Return from Parental Leave: The Weeks With No Process Attached
Most organisations handle leave well. The request is approved, cover is arranged, payroll adjusts, and a return date goes in the calendar. After that date, nothing is scheduled. The employee is simply back. That gap matters more than it looks, because these returns happen constantly.
How often this happens
In 2025, just over 92 percent of the 124,000 male employees in the Netherlands with a child under one took paternity leave (geboorteverlof). Add the parent who gave birth, and an employer of any size handles several of these returns a year.
The volume is predictable. What follows the return date is usually not planned at all.
Why the first weeks back are the heaviest
Work has accumulated during the absence, and the person is expected to be at full speed on day one.
At home, the night is broken into pieces. The parent who gave birth is still recovering physically, which is easy to forget once someone is back at a desk. The house chores and the appointments did not pause during the leave, and they now compete with a backlog at work.
Each of these is exhausting, but manageable on its own. However, when they arrive together, they are not.
When one parent is not back to full health
If both parents are well, this period is exhausting and it passes.
If one of them is unwell, it stops passing. One person then carries the job, the baby, the household and another adult who needs looking after. The other person cannot take anything on.
This is the version I meet most often in the counselling room. Rarely during the leave. Usually two or three months after the return.
Why it does not get raised at work
Someone who has just come back is careful about how they appear.
Saying they are struggling in the first month sounds, to them, like a poor start. So the honest answer does not go to the manager, who is also the person writing the next review.
What the employer sees is someone who returned on schedule and is getting the work done.
What a conversation at the right time prevents
The useful step is early and small. It is a conversation about what is realistic, held while the person is still coping.
Someone three weeks back will say they are fine, and at that point they believe it. They are still running on the effort that got them through the first fortnight. A conversation that considers the return as a period of time rather than a specific date captures what a return-to-work form does not.
Workplace mental health support for organisations can hold that conversation when it needs to sit outside the reporting line.
Plan the return, not just the leave
Most employers have a well-organised process for someone leaving and almost nothing for someone coming back.
Given how predictable these returns are, that is a cheap gap to close. What it costs to leave open does not appear in the leave administration. It appears months later, as a long absence that looks unconnected to the leave.
Kelly Kim is an NIP-registered psychologist and workplace mental health specialist supporting international and Korean organisations in the Netherlands.
