HELPING STRESSED DADS BALANCE WORK AND FATHERHOOD
Life Lessons Everywhere
Life lessons and observations from U8s football
Life Lessons Everywhere
I was watching my son's team compete in the Tandridge League U8s Trophy Final on Sunday, after a strong first half they ended up losing 6-3, which was a shame…
In hindsight there were some great life lessons to think about
Do what works, if passing the ball worked in the first half, keep doing it - stay consistent.
Stay aware of what's happening around you, sometimes you need to slow down, keep possession (of your thoughts) and look for the pass (opportunity.)
Making life easier for yourself and 'your team' is so important, it's easier the keep the ball then chase and have to win it back again.
When there's a good option to pass, take the pass, don't always try and score by yourself.
If you try and to do it all yourself people stop making themselves available for you, if you ignore the teammate running into space to create an easy 1 2 1, then maybe next time they might not make the run.
T.E.A.M. = Together Everyone Achieves More.
What life lesson did you notice this week?
"Helping Stressed Dads Balance Work and Fatherhood"
I believe that the transition from 'lad to dad', especially the first time round, is the most important and fundamental change any man will face, but it's a transition that leaves many really struggling.
Whereas mums, carrying a baby, are intimately connected to the process of getting ready to be a parent, dads tell me again and again that they only "became a father" when their baby is born.
Birth itself can be sudden and traumatic for everyone involved and this just piles the pressure and stress on, no wonder dads experience depression and mental health challenges.
BTW if you have any doubts you need to read Elliott Rae's PTSD story
Let's talk about dads, let's talk about the pressures and the support that is available, and most importantly let's normalise dads at the heart of the conversation about parenting, because equality at home is fundamentally linked to equality in the workplace.
Research call
WOMBA and Hult International Business School are collaborating to conduct a research study exploring how working parents experience the transition to parenthood in an organizational context. As part of this project, we are inviting working parents (mums and dads) to take part in an interview to share their experiences.
They want to interview:
Working fathers - professional men who have taken shared or enhanced paternity leave within the past two years.
If that sounds like something you could help with please contact
alison@wombagroup.com
Photo Credit Daniel Norin via Unsplash @danielnorin
The gift of Shared Parental Leave
Shared Parental Leave, what it is and why it creates benefits for businesses, dads and families.
The gift of Shared Parental Leave
In an industry which has long struggled with female attrition rate, recent research from law.com that shows 44% of partner promotions in the top 30 are women, (up from 12% five years ago), is to be welcomed. Even if that makes a comparatively minor dent in the 20% representation overall.
Originally published in the LAW Absolute Newsletter for Father’s Day 2021
Gender diversity is good for business - according to McKinsey, the most gender-diverse companies are 21% more like to experience above-average profitability.
For 15 years I have had a ringside seat on my wife’s law career, I’ve seen the dynamics and behaviours driven by hourly billing, the ‘eat what you kill’ mentality, the mental health challenges and the relationship tension that manifests itself as a woman posting “congrats, let’s catch up” on their husband’s 2-year LinkedIn anniversary notification.
It hasn’t always been pretty.
Policy and quotas only get you so far, culture change really matters, which was brought home to me when a younger female client of Lisa’s remarked that when they first met, she had assumed that Lisa didn’t have children “because I didn’t think you could be a mum and do this job.”
She and I both recognised how damaging that was for the prospects of all women.
What do dads want?
In their 30th anniversary report “State of Man” GQ magazine’s readers identified ‘Being a present father’ as the number one aspect of modern masculinity.
While dads in my Facebook group describe these desires
‘Spend more time with my daughter and be a happier person.’
‘To have more time with the kids.’
‘Attend more special occasions. Be a more active figure daily in
their lives.’
Even before the pandemic, research by insurance company Zurich and the UK government-backed think tank 'The Behavioural Insights Team' found that many more men also applied for roles when they offered flexible working options, suggesting the issue is just as important for them as it is for female candidates.
The impact of Covid on parents
The Office for National Statistics found that the first Covid lockdown had led to a 58% increase in childcare undertaken by men but women still did more childcare and women with young children are much more likely to be considering leaving the workplace altogether:
McKinsey reported that in the category of parents of kids under ten, the rate at which women in this group were considering leaving was ten per cent higher than for men.
