Speaker 1Hello and welcome to the How Not to Screw Up Your Kids podcast. So, pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. Today's episode I am joined by co-founder of Dadshift, Alex Lloyd-Hunter. We're talking about the role that fathers play in raising resilient adults, the importance of ever-present fathers and how our current UK paternity leave is sadly grossly lacking. So, basically not enabling fathers to be there as part of that process of raising our resilient adults. This is such an incredible interview with some real insights into how we can help support the Dadshift campaign, but also really importantly understand how and in which ways we can enable fathers to be more present when it comes to raising resilient adults. So, you're going to love this one. It's a great one. Before we start and before we head into the interview with Alex, as ever, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, I would be eternally grateful if you could rate, follow and review the podcast so that others can find us and we can spread the love. So, until next time, here's our conversation with Alex.
Speaker 2So, I'm Alex. I am the father to a lovely three-year-old boy. I spent my career working with charities, doing and about six months ago, I co-founded the Dadshift, which is a campaign for better paternity leave in the UK. We're campaigning on this because the UK currently has the worst statutory paternity leave in Europe. It's two weeks, paid at less than half the minimum wage, and that is rubbish. It creates problems for everyone in the family, but it also creates problems more broadly in society, particularly for young boys, which obviously people have been talking about a lot recently.
Speaker 1It's such a hugely important and topical conversation at the moment. Obviously, we're all, as parents, aware of the adolescence, the Netflix drama, which I would definitely like to touch on. But I'd like to sort of explore the paternity piece a little bit more. So, recently, there were some amendments, weren't they, to the paternity leave, so that there could be this enhanced aspect. What does that actually mean for a father?
Speaker 2So, the history of, going back a bit, the history of paternity leave in this country. So, we've just had the 22nd anniversary of it being introduced. So, the last Labour government brought in these two weeks and paid roughly the same amount. It actually used to be paid slightly more relative to the minimum wage, but it's gone down. And then about 10 years ago, the Conservative government saw the problems that we were having with paternity leave, that it's too poorly paid, so a lot of people can't afford to use it, and those who do end up in financial hardship. And particularly that it was reinforcing gender inequalities, that it was driving women out of the workforce who didn't want to leave the workforce. It's the biggest, one of the biggest contributors, to the gender pay gap now. And they tried to fix that by bringing in shared parental leave, which allows you to transfer some of the maternity leave over to the father or non-birthing parent. The problem with that is that, A, hardly anyone can afford to use it, and B, because dads don't have their own decent leave, there's a big barrier to people. They don't feel like they want to take maternity leave away, and mothers understand we don't want to give it up. So, what you see is that less than two percent of people are actually using shared parental leave, and those who do are over overwhelmingly the wealthiest. So, we haven't, we haven't had any meaningful improvements since then. The government has, in their employment rights bill, just changed it so that paternity leave is going to be a day one right. If you get a new job, you're entitled to it from the first day, which is really welcome, but the pay isn't a day one right. So, you can give your two weeks, but it'll be unpaid. Which, by the way, if you're self-employed, you have no entitlement at all, which is another area that we're miles behind other countries on.
Speaker 1Yeah, and actually, I mean, I looked at some data, which is pretty stark. So, I've got three in five fathers took two weeks or less paternity leave following the birth of their most recent child. Less than a third of fathers are able to access enhanced paternity leave anyway, and 50% of those that did access it, didn't access it fully because they couldn't financially afford to do it. And so, it's a big, big issue. Obviously, it's a really important campaign, and it's something that we need to address. For those that are listening to this, what are the key, because people will be listening to this as parents, but also they will be, they will have a voice in a boardroom, potentially, they'll have a voice in the HR, they'll have potentially a voice in their community. Can we talk a bit more about the fundamental, hugely documented benefits of fathers being given the opportunities to be more involved in parenting?
