MLB’s three-day policy is a starting point — but science says new fathers and their children need far more
Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman stepped away from the team this week after being placed on MLB’s paternity list, a move that gives him up to three days to be with his family, and a timely reminder of how far American workplace policy still lags behind what science says parents and newborns actually need.
For most working parents in the United States, Freeman’s situation will feel both familiar and frustrating. The country has no federally paid parental leave law, and only roughly one in four American workers can access any form of paid family leave. Even among Fortune 500 employers, fathers typically receive fewer than five weeks.
Compare that to Norway, where fathers are entitled to up to 15 weeks of fully paid leave plus an additional 16 weeks of shared parental leave on top of what mothers already receive.
The gap is not just a policy inconvenience, researchers say it has measurable consequences for children’s development and the quality of the father-child bond for years to come.
Fathers With Access To Paternity Leave Often Don’t Take It
MLB stands alone among the four major American professional sports leagues in guaranteeing paternity leave to its players. The NFL, NBA, and NHL have no formal policies in place. That distinction is worth noting, but the three-day ceiling also illustrates the broader national picture: even in industries with formal protections, the leave available to fathers is a fraction of what research recommends.
Studies show paternity leave usage in the US is relatively low, with most fathers taking one week or less, often due to lack of paid options and cultural stigmas. While over 80% of private companies may offer some form of paid leave, uptake is limited by awareness and economic factors.
High-income and white-collar workers are more likely to have access to paid paternity leave and take it, compared to lower-wage workers. Less than half of fathers take any paid leave, frequently relying on vacation or personal days instead. In states with paid family leave (like CA, NJ, NY), only two out of five eligible parents use it, with 60% of non-users citing a lack of awareness, according to studies cited by Forbes.
Researchers call this “flexibility stigma,” a set of informal workplace norms that paint fathers who use parental leave as less committed or less productive. The consequences extend beyond individual families.
According to the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, the stigma around flexibility is damaging to entire workplace cultures because employees broadly dislike working for organizations that penalize people for trying to achieve work-life balance.
When employers explicitly reassure workers that taking parental leave will not harm their careers, fathers are significantly more likely to use the benefit.
The Science Behind Why Early Days Matter So Much
The case for giving fathers meaningful time at home after a birth is no longer just intuitive — it is neurological. Fathers who invest significant time on caregiving show measurable changes in their brain activity, specifically in the connection between the amygdala and the superior temporal sulcus, two regions considered central to the parental caregiving network.
Physical closeness matters, too: fathers who engage in frequent, playful touch with their newborns show elevated oxytocin levels, the hormone most associated with social bonding and connection.
The effects on children are equally compelling, and they do not fade quickly. A 2020 peer-reviewed study led by Richard J. Petts at Ball State University tracked 1,319 families across five waves of data and found that the benefits of paternity leave appear years later in how children describe their relationships with their fathers.
“Results indicate that leave taking, and particularly 2 weeks or more of leave, is positively associated with children’s perceptions of fathers’ involvement, father-child closeness, and father-child communication,” Petts and his colleagues reported in the peer-reviewed study, with children assessed at approximately age nine.
Those associations were explained at least in part by fathers’ deeper engagement, stronger parental relationship satisfaction, and a more committed sense of fathering identity, all of which appear to take root in those earliest days.
How Athletes Changed the Conversation
Freeman is not the first professional athlete to step away from competition for a family milestone, and the accumulation of such moments has had a measurable impact on American culture. A growing number of athletes across sports have publicly announced they would miss games to be present at the birth of their children positioning professional sports figures as visible advocates for normalizing paternity leave among the millions of fans who follow them.
A turning point came when New York Mets infielder Daniel Murphy took the maximum three days of paternity leave guaranteed under his contract. Radio hosts Mike Francesa and Boomer Esiason made inflammatory comments about the decision, Esiason suggesting a player should schedule a C-section before opening day to avoid missing games. The backlash was swift and overwhelming.
As Slate writer Jessica Grosse observed at the time, and as The Muse later highlighted, what was truly significant was not the ignorant comment itself but the scale of the public response and Esiason’s subsequent apology, a signal of how much American attitudes toward fatherhood had shifted. When other players took similar leave in the years that followed, coverage was minimal, not because the story was unimportant, but because the act had become unremarkable. That quiet acceptance is itself a form of progress.
What This Means for Your Family
Freeman’s paternity leave will last at most 72 hours. But the research is unambiguous: those early days and weeks are not optional extras in a child’s development — they are foundational.
The science on paternal brain adaptation, oxytocin bonding, and the long arc of father-child closeness all point in the same direction. Fathers who are present early stay more engaged for years. Children who grow up with that engagement describe closer, more communicative relationships with their fathers at age nine and beyond.
The policy landscape in the United States has not kept pace with that evidence, but every time a visible public figure treats parental leave as a non-negotiable priority rather than a luxury, the cultural permission for every working parent to do the same grows a little stronger.