The Financial Times also reported that this trend is seen at senior levels too:
“Senior-level women were 1.5 times more likely than men to think about downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce because of Covid-19.”
What is Shared Parental Leave (SPL)?
In short, couples can share up to 50 weeks of leave and up to 37 weeks of pay between them. Transferring allowance allows parents to share leave in a way that best suits them.
https://www.gov.uk/shared-parental-leave-and-pay
Why is SPL good for business?
Shared Parental Leave is a mechanism for supporting parents to divide parental leave in ways that work best for them as family - improving well-being and long-term loyalty and performance. Crucially, it is also an opportunity to change the business culture, creating a more diverse workplace.
Initiatives targeted at women create a two-tier system, but when men take extended leave (or seek to work flexibly) it is no longer possible to assume that only women have caring responsibilities, and this broadens the definition of what success and commitment at work looks like.
As Lisa Unwin, writing last month, said:
“The partners explained to me that they’d love to have more women on the team, provided they were able to put in the all-nighters and accept that this is an 80 hour a week job.”
Firms can use SPL to create more diverse workforces and maybe even remove some of the energy sapping, relationship and mental health damaging work structures that persist in the industry.
Photo Credit: Jonnelle Yankovich via Unsplash @jey_photography
Benefits for dads, children, and families.
1) It increases the early bonding experiences between father and child.
2) It creates the opportunity to build skills for long term solo parenting which is important for equality at home.
3) It insulates dads from vulnerabilities in the event of relationship breakdown. How often do you hear the story - 'He can't share custody he doesn't know what he's doing’ ? Harder to say if you have a track record of looking after children on your own.
4) Present and engaged dads create great behavioural outcomes for children.
5) Great for dual income couples, skills learnt by dads builds equality at home.
According to a Harvard Business Review report,
“Women with equal partners at home are more successful at work. When people are less concerned with the impact of their job on family responsibilities and able to focus and commit more fully to their work, it’s no surprise that they’re more productive and able to take advantage of growth and advancement opportunities.”
The leading Law firms do enhance their leave.
https://www.linklaters.com/en/about-us/news-and-deals/news/2019/december/new-parental-leave-policy
Actions businesses can take to celebrate Father’s Day.
The pandemic has changed everything, we can longer assume that men don’t have or want caring responsibilities.
· Review your parental leave provision – putting dads at the heart of policy.
· Identify male fatherhood role models.
· Encourage men to take leave and access flexible working.
· Normalise men taking leave and build a different culture.
There is little point making up record numbers of women to partnership if firm wide culture is still built around long hours and an assumption that men do not want to be present in their families’ lives. It’s lazy and it will cause relationship issues and well-being challenges.
Photo Credit: Larry Crayton via Unplash @ljcrayton
new Dads are new parents too
Nicki Seignot, Author of 'Mentoring New Parents at Work' and founder of The Parent Mentor talks to James and Ian in episode 36 of Lockdown Dads.
New dads are new parents too
Nicki Seignot, Author of 'Mentoring New Parents at Work' and founder of The Parent Mentor talks to James and Ian in episode 36 of Lockdown Dads.
We discuss why supporting new dads matters, the role single dad Phil played to broadening Nicki’s horizons, beyond just supporting the maternity journey and what the post pandemic work landscape could look like.
Plus the usual podcast musings about schools going back, sunshine (!) and looking forward to better future.
Contents
00:50 The power of daylight in the mornings
02:15 Schools going back
02:45 Competitive world book day
04:00 Ian is looking forward to not apologising…
05:30 Christmas presents (!) and Covid
07:10 Nicki’s path-
Taking maternity leave in the late 1990s.
Hard choices and work just not working for mums
Mum2Mum mentoring programme at Asda
The important role of single dad, Phil
That 2011 program became The Parent Mentor business
Her book - Mentoring New Parents at Work and a realisation that dads weren’t part of the conversation.
“I mean, it sounds obvious talking to you too now, but you know, it was quite revelation at the time.”