Speaker 2Definitely. So, as you say, they are huge, varied, and very positive. And of course, it's worth saying that, you know, this only applies if your family does have a father in it. There are lots of ways to have a family, and they're all great. But the evidence is very clear that when there is a dad, if they are more involved, their child will grow up happier, they'll do better at school. So, it's good for their kids, it's good for the father themselves, they will be happier, they'll live longer. I saw some research that said they're less likely to abuse drugs, they're more productive at work, their relationship is less likely to break down. And that's something that I saw firsthand with my own parents' relationship, how the inequality of childcare really drove a wedge between them. And then finally, it's really good for mothers, because it is, we hear from so many mothers who, in the early weeks, for example, they had a C-section, and they were told, you can't lift your baby for six weeks, it might take you six weeks to recover. They didn't have family nearby, and their partner went back home. After two weeks, and we've heard from people who were left in absolute agony, someone who even ripped their cesarean stitches, because they were just, they were left with no one to do the physical stuff that was needed. And of course, it can be really tough on your mental health for both parents. So that's like the short term thing. But the long term benefits for mothers are that we see this all around the world, it's the one advantage of being bottom of the table, as we can see how this has played out everywhere else, is that in countries that offer better paternity leave, you end up with fathers being able to take on more childcare longer term. And that means that mothers who want to can go back to work, they can advance their careers, it reduces the discrimination that we see against women at work, because employers see them as a baby risk, and so don't promote them or fire them when they shouldn't do. And so there's real measurable benefits to women's pay, you see that improving paternity leave brings down the gender pay gap. And for every month of paternity leave, a father takes, there's research in Sweden that shows that improved the mother's earnings by 7%. So it's a really important move to make to bring the way we support families up to the way 21st century society works. But we have these 21st century values about how we want to parent these 21st century economic systems, and then these kind of 1950 systems that just don't match.
Speaker 1How can we. begin to make that shift particularly that there may well be some inherent potential biases that we as individuals have within ourselves that mean that we don't ask those questions and we don't kind of help make those those shifts because we're unaware of the things that we do that perpetuates this yeah
Speaker 2it's an interesting question i mean i think you are to sort of answer that question in a slightly different way i think something that is definitely true is the way we have parented as a society has changed in lots of ways and one of those ways is that it's become much less community-based and much less based around the extended family and much more nuclear in the sense that it's something that happens a lot more inside the house rather than out in the community and that puts the pressure more and more on parents and so that's where you see the importance of fathers stepping in and out of the community and that's where you see the importance of fathers stepping in to fill that role but perhaps might have been filled by the community or by extended family that's that sort of is the first shift that we need to make as a society is understanding that fathers are no longer optional really or sec you know the the non-birthing parent is no longer optional it's not really a choice anymore for most parents to have a single caregiver and a parent who goes to work because economically that's just not viable for most people so now what you tend to see is that mothers have to do every thing and fathers want to do more at home but they're locked out so i think that recognizing that shift is important but i think the point i want to add to that is that all the evidence we see is that particularly amongst the generation of parents parenting today that attitude shift has largely already happened in the sense that for example 90 percent of fathers agree with the statement that fathers these days want to be a bigger part of their kids lives if you ask people across ages genders and genders and genders they don't agree with the statement that fathers these different parts of the country levels of income 82 percent of people think it's better when both parents have equal chance to be involved in child care versus one so in some sense that the the soil has already kind of been plowed for us to like plant these seeds we just need to make the actual practical system change that will then reinforce this through a virtuous cycle and that's what we've seen in other countries who've well ahead of the game
Speaker 1on this alex are there any companies that have taken it upon themselves okay there's no limit to how much money they're going to make legislation beyond the two weeks paternity but are there any companies that are exemplifying this in that they have made an active decision regardless of legislation to offer their fathers greater paternity leave yes more and more
