Paternity leave is an exclusive right of a father, recognised in 27 countries of the European Union, which can be used in the first few weeks after the baby is born while given high benefits. There are a lot of great examples of paternity leave practices and one of the best can be seen in neighbouring Slovenia, which has gradually increased the paternity leave up to 4 weeks while fathers having high benefits almost the same amount as the real pay. Roda association in cooperation with Status M association and
Embassy of Sweden wanted to examine the opinions of fathers, that have children as far as 3 years old, about installment of paternity leave in Croatia. The online study about parental and paternity leave was obtained in the April of 2018 within the Festival of dad and in the study participated 407 fathers from all the districs of Croatia. The goal of the study was to examine involvement of fathers during pregnancy and childbirth, awareness about their rights, opinions about using parental and paternity leave and their experiene of using parental leave. The results have shown fathers participating in this study as very involved in childbirth preparation but they are very poorly aware about their rights and they hardly manage the parental leave scheme.
