On Friday, Maroon 5 announced the cancellation of a September 19 concert in Hartford, CT, to accommodate Adam Levine's upcoming baby.
Levine and supermodel wife Behati Prinsloo are expecting their first child — and judging by a recent video Levine posted in his Instagram, the due date falls somewhere smack-dab in the middle of Maroon 5's national tour.
In this latest tour announcement, the band emphasized that all other show dates will remain intact, which suggests Levine will stepping away from work to be with his daughter after her birth for just a short time.
"Sadly it's par for the course for having a baby soon," Levine said, apologizing for the band's recent tour schedule reshuffling.
"Unfortunately, it's life, and it can beautiful," he continued. "But it's also complicated, and I apologize."
Disappointed Maroon 5 fans aside, Levine's apology for a professionally inconvenient pregnancy likely rings familiar to many high-profile mothers whose pregnancies are closely scrutinized. Paging Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and her ultra-controversial two-week maternity leave last September.
Even author (and Beyoncé's feminist inspiration) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie caught side-eye for electing to keep her pregnancy and childbirth private.
“I have some friends who probably don’t know I was pregnant or that I had a baby," Adichie told the Financial Times in September. "I just feel like we live in an age when women are supposed to perform pregnancy. We don’t expect fathers to perform fatherhood."
Case in point: Maroon 5's frontman. Celebs and public figures deserve parental leave just like everyone else. Not to mention, celebrities have the platform and influence that can help broaden parental leave policies and government provisions. Someone like Levine could help normalize the idea of men taking paternity leave.
Mark Zuckerberg was a role model for this in November, when he announced his two-month parental leave in a Facebook post. Not coincidentally, his company also offers some of the most generous and gender-neutral parental leave in Silicon Valley, with 17 weeks of paid leave available for all new parents that can be used all at once or divvied up across a year.
Levine should do fatherhood however he and Prinsloo see fit, and that's a decision only those two can make. More broadly, if quickie parental leave could be seen as a public relations disaster for an A-list female, it's worth considering why we don't hold celebrity gents to the same standard and rarely consider their needs for substantial parental time off, too.
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