Speaker 2companies are doing that it's not quite as common as enhanced maternity leave but it is it's going up and what you tend to see is that it is often bigger companies who are able to be more generous with that as you would expect and that is that is why we're looking at statutory reform and we're looking at statutory reform and we're looking at statutory we're calling for statutory action by the government rather than focusing just on business because ultimately what we're seeing is something of a growing two-tier system where if you work for a big company we're probably better paid anyway you can get lovely paternity leave that's fantastic and you should take it if you can get it if you work at a smaller company you may already be on a lower salary and they can't afford to give you that and so you miss out but it is a really positive thing that more businesses are doing this and you see some of them offering equal leave to mothers six months pay or more you know it's transformatively different and that's something that yeah we really welcome
Speaker 1yeah and i think you're right it's it's about leveling the playing field in that regard and i think i would the thing that i would add that i know that you've alluded to at the beginning alex but i just want to kind of reinforce here is that obviously we're talking in this scenario of where you've got two parents but at even when we're talking about paternity leave or just raising that that awareness if you are a single parent and you're a single parent and you're a single parent and you're a single parent and you're a female single parent of the true impact of having males in a child's life this is not about saying perfect parenting has to have this idealized one of each as co-parents but much more the the real significant role that men make in the development and the nurturing of all children whether they're girls whether they're
Speaker 2boys yeah i think that's spot on and i think that extends more broadly to getting more men into caring roles and child care roles in society you know i my son goes to nursery there are probably 10 15 staff at the nursery not a single one is a man i'm not sure i've ever met a man who works at a nursery and so what that means is from the absolute earliest age children are internalizing caring is a woman's job it's not a man's job and you see that in primary education there are far more women working primary education than than men and so that i think alongside you are absolutely spot on we need those male role models for caregiving right from the beginning that doesn't need to be a father but we need to get more of them in society they are really important
Speaker 1and how do we address that there's a so we've got the department of social justice the lost boys report and i'm not going to refer to loads of it but there was there's a couple of bits that i thought almost like a how do we reconcile the somewhat conflicting narrative about society not valuing traditional male values of courage resilience and competitiveness which were outlined in the report how do we reconcile that bit with the empathetic sensitivity required to be a male in that caring role or is there no conflict i mean how do we reconcile
Speaker 2these things yes i think this is a really important part of why we need change in areas like paternity leave you know we are it's becoming clearer and clearer through this report through gareth southgate was talking about this recently of course through adolescence that it is a really rough time to grow up as a teenage boy in particular and i really feel for this generation of children who are essentially guinea pigs for this sort of giant social media experiment that um we have no you know we don't know what it's doing and we're learning as we go on the damage that it's causing and i think what we're seeing is there is this vacuum that has been created that the the role the traditional male role has changed over the last 40 50 years from a very set provider financial provider protector role was your partner would stay at home and look after the house and kids and women have now been freed economically more and more that's a really good thing they are getting careers they're going to work they're taking on more of that traditional male domain we have not done the work as a society to expand the role of men back the other way so there's a lot of there's now a smaller space that is traditionally male and it's a very confused space and so the the uncertainty around that is being filled by people who say the way that we reassert you can you can assert your status your confidence as a man or as a boy is through winding back the clock to going back to these hyper traditional masculine values that say it's not about partnership with women it's about dominating women it's about saying that this is a zero-sum game that their benefits are your losses and that is not true at all and part of what we think is so important about focusing on active fatherhood is that it is a core part of a different vision for what a good life as a man can be and crucially something like paternity leave completely diffuses the idea that you can't improve things for women and men at the same time because you you can right bad paternity leave is bad for men it's also bad for women and that's why we have men mums and dads supporting our campaigns so strongly on both sides and i think finally on your your question about how do we reconcile that with the empathy needed for me it is about what the this idea of masculinity has been sold online to people for like savandute and so on is that you achieve fulfillment through power and money and status and dominance and that is a recipe for unhappiness we just know that all the research shows that pushing people into rigid hyper masculine norms makes them less happy it increases suicide rates it worsens their mental health it makes them lonely and isolated and the the route to a happy life as a man is through connection and one of the tragedies of the norms that men have been pushed into for so long is that we have been denied connection and there can be no more important connection than with your children and so that is you know i think i think fatherhood is not going to be what everyone has but for those who become fathers they're going to be the ones who are going to be the ones who are going to be fathers we want it to be the anchor of their happy fulfilled life and not the kind of rubbish that you hear from the likes of andrew tate and others
