Parents that Work

Can we please stop laughing at incompetent dads?

How did the new film The Breadwinner even get commissioned? We're so bored of the central theme:

🙄 Dad doesn't know where the school is.
🙄 Dad can't manage the children.
🙄 Dad is completely clueless.
🙄 Everyone laughs.

Why are we still treating this as funny? If it's realistic, it's sad. If it's exaggerated, it's lazy. Either way, it reinforces the same old story:

Mums are naturally competent.

Dads are naturally incapable.

And neither of those things is true.

📌 Women aren't born knowing how to manage households or as intuitive mothers. They develop skills because society expects them to and through doing the work of parenting.

📌 Men aren't born incapable of caregiving. They just aren't expected to or given the opportunity to in the same way. Many simply haven't been given the same opportunities, expectations or role models.

These stories don't just let fathers off the hook, they place impossible expectations on mothers too.

We're ready for different narratives. Stories that show fathers as the capable lead parent, that show mothers less than superheroes, that show families figuring things out together.

The silver lining is at least it's getting awful reviews and revenue in cinemas. Don't bother watching the film, the trailer is terrible enough.

So tell us:

What TV show, film or book do you think portrays modern parenting and partnership well?

🎧 Listen to ep 44 of Equal-ish today

We spend a lot of time talking about the mental load and one big part of this is the emotional load for the family.

The parent who notices when a child is struggling.
The parent who helps name feelings.
The parent who repairs conflict.
The parent who remembers friendship dramas.
The parent who helps everyone process difficult experiences.

In many families, that responsibility quietly falls to mothers.

Let's remember it's not because they're naturally better at it. But because girls are often socialised to become emotionally attuned, while boys are socialised to suppress emotional awareness.

The result in adulthood? Women become the emotional managers of the family.

And men often feel excluded from emotional conversations they were never taught how to have.

Natalie Costa made an important point during our Equal-ish conversation:

You can't expect someone to confidently hold emotional space at 45 if they spent 40 years being told to "man up."

But emotional connection is a skill, it can be learned.

Let's stop defaulting to who is "naturally good" at emotional labour and perhaps focus more on how we help both parents develop the skills.

What do you think?

🎧 Listen to epsiode 43 of Equal-ish now

Do you talk about the hard conversations you had today or tell your children your day 'fine'?

One of the most powerful parenting tools isn't a book, a course, or a perfectly crafted response to your child's meltdown. It's letting your child hear you say:

"I had a tough day today."

We're showing them what it looks like to be human.

So many of us grew up in homes where adults were either "fine" or angry. There was very little in between.

Most of us didn't hear:
"I felt nervous about a meeting today."
"I was disappointed when that didn't work out."
"I felt overwhelmed by everything on my list."
"I was worried about something important."

As a result, many of us learned that emotions were either hidden, avoided, or only expressed when they boiled over.

In our conversation with Natalie Costa, she suggested something beautifully simple:

What if parents started talking about their emotions in everyday life?

Not in a dramatic or oversharing way, we're not trying to make children responsible for fixing our emotions. We're simply naming them.

"It makes sense I felt frustrated this morning because I was rushing."
"It makes sense I felt worried because I was doing something new."
"It makes sense I felt disappointed because I really wanted that to go differently."

Every time we do that, we're teaching our children that emotions aren't problems to solve, they're experiences to understand.

And perhaps most importantly, we're showing them that strong people have feelings too.

Maybe emotional resilience doesn't start with teaching our children how to talk about their emotions but with letting them hear us talk about ours.

What do you think?

🎧 Listen to episode 43 of Equal-ish with Natalie Costa and Kate Mangino now

Every parent wants their children to be happy. But happiness isn't actually what prepares children for life.

Because life includes disappointment.
Rejection.
Failure.
Grief.
Frustration.
Conflict.

It's hard to see our children experincing difficult emotions - whether it's the terrible two's or grumpy teenagers. But it's learning to navigate the whole gambit of life's emotions that helps us, and our children to thrive.

In our latest Equal-ish conversation, Natalie Costa introduces the idea of emotional fitness - the ability to navigate difficult emotions rather than avoid them.

Just as physical fitness trains your body to push through tough challenges, emotional fitness isn't about navigating the more complex and hard feelings of anxiety, anger, disappointment, failure, overwhelm.....

It's about building the capacity to experience those emotions without being controlled by them.

Many of us have never really been taught how. We were told:
"Don't cry."
"Don't worry."
"Calm down."
"Just get on with it."

So now we're trying to teach our children skills we never learned ourselves.

Maybe the work isn't raising emotionally intelligent children, maybe we need to start by becoming emotionally attuned adults.

What emotional messages did you inherit growing up?

🎧 Listen to episode 43 now with

One of the most uncomfortable parts of our latest Equal-ish conversation was talking about ambition in parenthood.

Many of us don't want less ambition.

We want to be great parents and build meaningful careers.

We want to stay healthy, nurture relationships, have hobbies and have time for ourselves.

Steve Cardwell reminded us that success doesn't mean progressing in every area simultaneously. Instead, we talked about seasons.

