Year of the Dad
Thursday, May 19, 2016 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
- Nick Thorpe
A special program to celebrate National Families Week
Our guest today is Nick Thorpe who is used to taking on big challenges. One such challenge was to voyage to Easter Island on a raft of reeds. Now he is working on making Scotland the best place in the world for children to grow up and as part of that campaign he is promoting 2016 as the Year of the Dad. This is part of the campaign organised by the Fathers Network Scotland with support from the Scottish Government.
The Government support for Year of the Dad has been echoed by mums, dads, practitioners and employers. They all see the benefits arising from the promotion of the importance of fathers in child development. Listening to Nick today we can hear how passionate he is about this whole topic of valuing and supporting Dads.
There are benefits in child development that have been well documented over the years and if father-friendly practice is adopted within organisations there will be benefits for the whole community. As part of the drive to share parenting in the home and in the workplace Nick tells us about the shared parental leave legislation introduced in England, Scotland and Wales in April 2015.
In the first year since it was introduced there has been an opportunity to measure the support shared parental leave has received from families in the United Kingdom. 87% of men say they would like to take longer leave to be fully involved in parenting their child but some care needs to be taken when examining the take-up rate for Dads taking parental leave. A better guide will be available when the scheme is properly evaluated in four years’ time but of those Dads eligible it does seem to fall within the Government’s projection of between 2-8%. In some areas it is higher as for example in the Scottish Government itself where the take-up among eligible men has been 11.5% in the first year.
Clearly Dads play a more active role in child care and domestic life in general these days. It is great that we get to recognise this by speaking to Nick today. Let’s hope that Year of the Dad spreads its wings to other parts of the world so that the Scottish drive to help Dads make a difference will become a world-wide celebration.
Nick Thorpe
An award-winning journalist, author and speaker, Nick has written thousands of stories for a wide range of print and broadcast media in Scotland and beyond. For several years a travel writer with three highly-acclaimed books to his name, he has voyaged to Easter Island on a raft of reeds and boat-hitched 2500 miles around Scotland’s waters. But he says he started the biggest adventure of the lot in 2008 when he adopted his three-year-old son. In recent years, he has collaborated with a number of third sector organisations, gaining a reputation as an inspiring speaker on meaningful risk, following his TEDx talk in Bucharest in 2012. A passionate advocate for involved dads, he is enjoying the challenge of taking the Fathers Network Scotland message to a digital world through text, speech and video.
Song selection by our guest: At the Centre by Scottish group Lies Damned Lies