Superhero window washers make children's day at Brazil hospital

At a children's hospital in Sao Paulo, two window washers dressed up as Batman and fellow superhero "The Flash" lit up the faces of young patients.

A day ahead of Brazil's celebration of "Children's Day" on Wednesday, the washers waved to the ill kids at Sabara Children's Hospital, took pictures with them from outside, and placed their hands on the glass sentimentally.

Jaquelina Maranhao said their visit lifted the spirits of her 8-year-old daughter Isabela.

"She was happy and got up to look and that was very good," Maranhao said. "When they are sick, they are a little down, quiet, so this helps them have fun."

The superheroes said they too were fulfilled by their visit.

Daniel Barbosa, dressed in red and gold as the main hero from the American television series "The Flash," said he wanted to bring some happiness to the children.

"When I get home, I hug my daughter and feel stronger, freer, calmer, more peaceful, and I feel like I can pass this peace onto these children," Barbosa said with a smile.

Laura, 9, said Barbosa's gestures brightened her day.

"There is nothing to do in the hospital and, with these activities, a child's day is happier," Laura said.

Source: Reuters

As baby leaves go gender-neutral, dads get time off

When Brian Cooksey joined a tech startup as a software developer in 2011, he was not thinking about the benefits package, especially not the parental leave policy - and neither was the company.

And when Cooksey became the first employee at Zapier to expect a child, management came to him for feedback on what the policy should be.

"They said, 'We're looking at 14 weeks of paid leave, what do you think?,' I remember thinking, 'Do they really mean weeks?!'" says Cooksey, 30, who has three children, ages 11, five and 13 months and lives in Columbia, Missouri.

After his second child was born, his previous employer only gave him 14 days of parental leave.

What changed in the meantime time was a key decision by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2014 that mandated all leaves be treated the same, beyond the birth of a child qualifying for medical short-term disability.

So any "bonding" time has to now be offered equally to birth mothers, fathers and adoptive parents - or even those caring for other family members.

Also some state laws, such as in California and New Jersey, now mandate paid family leave. More states are adopting similar policies.

In 2015, companies started to announce new offerings, too, says Brian Gifford, director of research and measurement at the Integrated Benefits Institute, a nonprofit research group.

Although just 3 percent of the tech workforce has a child under the age of 1, companies want push the envelope because they are in such competition to get and keep employees, according to the organization's research. "The numbers of who is going to take it doesn't matter so much. They want to be supportive of their workers," Gifford says.

In other sectors, there is still work to do on parental leave policies, particularly for men. Human resources at one power company wanted to put a gender-neutral parental leave policy in place, but the pitch to the CEO did not go so well, says Rich Fuerstenberg, a senior partner at the benefits consultant Mercer.

"I'm not paying for a dude to have a baby" was the feedback, Fuerstenberg notes.

Overall, the U.S. lags in paternity leave policies among leading economies around the world. According to Mercer's 2015 survey on Absence and Disability Management, only 25 percent of companies surveyed offered paid leave after the birth of a child, with companies like Google, Microsoft and Netflix leading the way with their generous benefits highly publicized.

But plan designs vary widely.

One company Fuerstenberg knows provides 16 weeks of leave, but it has to be consecutive - if you come back early, your eligibility ends.

Another offers 12 weeks, but you can come and go three separate times. Still others allow new parents to take a leave within the first year, but it does not have to be immediately, so two working parents could stagger their respective leave dates.

Employees also need to note that "paid" leave may not mean you get your full salary, says Brenna Shebel, director of healthcare costs and delivery for the National Business Group on Health, a non-partisan research group.

"More commonly, we're seeing 60 percent income replacement for parental leave and disability," Shebel says.

THE UPTAKE

Just making a policy is half the battle. The uptake rate for fathers taking leave depends on the messaging they get from their companies and they examples they see, says Shebel.

"The easiest thing is to have leadership walk the walk," adds Mercer's Fuerstenberg, noting the impact Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made with his parental leave.

Getting the human resources team up to speed certainly helps. When Mike Schaffer, an executive a communications firm Edelman in Washington, went to talk to his HR department about paternity leave options, there was a binder full of information.

"To be honest, there weren't a lot of fathers in my company that were role models. But I was able to take a full month off, which was encouraged and fully supported," says Schaffer, who also blogs about his three kids, ages three, five and three months. (thebestdadblog.com)

At first, Cooksey doubted whether his company's offer was sincere, but they persisted with encouragement. "Being the first one, I did think I should take it because it will set the precedent," he says.

Three other dads-to-be at the company have since come to him with questions. Cooksey tells them: "Don't be afraid to take the whole thing and unplug. Really unplug. You'll be OK, and you'll be happy you did."

Source: Reuters

Can social media save Syria's children?

As the image of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh looking dazed and bloodied after an airstrike on his Aleppo home went viral, the online conversation once again focused on children and war.

Omran Daqneesh is not the first Syrian child whose image has been shared thousands of times on social media this month. A high profile Twitter campaign resulted in the evacuation of a wounded girl from the besieged Syrian city of Madaya. More than 34,000 people used the hashtag #SaveGhina in order to focus attention on 10-year-old Ghina Wadi - Amnesty International said she was shot by a sniper when she went out to get medicine for her mother.

The Syrian government initially refused to let Wadi leave the town for medical treatment, but a social media campaign, as well as pressure from humanitarian authorities including Amnesty International and the United Nations, culminated in the Syrian Red Crescent arranging her transit to Damascus for treatment.

Madaya, which is 25km (16 miles) north of Damascus, has been under siege since mid-2015 by government forces and their allies from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. The situation has been described as "critical" by aid agencies. Some 40,0000 residents are said to be affected by food and medicine shortages.

Since Wadi's story went viral, several video appeals have sprung up on social media asking for the evacuation of children in similar situations.

On 15 August, a video showing a boy called Yaman Izz al-Din, also said to be in Madaya, was shared by a Facebook group called Hashtag Revolution. He is said to be suffering from acute meningitis.

"The boy has a high grade fever - if this lasts, he might lose his sight or become paralysed," says a man, who introduces himself as a doctor, as the boy screams in his bed.

The clip, which was viewed more than 5,500 times on Facebook, ends with an appeal by the doctor to the UN and Syrian Red Crescent to save his life.

Another clip on the Hashtag Revolution page shows the mother of a girl named Nisreen al-Shamaa appealing for her evacuation. The mother looks into the camera and says that her daughter has been ill for 25 days and can neither see nor move.

There have also been several tributes to children who have been killed in Syria's conflict.

The UN children's agency has warned that thousands of children in the Syrian city of Aleppo are at risk of disease, while the UN envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, angrily condemned all parties for not doing enough to stop the fighting.

Research by BBC Monitoring

Source: BBC