13:45 A pivotal moment using a mountain top image as part of icebreaker cards
“He held the card up and he says this was me. And I used to go mountain climbing, cycling, you know, the world was my oyster and I don't know where he is anymore.”
And he literally broke down in the session, and I said to my client afterwards, I said, if you are in any doubt about the power of what you're doing, it's in the room right now. We have to talk to dads too.
14:30 The danger of grouping parents as a single homogeneous group
15:30 The Dad Connect programme
16:15 Mentoring v Coaching
18:50 We talk about reverse mentoring
21:45 “Good enough is good enough”
23:30 Work Life Balance
“It took me to have children to respect my work-life balance and to want work flexibly. Why do we give away all that discretionary time? And why does that have to be a parenting thing to want to work flexibly?
So I think in a way the pandemic has given everyone the gift of being able to say, I have a right to a life away from work”
24:00 Hybrid working and the role of line managers
25:50 Incoming culture clash - “working from home is an aberration” ?
26:30 Will there be a generational split about office working?
28:30 The mechanics of hybrid working models
Tips
James’ choose to challenge on parenting norms
Nicki talks about checking in on a new dad back from paternity leave
Ian has been reading Why we sleep? by Matthew Walker
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Connect with Nicki
Photo Credit @kellysikkema via Unsplash
The 'Gram, The Blog and The Daddy
A trailblazer for same sex adoption, Jamie is the Daddy of Daddy and Dad and he joins us for episode 34 of Lockdown Dads.
The 'Gram, The Blog and The Daddy
A trailblazer for same sex adoption, Jamie is the Daddy of Daddy and Dad. What started as an exploration of the highs and lows of Jamie and Tom’s story of adopting two young brothers from foster care, became an award winning blog, key agency resource and an opportunity to work with major brands.
A timely redundancy lead to a focus on blogging, before dipping their toes into Instagram (not just for vintage cat photos…) and moving into the realms of influencing.
We explore the journey into fatherhood, how navigating trauma from previous lives is part and parcel of the adoption process. Plus relationship dynamics in a same sex couple (hint… the breadwinner / carer tension is the same) and the challenges of being dads in a mum’s world.
Contents
01:00 Half term, home-school and house moving.
03:10 James does care what the weatherman says.
04:00 Pets and waiting on Boris.
05:40 Booking holidays and being on TV.
07:00 James reflects on Ian’s sister in law’s Valentine dance.
08:30 The Path - “of course we're two dads, so options for starting a family are slightly different to other couples.”
09:40 Adoption is a huge, convoluted, overwhelming process and at the end of it, you become a family overnight
10:20 I thought maybe I'd write a book or maybe we'd do some kind of video blog or but blogging was my expertise.
11:30 “I was really trying to lay out exactly how I was feeling and how lost we felt sometimes, which people really identified with.”
12:30
Adoption agencies picked it up as a resource for potential adopters to read and it grew really quickly.
“I was made redundant, and it was cliched and everyone said it would be, but it was the best thing for me career wise because I just applied all that extra time on the blog and, and it grew and grew and started to win awards and and really became quite a big part of our lives as well.”
13:45 The mad world of parenthood - there's certain themes that I think everybody can recognise
15:00 Blogging inspiration from soft play and trampoline parks.
17:30 Instagram - not just pictures of cats
20:40 Relationship dynamics - breadwinner and carer
24:30 Support for adoptive parents
26:10 Dads in a mum’s world
27:20 Covid and a pub manager getting it all wrong.
28:00 Changing facilities for dads with babies
30:00 Gay men in a straight world - Valentine's Day and Mother’s Day
Tips 31:10
Read Martin Robinson’s book - “You Are Not The Man You're Supposed To Be”
Involve kids in decision making - a quick story about alarm clocks and bedtime habits.
Watch The Morning Show, Apple TV +, with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston
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Connect with Jamie
Why supporting new dads in the workplace is key to gender equality
The cultural norms around work are changing at a rapid rate thanks to the pandemic, but we must not allow it to widen the gender gap at work. Dads are key
Written for HR Zone
Why supporting new dads in the workplace is key to gender equality
The cultural norms around work are changing at a rapid rate thanks to the pandemic, but we must not allow it to widen the gender gap at work. A key part of this is creating the right conditions for working dads to take on their share of the caring responsibilities.
