Pete Buttigieg’s Paternity Leave Was Complicated. Here’s What He Learned

Chris Cohen
·11 min read

GQ; Getty Images

Happy Father’s Day! Read all of our dad stories here.

When I returned from paternity leave earlier this year, my boss here at GQ had an assignment waiting for me: find out how family leave is going for American men. We settled on a survey of new fathers, an unscientific but broad collection of interesting stories—from hourly and part-time workers who simply pieced it together to guys with good jobs and prominent leadership positions. You can read that here.

Working on that project, I unearthed from somewhere deep in my brain the knowledge that Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg had recently taken family leave. The 2020 presidential candidate and former mayor of South Bend, Indiana had become the first openly-gay Senate-confirmed Cabinet secretary while still in his thirties—and there was maybe some dumb Fox News stuff a while back?

A quick Google revealed that it was so much stupider than I remembered: After Buttigieg and his husband Chasten adopted twins in 2021, former Vice President Mike Pence had attacked the secretary for taking time away from work in plainly homophobic terms, then dug himself in about his “joke” when asked to apologize. The whole thing was gross, and weirdly anti-family from a politician who has claimed to be pro-adoption.

Reading on, I realized the culture-war bullshit was perhaps the least interesting thing about the whole situation. On one day’s notice, the Buttigiegs had adopted twins, a boy and a girl, who would need to spend nearly two weeks in the hospital after birth. A little later, their infant son came down with a serious case of RSV, which led to another spell in the hospital.

The couple's kids are now going on 3 and thriving. Ahead of Fathers Day, we got on the phone to talk all about how it went—and not at all about Mike Pence.

GQ: The first question I'm asking everyone for this project is a little different for you. It is: Was your boss cool about it? How did that conversation go?

Pete Buttigieg: [laughs] Uh, yeah, my boss was very cool about it. I knew that before we got the call, before we became parents, I was working for a president who really cares about his team and putting family first. Famously, he did that himself in the Senate. So I knew it was a family-friendly workplace. I felt that even more when we were going through tough medical situations with the kids that meant going back and forth quite a bit. At one point [President Biden] pulled me aside and put his arm around me and said that he was there for anything—anything we needed. That meant a lot—even for a cabinet member, it means a lot when your boss pulls you aside, and tells you that they want to be sure that your family's okay.

It strikes me that your experience is almost typical for so many men in America right now, where paternity leave is becoming so much more normal, but you also sort of have to assert it for yourself.

Yeah. I think there's really two sets of dads out right there, right? There are the dads who should get parental leave, but don't. Everybody should have parental leave. Then there are those who are entitled to parental leave, but the question is whether they can or should use it. And I think it's very important for the fathers to take that leave and be with the kids, just as it is for mothers. There is more to it than [a mother] physically recovering from labor. It is about so many things—not just the bonding, but the literal work. Which not every new parent knows is incredibly demanding and is something that—especially for a first time parent—really takes everything that you've got. It's a little more extreme for us in the particular sense that we became parents on 24 hours notice and there were medical issues, but really for any parent, that time is just critical.

I read something where you spoke about how work life balance in Washington and elsewhere is still sometimes treated as a “women's” issue. That was something you were maybe pushing back against.

Yeah. To be clear, I think expectations and demands on women are disparate. They create barriers to being paid equally and progressing in their careers. But leave, and just generally making pro-family and pro-parent policies? That's for everybody. And in a society that recognizes that dads need to step up, the policies have to reflect that. Sometimes I wonder if part of why we're behind on family policy is because this was treated as a women's issue, and women's issues were not prioritized.

I'm wondering if we could talk about some of the lessons you learned personally. It seems like every new parent has that moment of, like, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” What was that like for you?

Yeah, we didn't know it hit us. I mean, we'd been hoping and preparing to become parents for a very long time. It was a surprise that it would be twins, so there was that, too. The moment you're taking care of an infant, you realize that, not only are they dependent on you, but you are dependent on your village, so to speak, of friends and anybody you can turn to. That's one lesson. In our case, having my husband's parents close by was really important.