Sometimes family gets more attention. Sometimes work does. Sometimes maintaining your wellbeing is the priority.

We don't need to lower our standards forever. It's remembering the limits of what we can give, and having the wisdom to prioritise what matters most right now.

That raises a difficult question:

Are we struggling because life is genuinely harder?

Or because we're trying to win at every category simultaneously?

What does success look like in your current season of life?

🎧Listen to episode 41 of Equal-ish now

One thing Steve Cardwell hears from fathers again and again?

Guilt.

Not because they're absent, but because they're trying to be more present.

They're at work feeling guilty they aren't with their children.
They're with their children feeling guilty about work.
They're answering Slack messages during bedtime.
Thinking about nursery pickup during meetings.
Mentally living in two places at once.

As Steve put it, modern fathers are trying to do something previous generations weren't expected to do: provide and be deeply present.

If more fathers are now experiencing the same pull between work and family that mothers have talked about for decades, could that become a catalyst for changing how all workplaces think about caregiving?

Or are we simply asking everyone to carry an impossible load?

What's your experience?

Do you think parenting guilt is becoming more equal, or are we still having fundamentally different experiences?

🎧 Listen to episode 42 of Equal-ish now with

A man could probably triple his social media following if he just started posting videos of himself cleaning the kitchen before his wife got home.

This is one of those jokes that isn't really a joke from our latest Equal-ish conversation with Deliberate Dad founder Steve Cardwell.

Because somehow, in 2026, a man loading the dishwasher can still attract millions of views.

A father cleans the kitchen.
A husband tidies the house.
A man packs a lunch.
And the internet loses its mind.

Meanwhile, millions of women do these things every single day without applause, praise, or viral recognition.

The bar for fatherhood has risen in many ways. Dads are expected to be more present, more emotionally engaged, and more involved than previous generations.

But in other ways, the bar remains astonishingly low. So low that ordinary acts of adult responsibility can still be treated as extraordinary examples of fatherhood.

The question isn't whether we should celebrate involved dads. We absolutely should.

The question is: Are we celebrating genuine partnership and shared responsibility? Or are we still rewarding men for doing things we simply expect women to do?

What do you think? Has the bar for fatherhood really changed?

🎧 Listen to episode 42 of Equal-ish now with

Familiar wtih the "Nag Paradox"? If you've not heard of this, you've definitely experienced it.

It goes something like this:

"Just tell me what needs doing."

So you tell them. Then they feel criticised. So you stop telling them.

Then it doesn't get done.

Then you're frustrated.

Then they ask why you didn't tell them.

And around and around you go.

The irony is, we're taught that this is what a good relationship looks like. When in reality, it's far from equal because one person carrying the responsibility for making sure everything happens and having to dish out lists like a project manager.

The challenge isn't creating a better spreadsheet or to-do list to feel like you're not "nagging", it's building a relationship where both people feel responsible and accountable.

Have you ever found yourself trapped in the nag paradox at home or work?

🎧 Listen to episode 41 of Equal-ish now

The uncomfortable truth about being needed.

In our recent Equal-ish conversation, and in her book 'No More Mediocre', Laura described travelling away while her husband managed everything perfectly at home.

No disasters, no panic, everything was fine.

And instead of relief? She felt uncomfortable.

Because she realised something many of us never admit out loud:

💡Sometimes we attach our value as a mother to being indispensable.

We tell ourselves we're exhausted because everyone needs us. But beneath that exhaustion can also be identity. Purpose. Importance.
Security.

If nobody needs me, who am I?

It's a difficult conversation because it asks us to look beyond what our partners are doing and examine what we might be holding onto ourselves.

Not because we want to control, or because we're trying to gatekeep. But because being needed can feel good.

Especially in a world that often undervalues care work and is pushing mother's out of the workforce.

So here's a question worth sitting with:

Have you ever struggled to let go of something because being the person who held it all together had become part of your identity?

🎧 Listen to the latest episode of Equal-ish now

We all keep laughing at the same joke. But is it funny anymore?

The exhausted mum.
The clueless dad.
The wife who nags.
The husband who "helps."

It's the joke that keeps on giving....
In sitcoms.
In Instagram reels.
In stand-up comedy.
In WhatsApp groups.

And because we've seen it so many times, we've stopped questioning it.

In our conversation with Laura Danger, she shared how the pandemic exposed a huge gap between what people were experiencing behind closed doors and what social media was celebrating.

Her friends were texting:
"I'm drowning."
"I don't know how we're going to do this."
"I can't keep carrying everything."

At the exact same time, "couples comedy" accounts were posting jokes about mums parenting through illness while dads recovered from a mild cold in bed.

Everyone laughed.

But Laura started asking: What if the joke isn't funny?

What if it's normalising something that is actually hurting us?

The more we laugh at unequal relationships, the more we begin to believe they're inevitable.

And if something feels inevitable, we stop trying to change it.

So here's the question:

What relationship dynamic have we collectively accepted as "normal" that maybe shouldn't be normal at all?

🎧 Listen to episdoe 41 with author of No More Mediocre, Laura Danger