Writing for HR Zone I explored three key themes:
1. Stressed dads seek new ways of working
2. Dads fear being seen as 'uncommitted'
3. Equality starts at home
“Gender equality took a big hit in 2020. At the start of the pandemic, the government suspended enforcement of gender pay gap reporting. Domestically, women took on more unpaid labour and despite evidence that the first Covid-19 lockdown led to a 58% increase in childcare undertaken by men, the equality gap widened and more recently those gains appear to have rolled back. Facebook groups such as The Career Mum are full of stories from working mums taking on a disproportionate share of unpaid domestic labour, whether it’s childcare, home school support or the mental load.”
Connect with me on LinkedIn and join the debate
Dan Stanley - Becoming Better Men
In a powerful discussion about masculinity, purpose, and self awareness, ex Army Commando Instructor Dan describes how, far from being a magical time, becoming a new dad…
Dan Stanley - Becoming Better Men
In a powerful discussion about masculinity, purpose, and self awareness, ex Army Commando Instructor Dan describes how, far from being a magical time, becoming a new dad led to a 8 month separation in his marriage.
We discover how a chance meeting with an ex premiership footballer, helped him drop his people pleaser mask and literally stop running from his problems.
We discuss the impact of a dad who wasn’t present in his life, running so much your dog gets injured, and seeking to normalise the conversation about modern masculinity. Dan talks about his business principles of creating space for men to develop great relationships with themselves.
Plus… is it sledding or sledging and other pressing questions in 2021.
Contents
01:00 Dan is purposeful, available and congruent
03:00 Ian and the “done” list
04:20 Sledding or Sledging? Snow days as a niche argument in favour of flexible working.
07:25 Birth of Dan’s daughter was the catalyst for “not only the breakdown of my marriage, but also for what was an identity crisis or midlife crisis for me.”
08:10 Dan was running (and avoiding) so much that his spaniel (running partner) actually developed an injury that needed an operation.
09:00 “We separated for about eight months and it was a lonely time.”
09:45
“I kind of felt there's an opportunity here. There's an opportunity for me to use my story. And my authenticity. So allow other people to step into a space where they could unpack the thoughts and feelings, to really make sense of who they are and what they want, but ultimately it's cultivate a mindset for success that enables them to balance their happiness and their career motivations.”
11:10 It's all about normalising the conversation for me. Unless you've got a great relationship yourself, you can't have a great relationship with anybody else.
12:30 My dad wasn't present in my life and at the time I never really gave it any significant thought, but…
13:30
Training all arms commandos from the army. Screaming in people's faces, that in my mind, is counterproductive.
15:30
“I was reading a book called Legacy about the psychology of the All Blacks and a man a few loungers down is reading Chimp Paradox. We must have been the only two guys in the Maldives with self help books”
He was an ex premiership footballer, he'd had a couple of the operations, which hadn't worked…
He said a phrase, which has changed the whole trajectory of my life. He said the only difference between a grave and a rut is the depth. I was like, wow. You know, it was straight in my heart.
17:30 Taking massive and immediate action
18:30 Reflecting on ego and masculinity
19:45 It's about creating that space for men to have the conversations they've never had before, to be heard and listened to in a nonjudgmental space.
21:30 I found myself in the Peak District for five days, on a vegan diet. No caffeine, morning meditation and yoga and spirituality and the men's circles. Craig White was a real, a real catalyst for who I became.
24:00: I stepped away from friendship groups that I felt no longer served who I wanted to become. I realised that my values were kind of just social traits that I'd adopted from other people.
26:30 My story is perhaps extreme in a sense, but lots of guys can relate to avoiding, to placing their head in the sand
Tips (27:00)
Bird watching for the soul
A selection of stoic maxims.
Know thy self - develop yourself awareness.
Nothing to excess.
Surety brings ruin.
Listen to Tim Ferris podcast with Jerry Seinfeld
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More from Dan
I don’t claim to have a superpower, but...