Speaker 1yeah and i think you've raised that important piece and i know that gareth southgate talked about it as well about the role how important it is in terms of having male role models and so when we have fathers present in fatherhood because they have access to the same level of support as women to be present as fathers through paternity they see through that model directly in their home what it means all of the nuances that the the values that a man encompasses as well as strength but empathy and sensitivity too
Speaker 2yeah absolutely absolutely and i think we can also it's about it's about espousing a different kind of strength right it's not kind of shallow physical strength it's not getting jacked at the yourself status it's strength through emotional openness it's strength through admitting when you're wrong it's strength through being able to support others when they're struggling and admit when you're struggling like it's a different kind of strength i'd argue a much more difficult kind of strength and if you model that from an early age then of course your sons will grow up believing that that's desirable um so yeah i
Speaker 1agree before we um had we came on air i had a quick internet search in terms of celebrity fathers just to sort of see because actually i think the more people talk about this but it is interesting so i've just got a few quotes from some some celebrity fathers that this is probably for me i had to actively search it i've not seen it in the press in any headline so chris pratt says nothing he's ever done means as much as being a dad ryan reynolds says he would literally do anything to protect his baby and brad pitt has talked about trying to be a better father than his own yet i had to go digging to find these
Speaker 2yeah absolutely i mean he hit the nail on the head we actually launched the campaign with a stunt where we went and put baby grows on statues of famous people and just some sort of normal members of the public these statues around london and edinburgh so there was you know scoring a goal on his knees with a baby structure chest or gene kelly singing in the rain baby structure chest and the whole point we were trying to make was if you are a woman in public life you're constantly asked about your family you're defined as your family first and your job second but if you're a man it's completely opposite you are your job you're your career what you are what you contribute to society through that and what you contribute as a father and that massive part of your identity in your life is is secondary and not really something that people pay attention to so that's that's what we were trying to do there and i think part of the you know got a huge response to stunt lots of media coverage people really enjoyed it i think people liked the visual stories they were kind of fun but i also think part of it was it was a bit of a novelty thing i'm like oh dad's talking about babies you know fancy that that's interesting and that's sort of what we're trying to change right i'd love it to be a situation where if we did that again in the future people were like yeah of course dads want to be more involved with their babies like why is that a big deal
Speaker 1yeah in the same way as we've seen mothers across the globe not just in the uk with their babies in parliament or nursing with their babies in parliament or nursing with and feeding we i don't know alex maybe you can correct me but i've not yet seen a father with a baby in me neither
Speaker 2no me neither so if you're
Speaker 1listening and you are then i think please please take action and i think that's an important piece because you know we know that children and this is across both parents are much more likely to do what they see than what we say so how do fathers reconcile you know we're all and this isn't just for fathers specifically mothers will have their own baggage and history that comes from the way that they were raised but how do fathers break those ties and those values and those belief systems and that sort of indoctrinated deeply held view that actually i am the protector the financial provider that all of those stereotypes that we're so we know are no longer are just not helpful in 21st century parenting but it's so much part of who they are yeah
Speaker 2it's a good question it's difficult i mean i know for myself i i definitely grew up with a certain amount of that and that you know i you're much more qualified to talk to questions like that than i am but i can talk about my own experience doing this and you know i i was always someone who as a teenager i babies i can't i'm no good but babies babies don't like me i'd be convinced if i walked past a baby on the on the pavement it would scream as soon as it saw me and it probably was because it was picking up on like oh god babies i don't know what to do here and i wouldn't want to hold a baby i get very tense and it was only really through for me my wife is really clued up on this stuff you know she's read a lot about gender and she did a degree in feminism and like she knows what's going on and we had friends who had kids a few years before us so we'd seen their experiences and it took a lot of conversation with her recognizing what was going on for me talking about what was going on for me and what was going on for me and i think that's what i'm about you know how i had been brought up in those experiences to to recognize that these feelings were separate from me and the way i can and could be and that really helped but honestly even going into you know the day my son was born i had that anxiety of am i gonna be any good am i gonna bond with him and a lot of dads don't bond straight away it's part of the reason potentially this is so important it can take longer and i would you know i remember him coming out and being given him this like that's it i'm completely you know head over heels this is this is fine but yeah i i carried that uncertainty for basically 30 years and and it was you know it took a lot of work to to confront it and it's still stuff i i catch myself feeling and thinking and have to like very proactively challenge it's not easy to
