Livre d'Or

Very good point, I should be precise about conveying that active parent doesn't always look like taking a continuous chunk of time fully away from the workplace to care for a young child.

The childcare thing is very much a problem here too, in pretty much the same way you describe. For almost everybody but the very poorest and the very richest, it makes compelling financial sense for one partner to come off the career ladder or even out of the workplace altogether to care for children. And for heterosexual couples that partner is almost always the woman, for both direct sexism reasons and the way society is structured reasons. If both partners can work part-time then men get to be active parents, and women get to compete on an equal playing field in the workplace. It's hard to see the downside, really.