Childcare is a learnt skill, there is no magic mum superpower or special potion that midwives secretly give out and this is way this matters.
I don’t claim to have a superpower, but…
How many dads do you know would be comfortable looking after someone else's 2 year old for 2 days?
A 2 year old who I have only met a handful of times.
That's what I did last summer - like Batman gazing across the roof tops of Gotham I spent half of May on standby for THE CALL.
The call that my sister in law's labour had started. Because someone had to look after my niece. A Grandma was in South Africa, a Grandad was shielding.
"Help me Uncle Ian, you're our only hope." or something like that...
Enter Uncle Ian. No cape, but brandishing Paw Patrol heroes Rubble and Skye and a pedal car for the garden.
Top tip always bring toys... Especially when you are about to collect your niece from the car park of Kingston Hospital...
I can hear your thoughts (actually that is my superpower), why I'm I telling this story?
It's because there is almost nothing a dad cannot do when it comes to looking after their children (breastfeeding is the only thing I can think of). Childcare is a learnt skill, there is no magic mum superpower or special potion that midwives secretly give out.
Supporting new dads with coaching and mentoring, coupled with cultures that genuinely support dads' access to extended parental leave and flexible and remote working from the very earliest days of fatherhood is vital to improve dads' skills and confidence.
Solo parenting, learning from mistakes and building bonds with their children is good for mental health, attainment and equality at home and in the workplace.
Because when dads are there are the forefront of parenting anything is possible.
Including looking after your initially skeptical niece Sana!
Follow my brother Chris and my sister in law Takkies’ lockdown baby story on Emma Willis: Delivering Babies in 2020.
Tune in Monday 15th Feb 10pm @wtvchannel (Sky 109, Virgin 125, BT 311)
and watch out for Uncle Ian's minor supporting appearance! Don’t blink or you may miss it!
Picture Credit: @yuliamatvienko via Unsplash
TV presenter Nigel Clarke Chats about The Baby Club and Dadvengers
“Everyone’s Welcome” as Nigel Clarke, CBeebies presenter, explains how Dadvengers started from an all Dads episode of The Baby Club.
TV presenter Nigel Clarke Chats about The Baby Club and Dadvengers
There’s just not enough time!
Nigel Clarke, CBeebies presenter, explains how Dadvengers started from an all Dads episode of The Baby Club, the groundbreaking show for mums, dads and carers with babies under 18 months old. The Baby Club reflects the important CBeebies mantra that “Everyone’s Welcome”.
We talk about a generational shift in what is expected from and expected by dads and the importance of dads having the skills and confidence to be alone with their kids.
Ian and Nigel try and explain to James what the Clubhouse excitement is all about and we discover how you manage a 4 hour filming session with babies, sing songs (!) and probe Nigel about parenting in the public eye and what goes on at a CBeebies Xmas party.
Contents
01:15 Using Lockdown in the most positive way we can be - “I've found a place where I'm happy.”
02:00 Nigel’s motto - “There just isn't enough time”.
03:00 Special To Do lists
04:00 Children on Teams and Clubhouse
“Somebody told me about it (Clubhouse) and I was like, this is never going to work. But if it's done right, it's like attending a really cool lecture or a really cool networking room where you share stuff.”
06:45 Trying not to get stressed - people are accommodating
08:00 CBeebies closed for a couple of weeks and we, as the presenters, were recording stuff in our homes. So I did a series of links from my lounge.
09:45 Dadchats was a place for me to just research what parents might want to see or hear about in the Dadvengers podcast.
11:20 We did an episode of The Baby Club just with Dads
14:55
“I'm mid forties. So I grew up with a generation where the dads were at work. You see them maybe at the weekend, maybe in the evenings, maybe briefly before they go to work in the morning.
They didn't have the opportunity to be with their kids and around them spending lots of time.”
15:45: Wanting to be more involved - The Baby Club as a platform to really help dads.
18:40 The essence of it was wanting dads from all different backgrounds who were engaged with their kids, who weren't scared to change a nappy.
20:10 The importance of making dads feel welcome.
21:00 Patience and being public figure.
