After declining a radio interview on the topic, I nearly said no again.
It was too sensitive. I still reeled from past incidents around the topic. But this time, something prompted me to say yes, and I’m glad I did it in the end.
In this no-holds barred interview, I share, together with Kevin Seah about the unspoken misconceptions and challenges faced by stay-at-home dads and their working wives, and how we can do better to help men and women toggle between different seasons of their lives seamlessly – with joy, with courage, but with pride also, without fear of stigma in society.
More on the Diversity podcast by Institute of Policy Studies, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, launched today- https://bit.ly/3pAQt5G
Here’s a snippet of my sharing-
So recently, I’ve been following and reading Susan David’s bestseller book which is “Emotional Agility” and in that book she says there’s this powerful, beautiful word in South Africa called sawubona, and that literally is the Zulu greeting like, “hello” but it actually means “I see you”.
It’s giving somebody affirmation, it’s a validation. It’s saying “I see you, deep inside of you, and I affirm you for who you are”.
But when we don’t have the verbiage in society to describe stay-at-home dads (and their value), it almost creates a sense of invisibility. And this invisibility is not just painful but it is dangerous, because then there is an entire group of people that you are choosing not to see, and when you don’t see them that is how stigma and then, shame are created…
