Men who’ve been on parental leave have a significantly reduced risk of being hospitalized as a result of alcohol consumption. That is shown by a study published in Addiction from researchers on the Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University.

The aim of the study was to evaluate whether fathers’ parental leave influences alcohol-related morbidity and mortality. With a view to try to search out out if that’s the case, the researchers have investigated the results of parental leave policy that was implemented in Sweden in 1995. The policy encouraged fathers to make use of parental leave by reserving 30 days of leave for his or her use alone and resulted within the proportion of fathers using parental leave increasing from 43 percent to 75 percent.

Our findings were pretty remarkable considering the severity of the studied end result. Although alcohol-related hospitalizations were fairly unusual, we found that after the policy was implemented there was a 34% decrease in these hospitalizations amongst fathers within the two years after birth, in addition to smaller decreases as much as 8 and 18 years after birth.”

Helena Honkaniemi, Researcher, Department of Public Health Sciences, Stockholm University

“Most changes were found amongst hospitalizations for alcohol intoxication and alcohol-related mental and behavioral disorders. Additional analyses evaluating actual changes in parental leave use from before to after the policy suggest that these health consequences could possibly be explained by the rise in fathers’ parental leave use, fairly than other underlying trends”, says Helena Honkaniemi.

Nonetheless, no changes were found for alcohol-related mortality.

Co-author Associate Professor Sol Juárez believes that the outcomes of the study could possibly be useful for policymakers.

“Policymakers should consider that fathers’ parental leave not only promotes more gender-equal participation in childcare, but may also reduce alcohol-related harms”, Juárez says.