Share the Care: How Supporting Mums Helps Families Thrive with Marci El-Deiry and Philips

0:05Elliott:Hello and welcome to To Be A Boy with me Joeli Brilly and me Elliot Ray. We today have the wonderful Marci El-Deiry from Philips Avent. Philips have done this incredible report looking into self-care of mums and the time that mums have to spend on themselves. Some of the data is really shocking and anybody who cares about or loves a mother should really be understanding this data and thinking about what they can do to improve the situation. It found that nine in ten mums say they have less than an hour a day to themselves. So Marcy, it may sound like an obvious question, but why does that matter?

0:53Yeah, it was actually shocking for us to see that. It is just sort of taken for granted that, of course, after you have a child that you're going to be busy and your life is going to change, right? But what is not understood is having less than an hour, not having that time to recharge, take a pause, actually has a profound impact on mom's mental well-being, on her physical well-being. And it's not something that is really talked about leading up to having the baby. I think we talk about the busyness and we talk about the sleepless nights and things, but really having that moment to yourself can make the difference between burning out, right, and thriving.

1:46And what we're trying to do is raise awareness that actually mom is the cornerstone of the family. And if mom is thriving, the whole family can thrive. And what we also found in our research was shocking when we said, oh, what would you do with this hour of time? No one's going to the spa. No one's, you know, doing anything luxurious. It's I would take a nap. I would wash my hair. I would have a cup of tea. Right. These little sort of micro moments of refreshing themselves and restoring themselves so that they can get back to being the best mom that they can be.

2:31Elliott:I remember the early days of parenthood and not showering for days. And the times when I would shower, the baby would be on the floor next to the shower. So I'd be washing my hair while constantly, is he crying? Is he crying? Panicking that I wasn't holding him for the duration of cleaning myself. And that's how bad it is, isn't it? That's the desperate state things can get to. You know, when I reflect on it, I find it actually devastating that I survived that first year of motherhood in those extreme circumstances where you're spending no time on yourself, no time alone, having very little sleep.

3:15Elliott:It's quite extraordinary that we get through it. Yeah. And I think the other thing that we found is it's not that mom prioritizes baby and then herself, because there's all of the other things that have to come in. So actually it's mom that goes to the very bottom of the list. Yeah. And often what we also found is that it's not something that moms realize until it's to the breaking point. Right. Which is also where we've said, you know, we want to drive awareness of the village sort of noticing that and stepping in proactively. There's another dynamic here in terms of the actual birth experience.

3:56So, you know, we've got two daughters and our eldest, it was quite a traumatic birth experience. And so when we finally got home from the hospital, we didn't let her cry for the first six months. You know, as soon as she cried, we were running in the amount of times I stubbed my toe to get to her cot. As soon as she woke up in the nighttime, as soon as she had any temperature, we panicked. And it was that kind of anxiety about her health and her well-being. and obviously I had two weeks paternity leave, I went back to work, but my wife was at home dealing with that.

4:28Elliott:I find it fascinating they had to do some research recently to check that when a baby cries that men wake up at the same rate as women do and surprise, surprise, they found that men can hear. I think my husband became a deeper sleeper after my children were born. Did you hear that? But there is something there about mothers martyring themselves, isn't there? and there's something so culturally ingrained in us that it has to be us. We have to be the one to deal with this. What do you think we can do about that? How can we change that cultural narrative? I think that firstly, you know, we have to dispel the myth that you can do it all, be it all, have it all.

5:13You know, sometimes when I will mentor young women coming up through business, I say, you know, how do you do it? I said, first, you need to actually reconcile yourself that there's a myth out there about being able to do it all. You can have it all, but you can't have it all at the same time. I think that's the first piece is actually driving awareness of moms that, you know, there is a village there that you should expect, right? It's not selfish to want to self-care. it's not you shouldn't have to earn the right to ask a village and the village looks very different these days it doesn't have to be just your partner it can be many people around you and take many forms but it's not about earning that right it's about saying actually i shouldn't be meant to do this alone it doesn't have to be perfect and that they shouldn't be expected to do it alone Then there's the flip side of the village and also driving awareness of, you know, if mom is in the right place, if mom, if we're focusing on mom's well-being, everybody will thrive around her.

