to 14 hour days and do the business meetings and fly around the world constantly and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what interests me more is how do I do some of those things while also being as present as possible, not just in attention, but in time, in energy, in wisdom.

And so for me, that has become the aim of success is finding some type of equilibrium between being very successful in what I do. And that does mean that sometimes it pulls me away from my family. In 2022, I was away from home seven or eight weeks out of the year.

If you added up all the days that I had traveled, I was gone quite a bit from my family. And there’s moments like this that are paramount, that are super important to just be there, to root in, to ground in, to be with the family and to reassert and reestablish and cement a value within your family system. And so for me, this is why I took this two months of leave and worked towards this for the last nine months, I guess, 10 months, worked with my team. Everybody was on the same page. I’m going to be offline for this amount of time. Here’s the projects that we’re going to have going. Here’s what needs to get done while I’m offline. Here’s what we’re going to be doing once I come back online. And everybody was on the same page and that was able to work really well.

We’re doing some big things coming up. We’re designing an app for our members of the Alliance. We’ve got five, 600 men in an online group that’s growing. We’re going to have a couple thousand as of next year. And so we built an app, we’re building out the whole backend, the whole thing. That’s all happening right now while I am largely offline and not working and being with my family during this very important time.

And so I say all this because I want to challenge men to think different and bigger and broader about when their children are born. You know, if you’re watching this and you don’t have kids yet, I just want to challenge you to think about how can you structure that? Because I think what ends up happening is that we as men approach having kids and we kind of fall into, this is what society expects of me. This is what other dudes have done.

And I’m not interested in that. I don’t care what other guys have done. I’m not really interested in, well, this is what the guy from JP Morgan does. He’s a VP making a million plus dollars a year. I should do exactly what he does in order to get his results. I don’t care about that.

What I’m interested in is defining my own version of success. And for me, that is playing the game of chess of being very financially successful while also being very present and successful at home with my family. Because what I can tell you is that after having my son, the whole game changed.

I realized how fundamentally important it is and will be for me to be present in his life. And so for everybody that is out there, I hope that you continue to challenge some of these things. I’m not saying that you need to be a stay-at-home dad, if that’s what you want to do, power to you.

But what I’m saying is that we don’t always have to fall into the trap of I need to sacrifice what I really want at my core because there’s this looming definition of success that society and other men have told me is what success looks like for a man. And we can start to shift and broaden that. I’ve loved having this time off. I’ve also got a lot of projects done around the house, which has been pretty brilliant. But we can broaden our definition of success to capture other things.

So comment below. Let me know what you think about this. Don’t forget to man it forward and subscribe to the channel wherever you are listening. Thank you so much. See you next time.