Speaker 1overcome it no and in fact society in so much of the things that we do baby's crying we often just automatically then pass baby over to mom there's none of this sort of who how there'll be some people listening because the podcast is listened to 75 of our listeners are mothers are women although there are an increasing number of fathers that are writing in with questions which is amazing that will know that their partners want to be more present but it's about how opening those conversations in the same way that your wife was able to spot those things and have that conversation with you how can mothers begin to have those conversations so that the fathers that are either listening or not or that want to be more involved know that that is also part of that their desire and belief and that it's it's okay to dismantle some of this societal pressure and deeply held generational narrative that actually to be a good father i need to and then a whole list of things that i need
Speaker 2to do i think again speaking from personal experience and from talking to you know my friends with kids as well i think it's really important to name what is going on when if you feel like a dynamic is emerging like one of one of the things around paternity leave that the way it develops into this default set of way of parenting that is probably not what parents intended a lot of the time you know the phrase that i heard from one set of parents was you know we wanted to do everything equally and then one day we woke up and found ourselves in the 1950s and like it just happened sometimes and the loop that you can get into there is the father goes back after two weeks and in that two weeks they're probably you know really hands-on they're helping keep the mum awake when she's breastfeeding or they're taking a baby out for walk to have a nap and they're cleaning bottles and they're like there and they're in it and then suddenly their time to learn and continue that development as the baby develops goes and so over time the mother is the one who understands what the baby wants what does that cry mean where do we keep the cream what food do they like how do you chop this bit of food up so it's safe and then the baby wants the mum because they spend more time they're more bonded and so the father might try they might cry they hand them over and it's so easy for that to just to become a norm and an internal narrative to build up from father which is like well i'm not very good at this or like well you know i've given it a go but like yeah ultimately my mum's just my wife is just is better at this and the baby wants her mum and i think if you catch yourself doing that and it doesn't match the way you want to parent i think you you need to name it as early as you can and talk about it and recognize what might be behind that but it's not just you it's all of this stuff is societally driven and your situation will drive the way you're able to to do things and the earlier you sort of catch and talk about it the less likely it is it becomes something that's really embedded you can't
Speaker 1change yeah i think that touches on a really important piece of parenting just generally is this regular community communication and check-ins with each other they don't have to be formal meetings but just this these opportunities to just are we showing up are we parenting as we want to what are the challenges how can we help each other how can we support each other because it all becomes naturally so obviously because you've got this gorgeous little bundle of of need that you're responding to but as you say you can find yourself waking up in the 1950s and quite often six months 12 months 18 months later thinking this isn't what we had talked about how it was going to be totally
Speaker 2can i ask one particular
Speaker 1question because i know that i say this with love to all of you women listening here and all of you mothers but i think that sometimes we can create a bit of our own challenge saying it with love so how can women allow fathers to help rather than going into their default oh i'll just because that isn't fundamentally what we're signing up for what we know is optimal for our children and yet it's a default thing that i hear so many women will be just doing and sort of saying oh they don't don't instinctively know x and y needs to be done but i i think we have to shoulder a big part of that as women