21:30 I don't know if I can really call my work work.
23:30 Chaos and contagious crying - how to film an episode of The Baby Club.
24:45 I know a song that’ll stick in your head….
26:20 What happens on a CBeebies night out, stays on a CBeebies night out.
28:00 Tips
Men need to learn how to listen, not just talk.
Feel good with a squirt of aftershave.
Be present when your kids are there and you're spending time with them, put that phone away, drop it down.
30:44 There's not long left. We're at 13, we're two thirds of the way through, and then it's over, they're gone and they're not kids anymore.
From dad blogging pioneer to founding The Study Buddy
23 year old Nathan, apprehensively mulling over his thoughts about impending fatherhood did what we now take for granted - he started blogging.
From dad blogging pioneer to founding The Study Buddy
As a newly married 23 year old, apprehensively mulling over his thoughts about impending fatherhood while driving the A39 to and from Bristol, Nathan McGurl, founder of The Study Buddy did what we now take for granted - he started blogging.
The My First Kid website has sadly gone the way of our My Space profiles, but the story Nathan tells of dads sidelined from parenting will still resonate to many, even if supermarket parenting clubs no longer limit you to identifying as “Ms, Mrs or Miss”
We blend discussion about bad broadband, good haircuts and expensive contact lenses with a look at lazy and damaging gender stereotyping promoted by the UK government.
Nathan explains how having exhausting all the classic parenting manipulation techniques with his son, he created a system of GCSE revision planning that didn’t rely on learning by osmosis and became The Study Buddy.
Content
01:10 Nathan is a gin and tonic away from being “magenta.”
02:45 James loses the world’s most expensive contact lens.
04:10 Ian on bad broadband, good haircuts and lockdown birthdays
05:50 New marriage, new dad and new millennium - there was a lot going on.
06:50 On the road to Street and myfirstkid.co.uk was born, capturing all of these things flying through my head…
08:20 I started to become more aware of “parenthood” because I don't think “fatherhood” was much of a thing then.
10:00 Parenthood was all about the mums. The Safeway club just assumed it's Mrs. Nathan McGurl. I mean, you could be Ms. or Miss or Mrs, but you couldn't be Mr.
12:20 We talk government and gender stereotyping
15:40 Emails from Mums even more than Dads
I don't want to build it up to sound like it was profound, because it wasn't, it was things like “there's multiple births (triplets and twins) that run through my wife's side of the family… and I’m not sure if I could cope with having more than one at a time.”
It was more an irreverent type of thing, not necessarily a manifesto for fathers.
18:30 The path to creating The Study Buddy
It was deeply practical at the time, my son was going through his GCSEs when he was 16. God love him, he is me. So he's sort of a bit lazy with a sprinkling more cockiness in there than is possibly healthy.
He's every bit as ambitious as his mum and so he wanted to be a doctor, brain surgeon, quantum physicist, whatever it was that he had in his head to do, but his idea to get there was osmosis.
19:30 Using every trick in the book for motivation - “how about I give you a fiver?”
21:00 Then it came to Easter just before his exams,
The shouting is not as effective as I'd hoped. I just had two questions really that I kept asking him and he wasn't able to answer.
first one was… how much work have you got to do?
and secondly… have you got enough time to do all of that work?
22:00 It wasn't emotional anymore because it wasn't me telling him what I thought he should do.
22:47 This is how Study Buddy works
We have broken down all of the GCSEs and IGCSEs and some BTec etc so that we can create this master to do list. I mean, whatever it is you do, you've got to have, even if it's in your head, a list of things and steps that you need to go through. And then the next thing was, well, when are you going to do it?
26:30 You don't need to spend money, but for those parents who actually just don't have the time or the inclination…
27:40 It was built for the procrastinating boy, but this kind of approach helps with, those who are really anxious.
30:00 The power of the student feeling in control
I don't mean to suggest for one second that we implemented this on the Sunday and come Monday morning, we'd had the inverse Kevin and Perry effect, and my child came downstairs, in suit and tie because it wasn't like that! But what did happen, over time, was he started to feel like, he controlled it.
