Application for parental leave: rejected

"It felt like someone was trying to take my child away from me. I didn't care about anything at that moment; my maternal instinct was above everything else." In April last year, Anna Wenner received a registered letter that brought her world crashing down. "Your application for parental leave has been rejected, " reads the letter from the Caisse pour l'avenir des enfants (CAE). Less than a month before the 32-year-old is due to start her first "congé parental", she sits at home with her son crying and no longer understands the world. "Pure despair, " says Anna.

"My son is an absolute dream child. The pregnancy, everything was planned. Having to put my child in a crèche at three months: an absolute no-go, otherwise I wouldn't have had him in the first place, " says the psychologist, explaining her thoughts. Anna is a first-time mother and had already applied for parental leave over five months earlier. When she receives the answer, it comes as an absolute shock. "Of course, I looked up all the requirements online and it also said that you have to have worked continuously for twelve months, which somehow didn't leave any questions unanswered for me, as I've already been working for four years."

The consequences of a few days

What Anna overlooks is the clause that also requires continuous membership of the Luxembourg social security system, which may be interrupted for a maximum of seven days – in Anna's case it was 15 or eleven, depending on whether you count weekends. "I resigned from my old employer on 15 June 2022 and started my new job on 1 July, as is often the case. Even if I had been aware of the requirement, it wouldn't have changed my situation because I was already pregnant at the time of the application, " says Anna.

Her call to the relevant health insurance fund resulted in a sobering realisation: her first parental leave is gone, because the law is the law and nothing can be done about it. "I even asked if I could pay back the membership retrospectively, because it's about finances, but that's not possible either, because you have to be under an employment contract, " says the 32-year-old. Her only option was to apply for a second parental leave, but this would only come into effect on 1 July, i.e. after another twelve months of work. "But then I would have missed a month and a half between maternity and parental leave, so that wasn't an option either."