6:22And so helping the village to realize that it doesn't have to be anything big and a major gesture, but little moments like just feeding the baby. That's a 20 minute. That's 20 minutes that you can give a mom to go and sit down or take a shower. And, again, also what was stopping the village we saw in our research is them feeling like they don't want to overstep and this feeling that, you know, can I do it as well as mom? Right. I mean, I when I had my first baby also, I thought no one can do this the way that I can do. Not even my husband. Right. I would watch him change a diaper. Right. Yeah.

7:03OK. The wipes need to be warm. you then need to you know first take this one off then it goes in the bin and and he was like it's a diaper right and that's no good just get it on like i thought he was like are you prepping me for surgery or are you just you know i can do this and you go like okay yes i can do it right

7:24Elliott:do we think that men when we have a male partner don't do as much because they don't feel that they're going to do it very well. What do we think the reason is why women take on the huge burden of care much more than men do? There's a variety of reasons. I think paternity is a big issue. I think we need to give dads more time to learn the rhythm of the house. I think we need to have more conversations with men before they become parents so they can understand what kind of dad they want to be. They can understand the unequal, you know, default unequal load in their household that happens in so many homes and also so they can understand what that might mean in regards to their relationship their partner's well-being one of the things that in my personal experience my husband would say to me is i don't know if you need help or what i can do or what i should do right so there's a bit of the overstep there's a bit of the how should i do it and i think if we had that ahead of time, right, we could have instead of in the moment, right, it's very difficult because you're also exhausted.

8:36You haven't slept. And sometimes you think as a mom, if I have to explain, right, how to or if I have to ask myself, I'm already to do it myself in half the time. Right. I remember my husband saying to me, well, when they get older, the balance will shift. So I have two boys. Right. So when they get older, right, you'll have more time because, you know, they'll be playing sports and I'll be with them and all of that, which is great, but not, you know, when you're sleep deprived in the moment, right? And the baby's four months old, you think, oh my God, 10 years from now, I will get a nap. 10 years from now, I will get a moment.

9:13No. And I think it is really also just about making sure that you're on the same page of what when you're not in the moment, right? And I think it's so interesting because in the UK, the divorce rate is super high and we didn't realise how many couples actually struggle after they have a baby. Like their relationship is really strange. No one tells you. No one tells you. And in our hypnobirthing class, there were maybe 10 couples or so. Two of them split up within a year. And I don't know the ins and outs of their relationship, but from what I could see and what I know from my work as well, a lot of that can come down to the mother feeling like the dad's just not stepping up and doing enough.

9:54And so I think for men, it's understanding the consequences of not leaning in. You should want to do it because you want to do it anyway. But understand this could have real consequences to your relationship, to your mental health, to your partner's mental health. And no one wants that, right? Everyone wants a happy family. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think with the village changing, right, you see moms also see I have more options to, you know, whether that's, you know, my friends or my parents or if they are able to do it. to afford child care, you kind of say, ah, is it worth it? My partner should see the support that is needed.

10:33Elliott:Yeah, I mean, if you're getting more support from your mum or from your friends than you are your partner, you start to think, well, what's going on here? This isn't right. This is, I'm essentially a slave, like a depleted slave to this scenario. And that, you know, inevitably is a big turn off. I think also, you know, when coming back to the question about a martyr, moms martyring themselves, because I think that's the way that it always was. Right. And that was the role that you played. And you were expected to be sort of happy in this role. Right. You were expected to. And maybe this is why it's not talked about before birth.

11:10But like when you give birth, like the instinct will kick in and you'll know what to do. and this is going to be the best thing that you've ever done and you'll just naturally blossom into being the perfect mother, right? And you see this. And that's not true for everybody. And I think there's also a pressure that the moms put on themselves of like, shouldn't I be loving this, right? Shouldn't I sacrifice and shouldn't I feel proud to sacrifice? And shouldn't I feel now that I am a mom, shouldn't I be able to do it all myself? And I think that's what we really need to break, right? It took two people to make the baby, right?