I was a young mayor, I was deployed to a war zone, I’m accustomed to working at an extreme pace, but I have never encountered a workload like being a new parent, because it is just relentless. It's a wonderful but incredibly demanding thing. It took us a while, but Chasten and I actually figured out that we needed to resort to a shift system. I would go to bed as early as I could so that I could wake up somewhere between two to three in the morning, when he had to tap out, to start my day and take care of the kiddos. It's one thing to get calls in the middle of the night sometimes. It’s another for your day to begin at three in the morning every single day because that's when the twins needed attention.

I've heard it said that it can almost be harder for achievement-oriented people, because you can't win at it or be the best. You just sort of have to live it.

Yeah. It is not like you ever say, OK. This job is done. The job is never done by its very nature. Sometimes you make some leaps forward and then fall a little bit. And there's a different set of rewards and feedback, especially with infants—your feedback is that they're crying out for more. That is something that takes a lot of getting used to, if you're used to having a certain task system for evaluation and you get thrown into parenting. It really is just the most humbling thing. But of course, on the other side of that are these incredible rewards that make it better as well as harder than anything you'll ever do.

You have a uniquely demanding job, but at the same time, I think there are lots of dads out there who question whether they're going to be able to not take calls or not jump on a Zoom. How did you manage that, and do you have any lessons or advice there?

Obviously in my case, there were some things that could not wait that I handled. But for anything that could wait or could be handled by our fantastic deputy secretary or another department official, I really sought to let that happen and be present for the leave that I took.

I really encourage our team to do the same thing. Right now our chief speechwriter is on parental leave. At one point our undersecretary was on leave. The more you can fully lean into it the better. Again, in my case, there were limits sometimes. There were times being in an ICU room when I would have to duck into an adjacent bathroom with a laptop so that I could be on a Zoom.

Part of why I made a point of taking the leave was: Not only was it the right thing to do for our family and my kids, but I wanted to send that signal to the 55,000 people who work in this department that they should take advantage of the leave policy. That right is theirs, even if not everybody, certainly not every father, views it as something that’s OK to do.

And would that be your recommendation to someone else in a management position? That their example matters?

Absolutely. The more senior you are, the more it will feel like nobody can function without you. But in a healthy organization there are of course ways to plan and to time things. I would say the reasons are twofold: First, it demonstrates that the organization is healthy enough that it can operate with a temporary absence. And secondly it signals to other parents that they should do the same.

Did you find yourself with a favorite task or a favorite daily rhythm?

I think we're wired to be clouded by nostalgia a little bit. Those 3 a.m. wake-ups, pouring out a little granola for myself and then getting ready to make the formula for the kids? Now I look back on it warmly, but it was incredibly hard.

One of my specialties is bath time, to this day. It's one of the most chaotic but also one of the most fun parts of the day. Of course, early on, you’re terrified. That changes. It's crazy how quickly it changes. I remember when we were fighting for our daughter to feed, and being there in the hospital feeling like we were counting, fighting for every milliliter. Now it's like, Can I have more pancakes?

That's so great to hear. Did your experience leave you with any sort of lessons in terms of policy or just the general of shape of American society?

Well, look, we were very conscious that we were lucky. A good job, with a good leave policy and health insurance. Extended family and friends nearby who could pitch in. I don't know how else we would have survived the period when I had our daughter in a hotel room near the hospital overnighting in the ICU with our son. We'd swap out—I don't know when we could have eaten otherwise. Friends and family were there in a lot of ways.

Chasten jokes that the least convincing advice we got was “sleep when they sleep” because, as he says: Fine, we do laundry when they do laundry and we take out the trash when they take out the trash. There were some dark moments when I wondered if the time that I had on leave was gonna be the only time that we got. Which—I thank God—is not how it happened.

The bottom line is that, it's one thing to talk about being pro-family, it's another to respond to the needs of family. And one very, very important, and in my opinion basic thing, is to make sure that working parents have time and space they need to be parents—which by the way also helps them to be in the workforce.

That makes perfect sense to me. Family leave is both pro-family and pro-work, in a way.

But then the other thing is the work that you would do while on leave just might be the hardest work of your life.

Did you come back to your job with a new perspective? Did it feel easier or was there a sort of lightness to it? Some people have described that.

I can't say there's ever lightness in a role like this. It's always in demand. But there is a different perspective. You know, you are reminded of what is more important than how you're viewed politically. And I guess the other thing you think about is how lots of people could do your job—no matter how talented you think you are. But nobody can be the parent that you are to your kids.

Originally Appeared on GQ

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