The law was passed unanimously by the National Assembly and the Senate. Parents of a critically ill child can now take 620 days out of the three years provided for parental presence leave.
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It is not easy, when you are an employee, to take care of a child affected by a long-term illness, such as cancer, of a severely disabled child or who has been the victim of an accident. Of course, there is parental presence leave, but it could quickly be exhausted. The law indeed provided that an employee could be absent 310 days, or fourteen months, spread over a period of three years. Concretely, it can be whole days of absence, or it can be converted into part-time or half-days without work.
The deputy Agir ensemble des Hauts-de-France Paul Christophe, at the origin of this bill, noticed that for a fraction of the parent employees who use this device, that was not enough. They used up their fourteen months from the start of the parental presence leave period. Problem: they had to wait until the end of the three years to ask for a next one. The law which has just been adopted changes this system. From now on, if we obtain a new medical certificate from the doctor who follows the child and an explicit agreement from the medical control service, we can take back fourteen months – or 310 days – from the exhaustion of this leave. We can therefore now take 620 days, or 28 months during the three years provided for parental presence leave. So a doubling of sick child leave, which goes in the direction of what the associations demanded.
What do we get during this leave? There is a daily parental presence allowance. That is to say that one is no longer paid by his employer. Here again, the new law is in the direction of parents. It increases the allowance from 43 to 58 euros for a person in a relationship and to 52 euros for a single person. The cost of the measure is estimated between five and eight million euros per year.
A downside, this new device only concerns employees in the private sector. But the government, which is in favor of this device, has promised to include an amendment concerning civil servants in the 2022 social security financing bill.