12:00At least in modern menace, maybe sometimes more. But we also shouldn't expect that it's a one person job once the baby comes. I mean, one thing that really helped us is that other than hypnobirthing, we did baby prep with our church minister at the time. shout out Colin if you're watching and we went to his house there was like five couples it was probably a bit too late because it was maybe halfway through the pregnancy so you probably should have these conversations before you actually conceive a baby right like it's too late now you're in it um there was five couples and it's like a two-day course yeah and i didn't realize at the time how lucky we were to be having these conversations because they do it for marriage counseling married we had marriage prep as well and Colin had four kids i think with him and his partner and they both hosted us in their house.

12:46They gave us resources, they gave us scenarios, they got us to talk about who's getting up in the middle of the night, got us to think about work and earning and how we're going to split our finances, everything. And at the time I didn't realize how much this conversation is going to probably save our relationship and save our lives. These conversations should be so normal because I think a lot of people are literally seat walking into their parenthood. I'd definitely advocate for more kind of conversations with people, you know?

13:17Elliott:And I'd advocate for the name Colin. Colin. You don't ever meet a baby called Colin, do you, anymore? But it does raise, I mean, your research showed that only 40 % of parents think about the support that they're going to need before they have a baby. Why have we got this disconnect between the fact that you're going to need so much support and that message isn't translating through to parents before they have the baby do you think yeah you don't realize how overwhelming it is this is the conversation we've had with parents around the globe is that once the baby comes you're really in it right and you are doing a lot of physical it's the the bathing the feeding the cleaning the changing of the diapers all of this.

14:03And you actually don't have a conversation around what that means physically and mentally. And if you think about it, when you look at all that's out there for pregnant women on baby prep, it's all about the gear, what you're going to need, right? How many changes of clothes, how many... Even when you are at the hospital and you're leaving, right? And you get some of these parenting tips. It's, okay, you know, feed every three hours. It's very mechanical, right? There's nothing about putting your own oxygen mask on first. And so to normalize that as part of what are you going to need to raise this baby, it should also be you're going to need moments where you share the responsibilities of feeding.

14:54You're going to need moments where you just take a time out to care for yourself. It's not something that is talked about in any of the preparation up to that point. And again, also, you know, you think, okay, I've had this, I've made this baby, I've had this baby, and this is what it's like. And so there's no frame of reference of actually, no, if you are well rested, and if you have a minute to yourself to gather yourself, you know, you can actually be there in the little moments and be present in the moments, even if they're hard moments, because you've had a second to reframe. What do you think about taking advice?

15:35A lot of it is unsolicited, really annoying, go away advice. But some of it can actually be quite good. I remember our mother-in-law saying we should swaddle our daughter, right? Like, you know, no, we were so traumatized from the birth and you know, like, like, no, we're not doing that. And she wasn't sleeping, of course. And And then we swaddled her and she sat through the night. I should have listened. I should have done this four months ago. But yeah, I feel like we're in this place now where we're very individual. We don't want to do it by ourselves. We don't want to take advice. We want to kind of like have all the solutions.

16:09We want to do it by ourselves. Almost earn your own merit. Yeah. What do you think about that? Is that a thing? You know, I also think that there's so much advice out there and people are getting advice from so many different places. We also saw that in our research. It's shifted 10 years ago, right? The advice came from either your mom or your mother-in-law or your healthcare provider. And now we've seen with the rise of social media, right, that more and more people are getting advice also from social media or from other moms that they don't know face-to-face. And so I almost feel like it's a bit of overload of advice and information.

16:49And it's exhausting. I do. I remember like when we, so I would go to work and then, because my wife had, you know, she's spoken about this openly, she had personal anxiety after the birth and whatnot. And there were days when we lived in a two bedroom, small flat at the time. And our living room, it wasn't very nice. We were renting this flat. It had like brown carpet and these brown walls. It was quite a depressing living room, right? It wasn't a nice place to be. But she would struggle to leave the house at all. So I would wake up in the morning, go to work, I do what I can in the morning, leave them in the living room.