33:10 Tips
CKC = “Communication is key with COVID”
The power of an Excel spreadsheet - people will assume that you're busy and they will walk away.
Zig Ziglar quote “The elevator to success is out of order, but the stairs are always open.”
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Learn more here
https://www.facebook.com/TheStudyBuddyStudios/
Photo credit: @comparefibre via Unsplash
My Inspiration - Catching the “right” Train
Learn how my experiences of navigating the emotional pressures of being a new dad inspired my business vision.
My Inspiration - Catching the “Right” train
It really goes back to 2009, when my wife and I were preparing for the arrival of our daughter, and we were thinking about how we were going to live our lives - what we were going to do differently.
The choice that we made, was that I would ask for reduced hours in 2010 after our daughter was born, and then, at some stage, about six months after she was born, I would stop work altogether. We’d have a transition period and then my wife would go back to work when her maternity leave was over.
Lisa would have 6 months of full paid maternity leave, a good job working as a lawyer in London and I was working as a Management Consultant which is also a good job, a well paid job but in terms of the financial decision, about who was best placed to look after our daughter after those early days, the decision was made that I would take a career break
Becoming a Dad
So in January 2010 our daughter was born and I moved four days a week, with my fifth day, my “at home” day was flexible, built around the business needs.
So I had a pretty good situation. I had a commutable job - consultancy could be really tough, it could be a long way away from home, but actually, for me, for us, it worked pretty well.
However, it was still really really tough. Freya had reflux, quite severe reflux in the early days, and I used to dread the time when I would phone and check in with Lisa to find out how her morning had been.
Emotional pressures
It was a lunch time call. I’d get my sandwich from downstairs… I would sit in a quiet spot outside the office and I would phone in and I would ask her how things were and depending on what she said… it would have a fundamental impact on my emotional well-being for the rest of the day. You know, particularly for her, if Freya was a bit of a nightmare and she was screaming a lot and she wouldn't feed! She was good at sleeping at night - not good during the day at all. That had a profound impact on my own emotional state for the rest of the day.
Catching the right train
What I found out later was that Lisa, knew exactly which train I was planning to get, it was the same train every day and she knew exactly what time I would walk through the door, and if I couldn't get that train, she really felt those extra 15 minutes, they made a real, real big difference to her and it really affected her, it really made the day stretch out and it went so much slower.
Initially I didn't realise the impact of that train. I had a target train. I had something I wanted to do, but knowing how important that was, was a real game-changer for me in terms of how I approached work, how I got focused in terms of leaving on time and getting the correct train.
And that's one of the initial reasons why I founded Inspiring Dads. When I reflected on my experiences, I realised I had knowledge and skills that I could use to help and support new dads through the emotional trauma of becoming a dad.
The Inspiring Dads Vision
Active And Involved Fathers Who Stand Out, Stand Up And Make A Difference
We believe that this generation of dads is ready to embrace a new type of working life, one that blends work and family in a way rarely previously experienced by men.
No longer constrained by traditional and divisive gender norms around “bread-winning” and “caring”, these dads are ready to be the hands-on fathers they don’t remember growing up.
We know that more time spent looking after their children is good for dad’s well-being and mental health, unlocks workplace opportunities for their partners and redefines, for everyone, what “being committed” looks like.in the workplace.
This generation of dads understands that you shouldn’t have to choose between “being a great dad and having a great career”, and with the right support they will drive improved choice and gender equality for everyone.
Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash
Our Values
Flexible Working For All
Everyone wins when dads feel comfortable seeking out the type of flexible working patterns that support their desire to be an active and involved father. #Flexforall.
Supporting Dads Leads To Gender Equality
In order to create equality at home and at work, we need to move away from support that appears to be ‘perks’ just for mums (unequal parental leave, maternity coaching and part time and flexible work).
Communication Is Key
Dads need to be honest about their needs and pressures, and learn to talk openly with partners, managers and co-workers to design working lives that deliver what they and their families need.
Photo Credit: @snapsbyfox via Unsplash
Ian Dinwiddy, Founder
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A new generation of dads wants be an active and involved parent and thrive at work - and this represents a major opportunity for families, the workplace and society.