Italy Gives New Fathers Ten Days. Norway Gives Them Fifteen Weeks and Takes Them Away If They Don't Use Them.

🇮🇹 Italy · 🇳🇴 Norway

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Norway, a father who skips his parental leave doesn't get to hand it to his partner — the state simply lets the weeks evaporate, which is a remarkably effective way to make a point. In Italy, parliament just voted down a bill that would have given fathers anything close to that much leave at all, citing cost, while the country's female employment rate sits dead last in the EU. Both countries will tell you they support working parents. Only one of them built a mechanism that actually forces the support to show up.

Do's & Don'ts

🇮🇹 Italy

🇳🇴 Norway

Italy's maternity framework looks reasonably generous on paper — five months at 80% of salary, usually split two months before and three after birth, per the national insurance agency INPS, often topped up by employers to full pay. Paternity leave is where the system becomes stark: ten mandatory days, full stop, unless a father is standing in because the mother genuinely cannot care for the child. Parliament had a chance to close that gap this year and declined to take it: in February, a Spain-modeled proposal for equal, non-transferable, fully paid leave for both parents was voted down 137 to 117, with the governing Brothers of Italy party citing cost rather than ideology. The consequences show up in the labor statistics Eurostat tracks: Italy's female employment rate was 53% in 2024, the lowest in the EU against a 70.8% bloc-wide average, and women account for roughly 70% of voluntary resignations, frequently timed around childbirth.

Culturally, though, something is visibly shifting underneath the unchanged law. Diego Di Franco, a Rome-area father of two with more than 50,000 Instagram followers, has become the primary caregiver while his wife Raffaella works full-time as a senior manager — a reversal he describes watching play out in real time at drop-off: "With my first child I was the only dad at kindergarten," he told Reuters. "Six years later, there were three or four. And I thought: things are changing." The data backs the vibe shift even without the law moving: research from the think tank Tortuga found paternity-leave uptake jumps to 71% at companies that voluntarily extend it beyond the statutory ten days, against a 64% national average — proof that when the option genuinely exists, fathers increasingly take it.

Norway built the exact mechanism Italy just rejected, and built it to be unignorable. Parents choose between 49 weeks at full pay or 59 weeks at 80%, with a father's quota of 15 weeks carved out specifically for the non-birthing parent — weeks that simply vanish, rather than transferring to the mother, if the father doesn't use them. The design works: roughly 90% of Norwegian fathers take their quota, a figure researchers consistently attribute directly to the use-it-or-lose-it structure rather than to any sudden cultural conversion. Notably, the policy isn't just a Norwegian-born habit — a Reddit commenter living in Norway, posting as guppymoo, described new immigrant and native fathers alike looking forward to the leave: "They look forward to it and they love being at home with their child." A UK-born father, Adam, quoted in sciencenorway.no's coverage of immigrant uptake, put it even more simply: "I would have done it again and again. You see your child grow, it's great."

The Reckoning

The real contrast isn't generosity — Italy's maternity leave is respectable by global standards, and Norway's isn't infinitely more generous in total weeks than many European peers. It's where each system places the lever. Italy's system assumes a father's involvement is optional and voluntary, so uptake depends entirely on individual employer goodwill or individual father ambition, which is exactly why the national paternity rate (64%, on a base of only ten days to begin with) lags so far behind Norway's 90% on a 15-week base. Norway's system removes the choice to defer: the quota isn't a suggestion, it's a use-it-or-lose-it deadline, which turns a cultural preference into statistical near-universality almost by construction.

The irony is that Italy's cultural mood is arguably moving faster than Norway's did at a comparable stage — "dad influencers," visible kindergarten drop-offs, a wife's public gratitude for an engaged co-parent — but without the legal mechanism forcing the issue, that mood has nowhere guaranteed to land. Norway didn't wait for the culture to shift on its own; it built a policy that made the shift structurally inevitable, then let the culture catch up to what the law had already assumed.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Reuters (via thestar.com.my) — Diego Di Franco, an Italian father and primary caregiver to two children, described the slow visible change in his own daily routine: "With my first child I was the only dad at kindergarten. Six years later, there were three or four. And I thought: things are changing" — genuine optimism, delivered alongside parliament's own vote against formalizing that change.

Reuters (same piece) — Raffaella Di Franco, Diego's wife and a senior manager, credited her husband's full-time caregiving directly with her own career trajectory: "It gave me the confidence to face challenges and seize opportunities" — a rare first-person account of the career upside new fathers' involvement can create for mothers, when it actually happens.

Reddit, r/Feminism (via mirror) — guppymoo, a commenter who says they live in Norway, pushed back against skepticism in the thread with a simple on-the-ground observation about fathers using the quota: "They look forward to it and they love being at home with their child" — not policy analysis, just a description of what the ordinary case actually looks like.

sciencenorway.no (Norwegian research-news outlet, quoting an immigrant father directly) — Adam, a father originally from the UK, described taking the full father's quota without hesitation: "I would have done it again and again. You see your child grow, it's great" — notable because the quota wasn't customary in his country of origin, yet he adopted it fully once it was available.

Reddit, r/Feminism (same mirrored thread) — Falkner09 offered the most grounded skepticism in the discussion, questioning how transferable Norway's model really is for lower-income dual-earners elsewhere: the policy, they wrote, "doesn't sound like that great an idea for a couple with an unplanned pregnancy that already work two part time jobs" — a fair caveat that Norway's wage-replacement generosity, not just its quota structure, is doing real work here too.

Conclusion

If parenthood and career are both on your near-term horizon, don't just compare the number of weeks on offer — compare who the policy actually obligates. Italy's generosity is real but optional for fathers, which keeps the career cost of parenthood landing overwhelmingly on mothers. Norway's generosity is mandatory by design, structured specifically so fathers can't quietly opt out even if they wanted to.

Here's what I'd tell a friend: in Italy, ask your specific employer about paternity top-ups before you need them, because the law alone won't carry you — and know that even visible cultural momentum hasn't yet moved parliament. In Norway, use every week of your quota without guilt; the system was built on the assumption that you would, and declining it doesn't make your partner's life easier — it just wastes leave nobody else can claim.