FOI reference: FOI-2025-3176
You asked
Please can I request any information on the number of stay-at-home Dads there are in the UK and London specifically over the last 10 years?
Could I also request any information you have on male mental health over the past 10 years in the UK and London specifically?
We said
Thank you for your request.
Stay at home dads in the UK
We measure the labour market status of individuals and families from the Labour Force survey based on interviews with people resident in households in the UK.
We do not hold an estimate specifically of the number of stay-at-home Dad's, although we do produce a statistic that may give a reasonable proxy of trends in this area.
As part of our quarterly release on Working and workless households, we produce a table on the Economic activity and employment type for men and women by age of youngest dependent child living with them.
Within this table there is an estimate of the number of men with dependent children, who are economically inactive (neither in work or seeking work), who give their main reason for not seeking work that they are looking after the family or home.
This table has been produced for each quarter since January to March 2018.
This data are only produced for the UK and the countries of the UK.
Men's mental health
While we produce some information on mental health, the best source of information for your topic of interest would be NHS England Digital's Mental Health Data Hub. For any queries about this data, please contact NHS England directly at england.contactus@nhs.net.
For access to the data we hold on this topic, navigate to the Mental Health main page. Here you will find bulletins, articles, and datasets regarding the mental health of children, adolescents and adults. Our latest Suicides in England and Wales publication reports on the number and rates of suicide by sex and area of residence, which may help with your query. Please also see the publications related to mental health which also provide some data about male experiences of mental health, particularly of talking therapies in prisons.
We have also answered a previous FOI request regarding self-reported mental health conditions. This provides a link to the data we hold on personal wellbeing using data from the Annual Population Survey (APS) and UK measures of national wellbeing using Understanding Society data. Please refer to this response for more information and caveats about the use of this data.
Mental Health UK also may be able to assist, as they have published information and statistics on this topic.