Prominent conservatives are pushing new family policies to reverse America’s collapsing birthrate. A recent New York Times piece highlights several proposals intended to boost the birthrate. One such proposal, which is now gaining support even among Republicans, is paid leave.
The intention behind this proposal sounds noble — but the results won’t be. Paid leave sounds pro-family, but it ends up empowering the state, not the family. Before America rushes to expand government programs that push family life in a certain direction, it’s worth looking at where that road leads. Norway has already ridden to the end of it — and it doesn’t look like what advocates promised.
How Norway Paved the Way to Nowhere
In the late 1970s, Norway introduced one of the world’s most generous paid leave systems. At first, parents were free to divide the time off however they wanted — and already then, men and women revealed their inherent desires. Mothers took the bulk of the leave, fathers far less. Over the next decades, as the program evolved, it was pushed and pulled between Norway’s liberal and conservative parties: one favoring choice, the other pushing for enforced gender equality. As the country gradually became the left-wing stronghold it is today, the more the program was used to achieve gender parity.
From Choice to Coercion
Since 2018, the roughly one-year leave (or 61-week leave at 80 percent salary) has been split three ways: one for the mother, one for the father, one to be divided between the parents. The father’s 15 weeks are mandatory, and if he doesn’t take them, the benefit is revoked. In a country taxed to death for perks like these, making the wrong choice means losing the benefits.
What happens when the state invokes programs like these is predictable: Families end up at the mercy of those in power. And in Norway, that’s no longer the parents. If this were simply about helping couples financially to incentivize family planning, wouldn’t tax credits do the trick? This story reveals how paid leave is sold as supporting women, but once implemented, it becomes another tool for social engineering.
Paid Leave Was Never About Helping Families
Norwegian mothers — allegedly the beneficiaries of this system — are increasingly unhappy. In 2021, 76 percent said they didn’t get enough time with their babies, and nearly half took additional unpaid leave on top of the eight months already provided by the state.
Does the liberal government change course, recognizing that its policies aren’t what men and women actually want? No. It doubles down — because these policies were never about helping families. They were built on a deeper ideological project, one that treated women’s attachment to home and children as a problem to be solved.
The liberal forces intended to engineer a society based on feminist ideas like those of Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that no woman should be “allowed” to stay home with her children, because too many would choose to do so if given the chance. So, paid leave and daycare became one more way to push mothers back into the workforce under the banner of choice. Today, 94 percent of children in Norway are enrolled in daycare, and the country has built a society where taxes are so high that making a different choice is no longer financially possible.
These policies allow us to avoid hard decisions about work and motherhood — they have allowed policymakers to avoid confronting real differences between men and women altogether.
I saw this firsthand when I worked as a psychiatrist in lower-income communities. The women I met weren’t asking for more time off to return to low-paying jobs — they wanted the financial freedom to be full-time mothers. Notice, the loudest advocates for paid leave are typically professional-class women who don’t want to make the choice between career and family.
After speaking out publicly in Norway against these policies, I was flooded with emails from mothers who had never dared to say what they felt. They described the anguish of handing over their babies when the leave ended and the isolation of wanting to stay home in a culture that treated them as abnormal.
Men show it too: Despite heavy incentives, about 35 percent of Norwegian fathers still refuse to take their mandated leave, revealing a biological value system that no policy can erase. Through their actions, often by paying out of pocket, both sexes show their desire for traditional values. The younger generation is now stating this publicly.
Maternal Employment: At What Cost?
Don’t be fooled: Paid leave policies are designed to produce higher rates of female employment, and Norway has the highest in Europe. But along with it came a silent epidemic of maternal guilt, child detachment, and psychiatric distress.
Before copying policies from what you’re told is the happiest country in the world, consider this: Norway now has the highest rate of sick leave in the world — nearly a quarter of it for psychiatric reasons. Nearly 70 percent of new disability claims in young people are for psychiatric and behavioral disorders.
In 2023 alone, there were more than 2 million general practitioner visits for psychiatric complaints — in a country of just five million people. That same year, 22 percent of Norwegian women — supposedly the luckiest women in the world — sought help for psychological distress or drug addiction.
Removing the barriers for maternal employment invariably also means placing children in institutional daycare. Norway has had near-full maternal employment since the 1990s — the same time psychiatric disorders among children began to rise sharply, long before smartphones could be blamed. Nearly 10,000 children are now on antidepressants.
According to PISA 2022, 41 percent of Norwegian students are now classified as low achievers in one or more subject areas, reflecting a steady academic decline. That drop coincides with growing concerns about increased school absence and mental health issues. One in five Norwegian children develops a psychiatric disorder during childhood, starting as early as pre-school age. Daycare for all — attachment for none.
The American Right Should Rethink
If paid leave were the key to saving families, Norway would be thriving. Instead, its birth rate has steadily declined and now stands at 1.44 — so low that politicians openly discuss immigration as the only sustainable solution. If policymakers truly wanted to support families, they would offer flexible, direct help — like cash bonuses or tax relief — not programs designed to funnel mothers back into the workforce.
“Universal” paid leave sounds good, but in practice, it forces everyone onto the same track: working early, institutional childcare early. American proposals risk making the same mistake — pushing women into a system built around economic productivity and, instead of boosting birthrates, creating a generation unfit to hold together what the state pulled apart.