Speaker 2yeah i mean look i'm not gonna um i think it's it's uh i'm not gonna tell women what to do for sure but i'll talk from the male perspective on the father's perspective yeah for sure i think some sometimes whether it's active or more often than not i think not active it's easy to get into that mindset of like men are less good at certain things right like you know the worst version of this is the sort of homer simpson stereotype of a father he's kind of useless man who'd be frankly easier for everyone if no he wasn't there and it's so easy for both parents to lean into that when it's suitable for them and i apply that to fathers you know sometimes and i think fundamentally in these days most fathers do want to be good dads hands-on they want to get stuck in so i sort of say one thing is probably like kind of forcing them to lean into that if you get to something you're like i can't do this or i don't know how to do it you just do it or the baby doesn't want me like don't just sort of let that sit and don't say well yeah you know i am more confident i am better at doing this and you know i still like still my own family we still have that kind of a sometimes where i'm concerned that my son really does want to spend more time with my wife and he probably wants to spend with me because she's more fun than i am and you know that the part of it is like that's me stuff but also she's really good about just being like no that's not true and you know and then when when my son and i do something and he's like has a lovely time or he misses me when i go she's really good about like reminding me that that's happened to like challenge my own assumptions about what's going on um so yeah
Speaker 1that's a really good it is that sitting with that so thank you so much for that thank you so much for that thank you so much for that thank you that's really helpful now i want to talk a bit more about your campaigns now obviously the campaign with the strapping on baby grows on tiara henry and and other was phenomenal got a huge amount of um media coverage which is brilliant because it's all about raising awareness what campaigns have you got coming up and how can the people listening to the podcast help and support
Speaker 2that so we have this is a really crucial year for the campaign so the government has promised to review parental leave in their first year in office and they've confirmed that's going to start in june and last about a year so all our focus is going to be on bringing this issue as high up we up the public agenda as we can and making as much noise as we can in order to convince the government during that review that they have to make paternity leave longer and better paid um and essentially the more people the more members of the public the bigger the kind of grassroots groundswell behind this is the more we can do that so one particular thing we have coming up that people might want to get involved in we are doing the first ever national dad strike as we're calling it so we're not actually going to sort of down tools and walk out but we are doing is going to get as many dads and non-birthing parents as possible to take some time off work on the same day wednesday the 11th of june it's just before father's day and either come along to a picket we're doing outside the department of business and trade or we're going to do a picket where we're going to call for better paternity leave or just go and do the school pickup and what we know is that the vast majority of pickups are done by mums and often that's because fathers are in this breadwinner role and mothers are the ones who've had to take a step back from careers and actually a lot of men would love to be there and so for one day we do think well come let's you know let's all do it one day step up take the time of work take an hour or two of work all be there at the school pickup at the same time so if you'd like to take part in that the more people you take part the bigger news story it will be you can come along to our website downshift.org.uk to sign up there and you can choose to either pick it or pick up i love
Speaker 1that pick it or pick up and i'm guessing and we will provide the links in the show notes so don't don't worry if you didn't manage to write that down quickly enough they are available in the show notes will that will people have the opportunity to get some sort of um information in terms of obviously you want this to be nationwide or you want to be able to set up if they do pickets or pickups within their community in terms of campaigning towards press and media within their their local areas to highlight this exactly yeah
Speaker 2we're gonna once you sign up if you're up for doing more to get other people recruited and making more of a noise around it we'll show you how to do that we'd love you to get involved but the more people who become recruiters for the the moment the more it will grow so yeah 100
Speaker 1yeah and that's just such a very simple thing to really draw attention to this and it's obviously one of many as you say with june being the time that the review is beginning to take place it's 12 months for you alex what does success look like or begin to look like begin to look like
Speaker 2yeah so fundamentally what we need is longer better paid paternity leave that takes steps towards equality between mothers and fathers and the equality piece is important because ultimately what we want is a system where families can choose what works best for them not have it dictated to them by their gender and the length of the leave is obviously crucial two weeks is nowhere near enough we all know that it means that you're getting dads go back way before they're ready mums don't get the support the mental health of both parents can be really badly affected like all the things we know it's not close enough so we need it longer but crucially we need the pay to be higher as well because if we don't get high pay we will see what we see now which is a lot of people just can't afford to take part and it will become even more an unequal and divided system so we need to get the pay to be higher and we also need self-employed people to get it you know self-employed people need leave in exactly the same way and i've had heartbreaking conversations with self-employed trades people for example who were sort of financially destroyed by having to take time