Stay-at-home dads are being left out of the 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.

Stephen Heron, stay-at-home dad

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.”

The comments he gets are more “guy to guy”. “Men can’t comprehend not having work to focus on,” he says. “I’m a guy at home who doesn’t have that gratification of work. It’s a slow grind rather than a satisfying deadline. It doesn’t always fill your tank in the same way. Your work is never really complete.”

When he attended an ice-breaker for parents at his son’s primary school, he immediately felt like an outsider. “They’d pulled together six tables in a local park,” he recalls. The other mums effortlessly chatted away. “I didn’t feel I could jump into the conversations as there was no common ground unless I spoke about my son.” When he sees other dads at school, he “buddies up” with them instead.

All the same, one wonders whether his own misconceptions of parenting have shaped the difficulties he experiences. The biggest challenge, he says, is not having the time for self-care on a “mental, physical and spiritual level”. “I underestimated how tired I would feel,” he says.

There can also be domestic implications for families where the main child-carer is male. US research has revealed that a man who is financially dependent on his wife may be more inclined to cheat – and the greater the earning gap, the more likely they are to have an affair. Other reports suggest that stay-at-home dads find it harder to get a job when the children grow up than men who have remained in their jobs.

Of course, many of the problems male carers experience are ones nearly all mothers have had since time immemorial – the lack of time for oneself, exhaustion, falling off the career ladder due to childcare obligations, patronising assumptions. When I first went on maternity leave, I had a few comments from people telling me how lucky I was, as if looking after a newborn baby was one long lazy holiday.

Yet perhaps perceptions are starting to shift. Tom Bailey, 47, an NHS speech and language therapist who lives in northwest London, is just about to take the plunge to become a stay-at-home dad for his two daughters, four, and two. “It’s a financial decision and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to spend time with my girls,” he says.

His high-flying marketing executive wife is the breadwinner – and when their children were in nursery full time, the fees were “equivalent to my wage” he says. It will provide his family with a very different work-life balance.

He acknowledges he is up against preconceptions. When he took his children to sign them up for groups, the assumption was that their mum would be the one taking them. “I come from a female-dominated profession already, so it won’t be that unusual for me,” he adds. “But you can’t help but feel like a spare part in this mum world.”

But in other respects, he argues, it’s a more level playing field on a domestic level between him and his wife. There is no expectation, for instance, that the house will be spotless when his wife returns from work, as can be the case when it’s the woman who stays at home. “She knows I won’t have much downtime.” He doesn’t feel emasculated: “As a family we are doing the right thing – and I feel blessed having this quality time with my children. It’s a unique position to be in.” His male friends, he says, wouldn’t have chosen it. But for him it’s liberating not having to be somewhere at a certain time. He’s even hoping to hang out with another stay-at-home dad in his street.

I have to admit that the next time I see a dad consistently at school, I’m going to make a real effort to include him. As a working mum, I’m so caught up in the hectic whirl that I never realised the struggles of the dad at home, and as time goes on, I hope there are more of them. It’s time we stopped seeing them as a rarity. And making childcare more inclusive might also just be the change to the monotony of the school gate that we all need.