I dropped to one knee and bowed my head; a little flourish of the hand bade my wife continue. During maternity leave with our third, the mother of my children had summoned me to her presence and was mid-flow on her list of commands of what needed to be done that day: laundry, meals, emails, forms, and appointments. Kneeling felt like the most appropriate pose to receive such an edict.
She didn’t appreciate the joke. “Do you think I want to be in charge of this stuff?” she snapped.
This was classic mental load territory. On my podcast, How to be a Happier Parent, we often ask why the planning, thinking and juggling behind the scenes that keep families afloat always seems to fall on mums. The uncomfortable truth is that we still think it’s their job. It begins in the very early days of parenthood.
When our first child was born, I was self-employed. This meant, unlike in other countries, I was entitled to no paternity leave. No pause, no moment where the world told me: it’s your job to care for your baby, too.
It was financially impossible to take more than a couple of weeks. I remember being on the threshold, keys in hand. A tight, hot guilt in my chest. It felt absurd to be walking out the door, leaving a woman who had been through the biggest physical trauma of her life alone with a baby. But I pushed the guilt down. My responsibility was to earn money, not give direct care. The paternity leave system makes one thing clear: this is the sacrifice dads are supposed to be making.
Going back to work so early felt like a lose–lose. I missed the small, absurdly precious moments – bouncing my adoring daughter in her chair, half-watching The Sopranos at 10am, while my wife recuperated. It’s a miserable conflict, not being where you want to be, and knowing that wherever you are, you’re letting someone down.
Alex Trippier with his two young children and newborn babyAt first, my wife was scared to be left alone with our baby. Then, as we had more children, that fear hardened into something else. Resentment. Because from her perspective, despite knowing it was the rational decision, I was leaving. I was choosing to continue as if nothing had changed. I was choosing the easier option. This made me angry in return: “Do you actually think I’d rather be at work than with my children?”
This is a row painfully familiar to many parents: the repeated “who’s had the worst day?” argument between the person who’s been at home with the children and the one who’s just fought their way home on the tube.
And this is where it happens. The split. The part where fathers and mothers lose each other’s perspectives. While my life continued unaltered, my wife became CEO of our home. A job she had never applied for and one whose responsibilities stuck long after she returned to work.
And the UK’s approach to paternity leave means this sinister mindset continues to be baked into the very fabric of our society and economy. I see it in the smallest moments. The list of questions I’ve asked her just this week makes it obvious who is running the show (“Will the kids eat these?” “What time is Robin’s parents’ evening?”)
But when did we decide this was all her job? She suggests it happened even before our first child arrived. “I knew I was about to go on maternity leave. I knew I was going to have this time where I was supposed to become the expert in our child, where I was to devote myself totally to becoming a mum,” she says. “It’s a time when women know their lives are going to change, and we start planning for it. I don’t think you ever had that.”
I remember this period. When our daughter-to-be was still wriggling around in my wife’s stomach like something out of Alien, we spent a weekend arranging a “changing station”. This felt wildly overengineered to me. I hadn’t even considered that babies needed infrastructure. My wife was already anticipating, researching, and making decisions. I was taking orders.
The UK has the worst paternity leave in Europe; it exiles men from their homes and families when they’re needed there the most, and pressurises mothers into sole responsibility for children. It creates a dynamic which destroys previously strong relationships. It sends a powerful message about what our roles are supposed to be.But if we can identify the inequities this causes, why don’t we just change them? One of the reasons is that sharing expertise is sticky. My wife learned on the job, but she finds it excruciating to watch me do the same. I can sense her brittle tension as I rifle through bed linen to guess at the correct size for the kids’ beds. “Forget it! It’s quicker if I do it!”
The consequences are far more serious than some tetchy confrontations about bed linen. A Whitestone survey commissioned by the Dad Shift, a group which campaigns for fair paternity leave, shows that 39 per cent of separated parents said not sharing caring responsibilities more evenly was a factor in the breakdown of their relationship. The polling also revealed that 59 per cent of parents said the UK’s poor paternity leave made it harder to share childcare equally in the long term. Government analysis shows that working couples where the mother is primarily responsible for childcare are 92 per cent more likely to separate than those where care is shared.
What would be different if we had a paternity leave system which told dads that caring for children was their responsibility? Academic researcher Marte Bergan’s comparative study into parenting in the UK and Norway shows just how much a strong paternity leave policy shapes family life. In Norway, paternity leave is 15 weeks. “As a result, the Norwegian dads I interviewed knew the routines, the schedules, what was for dinner, whether new underwear was needed; there was far less of the damaging micromanaging dynamic often reported by UK couples,” says Bergan. “That period of solo care shifts fathers from assistant to primary caregiver, and crucially, it sticks. When they return to work, families don’t revert to mum as the default manager.”
On 2 May, dads and prams will take to the streets in a “push for paternity leave” to demand a better deal for fathers in the Government’s upcoming parental leave review. I spoke to one of the organisers, Joeli Brearley, founder of Pregnant Then Screwed, a campaign group aiming to abolish the persistent disadvantage women face at work after having children, from lost earnings to stalled careers and discrimination.
“The evidence is overwhelming. Better paternity leave improves mothers’ physical and mental health, narrows the gender pay gap, and leads to a more equal division of labour at home,” says Brearley. “Countries that have implemented it see lower rates of postnatal depression and stronger long-term relationships.”
I’ll be joining the march on 2 May, not just because our paternity leave system caused real, avoidable pain in my own relationship, but because it’s time we sent a different message to men. Right now, we tell fathers their value lies in what they earn. We need a system that says something else entirely: dads, we need you to care.
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