17:22I would come home and just still be packing the bag to go out. And this is like 6 p.m. And literally all day just trying to pack the bag, trying to leave the house, you know. And you get home as a dad and you're like, yeah, this is, because I was in the mud as well. But you're like, this is, you're worried because you're thinking as a family, we're not kind of functioning. You know, we're not, we're not living. We're literally surviving the days. and so when our second came along we were very very keen to not let life stop yes so very early we were like as soon as we can we're leaving the house we're going here you're taking both kids out by yourself i'm taking both kids by myself we're going to the shops we're going to this like we're we're not letting this stop our lives again you know we're going to be out we're going to live and we did that but yeah you know parents up and down the country mothers are struggling with this right and a lot of times we don't see it because they're in the house right and i the thing that is interesting about that is um because i also remember those days is sometimes the struggle to just get out of the house is and bringing it back to sort of the village is like what if i what if the baby's crying right and i can't stop them and we're in public and it's driving everybody crazy and everybody's looking at me like I'm a bad mother.

18:43What if the errands run a little bit too long and I have to breastfeed? Like, do I do it in the car? What do I do? What if all of these scenarios also that come down to how do I make it comfortable for everybody else, right? How do I create the perception or avoid the judgment of everybody else outside that I'm a great mother Or I've got this type of a thing, which is also where part of what the village can support with. And this is not just, you know, in your immediate circle is understanding and having empathy for what it actually takes to be a parent. And I've actually seen that. I'm originally American.

19:29Right. But I live in the Netherlands now. And the thing that I find so interesting about the Dutch is that, like, they're very calm about when the kids are crying or the kids are fighting or the kids. And I'm the one going around and I'm saying, like, stand in line, be polite, don't do that. I'm so worried about how it's going, how my children's behavior is going to reflect on me as a parent. And some of those things you just can't control. And so I think also parents have this overwhelming sense of, you know, how do I avoid the judgment or how do I navigate these situations in a way that doesn't reflect on me as a parent or my parenting style?

20:13Elliott:I was completely the same I didn't leave the house With either of my kids And for many reasons I mean partly because I was so exhausted I thought if anybody talks to me I don't know what words will come out of my mouth And they will look at me like I'm mad And I spent a lot of time In the local park Pushing a pram around the park Sitting on a park bench That was my only escape From the house on many days And you've acknowledged this and you've been putting these benches, purple benches in parks around the UK. Tell us a bit more about that. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. There's this, there's sort of this cathartic space outside.

20:58And what's great about these benches is we want moms to know that we see them and it's a space for them. And they can decide, right? Is it a space for them to sit down and talk to each other? Is it a space for them just to take a minute, right? I think also why by going on a walk seemed like a luxury, but really it was survival, right, for me as well, was because you actually are outside of your house. So you aren't seeing all the things that need to be done. I remember we had these sessions where you could get together with a bunch of new moms, right? And it was always great, right? It was like a mom's club type of thing, but you had to be on.

21:40And some days you're like, I just can't. And then you realize that actually the most recharging is when we just have a minute to ourselves where we don't have to be on for anybody else. Right. And also what we hope for these benches is it's a moment of time where mom can sit and rest and actually unleash the mental load. Right. That they have, because I I think so many times we see only the tip of the iceberg with mumps and how things are moving and the mechanics of it. But underneath that is a constant churn of, you know, I have to feed in three hours. That means I have to, you know, get home by this time.

22:24That means I have to wash the bottles. That will take me 20 minutes. Then I have to warm the bottles. Then I will have to change. And then someone's coming home. And my husband will come home. You know, all these things. and the hope is that this is a space outside of that where you can just sit and take a moment

22:40Elliott:for yourself or scroll on your phone or scroll on your phone whatever works for you just to have that moment and you're working with local authorities aren't you what's the long-term goal and vision for this campaign yeah at phillips advent we believe if mom is thriving that babies and families are thriving, asking for help and spreading the word that it's not selfish to self-care. It's actually preservation. And it's the right thing to do to help be the best mom that you can be. And so for us, what we're also trying to move into is awareness of employers as well with with what are some of the programs they can put in place, paternity leave, things like that to actually help share the care.

