Why dads need to talk about money

While the number of stay-at-home dads has increased in recent years, just 7% of men are focused solely on caring for their families. This means most dads are juggling work and caring responsibilities. “There can be a pressure to provide and it can feel like it’s your responsibility to be the breadwinner and provide for your family” says Paul Rhodes, who works at the Money and Pensions Service and is a father of two and co-founder of Fathercraft UK.  

This financial responsibility (or perceived responsibility) can feel incredibly isolating – especially if your partner is doing a lot of unpaid work looking after small children. 

MoneyHelper has a hub of useful content around becoming a parent with free tools and guides to help dads make their money go further. 

Of course not every family has both a mum and a dad, but in two-parent-mixed-sex families, research shows that the men and women tend to split up ‘money tasks’, with women managing day-to-day expenses and men looking after longer-term financial decisions such as pensions and investments for the future.  

Dr Hayley James of Aston University, who conducted this research, says that men can feel “pressure to feel like they know what they’re doing with things like investing”. While investing your money can potentially make your savings grow faster than simply putting them in a savings account, it can also come with risks as you could end up with less money than you started with.

If you feel like you should know about pensions or investing but don’t know where to start, you can use our guides:

•  A beginner's guide to investing and 

• Pensions explained which outlines the key concepts and shows you what different options there are. 

Equally, if you are keen to learn more about how to balance your day-to-day incomings and outgoings see our guide How to create a household budget for your family.

Talking about money with friends, family, children — or experts if necessary — can help you feel more confident in managing your money and give you greater financial resilience to deal with future income changes or life events that affect your finances.

But there is a stigma around men in particular not wanting to talk about money. This is due to personal pressure to live up to the “societal expectation” that they need to be the breadwinner in the family. According to Paul Rhodes “it can end up being incredibly hard to hold your hands up and say if you’re struggling with money”. 

It’s not just men who find it difficult to talk about money, as recent MaPS research showed that as a population, UK adults would rather talk to friends about sex, relationships, and politics than money. 

One thing Dads could do is encourage their children to build healthy relationships with money from a young age. Our study has shown that almost a third of parents and carers don’t talk to their kids openly about money, missing out on an opportunity to help with children’s vital early understanding.

Getting children engaged with fun, age-appropriate money challenges is easy to do.

Evidence shows that the way we behave - and how good we are - with money as adults is learned when we’re young through looking at the world around us.

So, talking to your children about your budget, and being open about money in general, can be a good way to show them what being careful with money looks like.

We have lots of great ideas for How to teach kids about money and How to talk to your children about money.