Grandparents in a Portuguese town will be entitled to paid leave in an effort to boost the country’s low birth rates.
The local council of the seaside town of Cascais, outside Lisbon, said it would grant a month of paid leave for all its employees on the birth of their first grandchild and just over two weeks’ leave on the birth of subsequent grandchildren.
The thinking is that it will give older people a better quality of life as the population ages and encourage parents to have more children, knowing they have support at hand.
“By valuing grandfathers and grandmothers we are seeking to preserve and promote family cohesion and solidarity,” Carlos Carreiras, the mayor of Cascais, told the Portuguese newspaper Expresso.
Portugal shares the problem of other developed countries of a low birth rate and aging population.
In 2022, there were 89,764 births compared with 117,809 deaths.
According to projections, half of Portugal’s population will be aged 50 and over by 2040, and almost one in three will be 65 and over.
Under the council’s scheme, grandparents will also get a small reduction in their municipal taxes.
They can divide their leave into individual weeks – rather than take it as a block – up until the child is three years old.
‘Grandternity’
Mr Carreiras said he is convinced that similar schemes to help grandparents perform family support roles “will become widespread across the country”.
He is already hoping it will be taken up by private companies by offering them a 25 per cent discount on council services if they sign up.
If that happens, those companies would be following in the footsteps of major companies in Britain and the US who are doing something similar.
In recent years, companies including Booking.com, Fannie Mae and SentinelOne have introduced “grandternity” leave for their employees.
In Britain last year, Tesco granted workers who have been given a special guardianship order by a court the same childcare rights as adoptive parents, amounting to 26 weeks’ leave on full pay.
The kinship leave, as Tesco calls it, will apply to grandparents or other relatives looking after the child of a family member, and is intended to help carers stay in the workforce while managing their extra responsibilities.
In Cascais, 23 per cent of the town’s total population are over 65. And out of 2,369 council workers, 42 per cent are aged 55 or over.
‘Intergenerational relationships’
The mayor said the initiative aims to recognise the important role grandparents play in the family while strengthening ties between generations.
“This intergenerational relationship is absolutely fundamental in terms of exchanging knowledge and learning”, he said.
The scheme is being overseen by a new department which also plans to introduce dozens of measures to protect the most vulnerable in society, including children, the elderly and the poor.
More than 400,000 elderly people in the country are considered to be at risk from poverty, living on no more than €551 per month, according to the think-tank’s Pordata database.
Mr Carreiras said that the pandemic showed the importance of protecting “the rights and dignity of the elderly” who were among the most vulnerable to the disease.
It also highlighted that many are suffering from loneliness, particularly in villages where people have left for bigger towns and cities. Of the country’s 10.4 million inhabitants, about a million are elderly living alone, according to figures from Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, a sociological think-tank.