23:30So we want to do longer term, make a much bigger impact. And so this is just sort of the beginning of this research was the beginning of us really finding that universal truth. And the research was done here in the UK, but also around the globe. And so we see that everywhere in all pockets, and it looks different, you know, in India or in Indonesia or in the US versus the UK. But there is this universal lack of understanding that if mom self-care, then they can actually care for their families better. So for us, it's about driving the awareness and then partnering to bring out the village. And I love that.

24:10I love that you're approaching it from everyone's got a part to play in this. You know, I think dads clearly have a part to play. Businesses have a part to play. mum's a part to play in regards to you know letting go and whatnot so I love that I think it's really important because you know I think in this work it's very easy to maybe place the responsibility on one party or you know this is going to fix it when actually it takes a whole society approach everyone has to change and I think even wider you know what you're saying there about the village is not just the people in your family it could be when you go to the cafe and the baby's crying and the mum looks stressed how do you respond you know that I can make or break how someone feels, right?

24:52And so just responding with kindness, understanding, hopefully from conversations like this, a smile.

24:58Elliott:When you see somebody dealing with a screaming baby, I think it's such a difference rather than a glare, which is what you often get. And that's part of the village, right? It's like we all have to part to play every day in our everyday life, regardless if we know the person or not. Right. And I think that that's, it's a funny story. a couple of weeks ago, I had a friend visit from the U.S. And he said, he's asking me what you love about the Netherlands. And I said, you know, it's really a place for families and kids, right? And he said, I know. He said, I was at a cafe and this mom was there with her baby.

25:34And she turned to these two ladies that were also sitting there and said, I have to go to the bathroom. Will you watch the baby? The baby was in the pram. And he was like, he's like, I'm just observing this whole thing going like, what will happen here? Will they say yes? Is this legal? Is this legal? Can you just leave? And he goes, the woman went up, went to the bathroom. The two ladies looked over. The baby was still sleeping. They kept, you know, looking over. And then she came back. And he said, I really see it. And that, for me, if we could have more of those moments, if we can highlight those moments, then I think that we normalize moms asking for help and for support.

26:21So we were recently in Saudi where moms just started working five years ago, right? And so they don't have lactation rooms in public spaces or in offices. And so with many of our teams around the globe, that's actually where they started. They said, we want to create a lactation room, create a lactation space. We've done it with retailers, baby specialists, because if you go there, you go there to try the gear, you go there to shop, right? The chances are you might need to breastfeed or change or what have you. And that's one where we have actually installed Philips Avent spaces in certain places around the globe just to say, hey, we're here for you.

26:59You deserve this moment to whatever it is, whether you need to change or you need to breastfeed or you just need a moment in the rooms. I'd love to get your thoughts on intergenerational families and living spaces. So we had to get out of the brown living rooms, flat in Walthamstow. And it wasn't very nice. We couldn't afford a house at the time. So we moved in with my parents. I went back into my room that I grew up in. Hi, mum. I've got a wife and a baby. I'm back. It was good. We could save money. But obviously being a parent and a child at the same time is tricky. Yeah, it's true. But what was amazing, obviously we could save loads of money.

27:35but my parents at the time they were retired healthy fit they could do some of the nursery drop-offs they could cook us dinner even do some of our laundry that's amazing and i remember i went to work and there was a guy an indian guy and he lived with his mom yeah and he was like why why are you moving out why don't you just stay and we were like well we want our own space and he was like why why don't you just build an extension on the house and stay at home because it works for everybody right we thought about it for about two minutes like no we're moving to our own house but i got his point yes in terms of life was actually quite nice in in some ways we had support yeah it wasn't as stressful we weren't running around i'm very lucky that i get to go all over the world and see all sorts of family structures and when we go and we travel we go into homes and um you think that this is great the more people the better the village better, right?