Stay-at-home dads are being left out of parenting conversation

When a dad friend was made redundant and took on full-time childcare duties, I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him. Overnight the adrenaline rush of working in finance was replaced by the mundanity of sticking on a wash or finding the lost PE kit. The family usually had a nanny but to save money he stepped in — and thrust himself into the mum circle as a result. At the school gates, he would listen as we gossiped away and worried about the juggle — and at one play date, he even ended up mowing my lawn and cutting up a manky sofa with an axe so I could get it out of the door. (This wasn’t your average play date, of course. It was a full-on DIY moment.) But however efficient he was at childcare, and he was very efficient, he couldn’t help but look like a fish out of water.

I thought of this when Tom Holland last week revealed his plans to quit acting and become a stay-at-home dad when he and Zendaya, who are engaged, decide to have children. “When I have kids, you will not see me in movies anymore,” he told Men’s Health magazine. “(My life will be just) golf and dad — and I will just disappear off the face of the earth.” He’s not the only one. Wayne Rooney is also reportedly planning to take on the role of house husband to his four sons this year after leaving his manager post at Plymouth while his media personality wife Coleen concentrates on her career. Most excitingly of all, a new reality show House Husbands is on the cards. A recent casting callout gave some idea of who the producers are looking for, declaring: “Are you a proud husband holding down the home front while your powerhouse wife takes charge in the boardroom, on set, or in the operating room?”

Yet although the number of dads leaving the workforce to look after their children in the UK rose by a third from 2019 to 2022 according to Office of National Statistics data, stay-at-home dads are still very much in a minority. “House husbands” currently represent 1.7 per cent of all men living with dependent children, compared to 13.9 per cent of women in the equivalent category.

“It is still an extremely countercultural thing for a man to be a stay-at-home father,” says Dr Jeremy Davies from the Fatherhood Institute, a charity that publishes research on fathers, and lobbies for them to be taken into greater account in family life. Government policy, he argues, has failed to “catch up” with the fact more families want fathers to be more involved with childcare. Early learning centres do “nothing to engage with fathers” and as a result “often fathers don’t realise how important they are because there is nothing to disrupt the message that it’s all about mum”.

The UK’s statutory paternity leave offer is the worst in Europe — and it’s almost the worst in the world, he adds. Dr Davies is part of a campaign for all UK fathers to have the right to six weeks’ well-paid leave in their baby’s first year, as a minimum. Currently, fathers get two weeks paternity leave paid at £184.03, or 90 per cent of their average weekly earnings (whichever is lower). Since 2011, dads have also had the right to take up to six months unpaid leave during the child’s first year — if the mother returns to work. Yet research from charity Pregnant Then Screwed has found that three in five fathers (63.7 per cent) took two weeks or less paternity leave following the birth of their most recent child. This is despite only 18 per cent of the UK population believing that two weeks or less paternity leave is enough. For all the obvious domestic and familial benefits of paternity leave to family life, 70 per cent of fathers who only used part of their paternity leave entitlement said they simply couldn’t afford to take unpaid leave. “The current offer sends a very clear message that fathers are not really valued and supported,” says Dr Davies.

There are also hardwired cultural reasons why men find it hard to take time off to look after their children. While the role of a mum as the full-time carer for children is widely accepted, fathers who take the same decision can be judged and isolated. The very term househusband is even seen by some as not very manly. In 2022, Stephen Heron, 37, a former physiotherapist moved with his journalist wife, Mei, and their son, five, and daughter, two, to London from New Zealand when his wife got a job promotion. His daughter was five months old at the time and Heron put his career on hold to become a stay-at-home parent. Until that point, the couple had both worked part-time, sharing the childcare with a vision that they’d always raise their children themselves during their formative years.

Heron had always liked the idea of spending time at home with the children. But he encountered a lot of gender bias when he took on the job full time. “Friends and relatives always ask: ‘When are you going to return to work?’,” he says. “There’s a much greater acceptance that it’s the woman who will be the one at home. Or else, they assume it’s a pretty cushy life.”