off unpaid to look after their partner and their child in the first few weeks of their baby's life and we just shouldn't be doing that to new parents at a very like vulnerable time so in terms of what that means in practice as an absolute bare minimum we think that needs to be six weeks at least 90 pay which is matches what you get at the beginning of maternity leave that needs to be the minimum next step but still um that would be an absolutely transformative difference from where we are now i had six weeks off myself when my son was born it was it was so much better i mean after two weeks i just thought i don't know how people go back i don't know how people do this so six weeks would make a huge difference that needs to be the bare minimum longer term you look at countries like spain they offer 16 weeks full pay sweden 90 days for both parents and 300 days and the average across europe is the equivalent of eight weeks at full pay so that shouldn't be the end point but as a minimum next step that would be a massive step forward and that's at least what
Speaker 1we want to see yeah and it's not unreasonable is it at all in any shape or form and particularly because i think sometimes we have such closed views governmentally around the how much is this going to cost us now whereas actually what is crucial which i'm sure you're aware of is the cost to society if we don't have fathers present and it costs exponentially so much more through the absence so it's it's better for everybody if we do this
Speaker 2absolutely yeah the long-term cost is is cost benefit is enormous but actually there's also a really good short-term economic case as well so helpfully the joseph roundtree foundation recently did some modeling looking at what had happened in other countries and they found that six weeks earlier in the year they were able to get up to about 90 percent of the cost of child care which was about two hundred million pounds in economic growth by helping mothers who want to go back to work which you get from your dad's taking on sharing more of the child care but it only costs the treasury about 200 million pounds um total as a kind of net cost so every pound they're putting in we're getting 13 pounds back into the economy which makes it a pretty incredible investment and that's not even looking into the long-term cost savings that you're talking about like one area there is that the cost savings that you're talking about in the long-term cost savings that you're talking about in the long-term cost savings area there is the mental health cost area there is the mental health cost area there is the mental health cost savings at a sort of financial level i savings at a sort of financial level i savings at a sort of financial level i think it's pwc that pricewaterhouse think it's pwc that pricewaterhouse think it's pwc that pricewaterhouse cooper's did a model that showed that cooper's did a model that showed that cooper's did a model that showed that better paternity leave would save 1.4 better paternity leave would save 1.4 better paternity leave would save 1.4 billion pounds to phs over 20 years by billion pounds to phs over 20 years by billion pounds to phs over 20 years by saving half a million parents from saving half a million parents from post-natal depression i mean it's a huge savings we could get outside the economic growth and it's good for growth as well
Speaker 1yeah and it is it's so profound when you start looking at those numbers and and the reality of the cost with that obviously i'm gonna we're gonna be signposting and really hoping that everyone steps up for this campaign in june and and that is wonderful obviously when you have the big campaigns we want people to come out but what can parents what would you ask parents to do this is mothers and fathers and anyone else who is interested in ensuring that we raise some really confident and resilient children even if they're not parents themselves what can we be doing day in day out to begin to move and shift this narrative in the direction that you that we want to get at least this six weeks minimum
Speaker 2so a very simple answer is talk about it more talk about it with your friends with your colleagues with your friends with your colleagues a lot of what we find is a lot of people actually don't know how bad it is because we have a different view of ourselves as a country right as a different view of our values we think we're quite progressive we think we're quite good on gender equality and this is a real anomaly and it's only until people are starting to look at our kids they're like oh god that's that's really bad and so you know loads of people don't know about it i went around with a graph around london asking random people filming it do you know where we are in this graph and hardly anyone knew we're at the just talk about it more that's incredibly valuable and we if you're up for sharing stuff on social media we're on tiktok and instagram at that shift uk liking sharing commenting all helps it reach more people and helps get the message out but in your own lives yeah just talk about it but and
Speaker 1that's raises that consciousness and then it just it helps that movement and just sort of carries it further and more quickly Alex thank you so much that's been such a brilliant conversation and it highlighted so many important sort of things for us to be considering and the fact that actually I found it uplifting and empowering because we can create change all of us whether we're fathers whether we're mothers whether we're our aunts uncles grandparents or just really people who are who want more for young people so thank you so much and for all that you do
Speaker 2thank you yeah my pleasure thanks for having me
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