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Anna’s unwavering passion, eloquence, honesty and relentless campaigning have led her to gain a loyal following that amasses over 400k on Instagram alone. Anna is admired and appreciated by so many parents far and wide for being a much-needed voice around flexible working, childcare costs, and maternity and paternity packages. We sat down with Anna to discuss the challenges she has faced since becoming a parent and why this time around she’s not going to return to work with any apologies.  

At what point in your career did you first become a parent? And how did you find that transition? 

Anna: “I first became a parent just as my career was really taking off. I think this happens with a lot of women actually; you’re at that junction where your career is going like this, [Anna gestures an upward movement] and then suddenly you have a baby [she meets and connects the other hand] and it kind of cuts you off a bit. And this is not because of a lack of your own enthusiasm, your own experience or your own brilliance, but because of the ceiling that the world of discrimination puts upon us mothers. So yeah, my eldest came along as I was rising [up], I then just hit a complete wall. 

Where did your inspiration for ‘Mother Pukka’ come from? 

Anna: “Mother Pukka came from a really primal, visceral, maternal, angry place. That’s why it was quite blue at first. It was Mother something else! [She laughs] So it was watered down and became Mother Pukka. But initially, it came from a place of just ‘hacked-off-ness’. I’d seen so many baby magazines and so many articles that were aimed at parents, all of them talking about what nipple teat to have and what ‘bugaboo’ to get, and what nappy changing bag worked, but no one was talking about the motherhood penalty. No one was talking about the lack of flexible working for parents. No one was talking about the quiet swathes of women who are disappearing from the workforce just because they assumed that’s what needed to happen because of the status quo. And so mother pukka, just came from this place of frustration that I’d had my flexible working request denied for really vague reasons.

Like ‘it would open the floodgates for other people to have flexible working!?’ And I was like, I’m sorry, let’s open the floodgates because people are drowning behind them! Specifically mothers – 54,000 mothers every year are discriminated against. So, yeah, that’s where it [Mother Pukka] came from.”

You’ve recently posted, I’m not sorry, where you mentioned that when you returned to work after having your first two children, you returned almost ‘smaller’ and quite apologetic. You have shared your understandable frustrations around that. How different will the experience be for you this time around? Do you feel stronger than you did previously?

Anna: “I’m just not taking it anymore, you know. [Anna talks passionately] I think things have and are changing; it’s not a case of employers changing things, I think women are changing things because we’re 50% of the population and we’re just saying ‘No!’. We’re saying, ‘No, call my daughter’s father as well as me when she’s in nursery!’ (And that’s nothing against the amazing key workers who work with our children.) But the expectation, the bulk of childcare, is still strapped firmly to female shoulders. It’s not that we’re fighting some revolution. It’s evolution. That’s the difference. And I think people see that, with the work I do, the work the ‘Pregnant Then Screwed’ group does, the work that the Fawcett Society does – all these amazing organisations shine a light on this. People say to me ‘Oh my God, this is big what you’re all doing!’ and I’m like, no, it’s what it should have been there in the first place! That’s what equality is. It’s rebalancing a system that is structured and built for women, specifically mothers to fail. So I am not apologising anymore for a system that is set up for me, for my daughters, for my daughter’s-daughter’s to fail. It’s not my fault. It’s not your fault. and it needs fixing!”

Is it that personal experience that inspired you to start Flex Appeal? (The campaign for more flexible working for everyone)   

Anna: “I think when I started speaking about the other side of the motherhood story, which wasn’t just about what maternity bag to buy or, ‘how to pack your hospital bag.’ It was about the real-time frustrations around giving up, not just work, but your purpose, of yourself, the expectation that you just step back. I decided, actually, do you know what this needs? Governmental change. This needs structural change. So that is when I launched Flex Appeal, which was our lobbying body/platform/organisation for the exhausted women in the street shouting, ‘ I don’t care what you want to call me [for being me]!’ It’s that drive to change not just the narrative, but legislation. I just thought, there’s no way through this unless legislation changes for men and women. And I think that’s the big point here. This isn’t just about mums. This is about parents! It’s about dads who are just desperately frustrated that their employer won’t enable them to work flexibly because it’s seen as a ‘her-in-doors’ job still.  

I say, the unconscious bias, but it’s a conscious bias that sits right there. So I needed a campaign to hook this on. That would have me, my little daughter at the time, my second daughter, and maybe this one now [she points to her unborn child] knocking on the doors of Whitehall and just saying, what are you doing about the 54,000 women every year that are locked out of the workforce for daring to have a baby? Like, that’s a ridiculous amount. And  that doesn’t even include gagging orders, NDA’s, etc, so you could probably quadruple that number you know.”

After 10 years of campaignin, how are you feeling now that it was recently announced the current government has decided to start the ball rolling? And how long do you think it will take to be implemented?

Yeah. Three babies, one decade, and one campaign [she laughs.] I will say the proof is in the pudding because there’ve been so many governmental, political promises and until it actually happens, I don’t and I won’t believe it. So in some ways I’m taking it with a pinch of salt. 

It’s quite monumental, but until flexible working is by default, that it is just assumed across the board instead of fought for, the onus is still on the employees. Until that structure changes, I won’t see any level of success. But what I would love to see, before that time is don’t wait for the laws to change if you’re an employer. Don’t take the stick approach, take the carrot approach. Why aren’t you thinking about how you can retain this brilliant talent? You’re not doing us a favour. We’re great. We’re talented. You’re cutting us out at our prime when we know so much and then you have to get somebody else in and [have to] train them up. So it’s about businesses too really. I want to see cultural change. I want to see. For example a dad messaged me, and he told me that he had put his request flexible in and it was rejected on the basis that they said, ‘Can’t your ‘missus’ do that?’ That was in 2023? [she sighs in disbelief and goes onto answer the question herself…] ‘You know what, No. His ‘missus’ might be working elsewhere, or might be a brain surgeon, or you know, might be doing something else. So no, the assumption that ‘her-in-doors,’ ‘ya missus,’ ‘the mum’, the ‘primary caregiver’ should automatically pick up that childcare slack, is so inherently wrong. So I want to see a cultural change around that employer going, yes, absolutely, pick up your daughter from nursery because of the old hapless dad trope, you know, ‘daddy daycare’ or ‘babysitting my children.’ any of that – we’re done with it! Like you’re parenting. I think that it’s language like that that we need to start using: parenting, parental leave, not just maternity leave. Lets unite the two sides of the procreation coin. It takes two to tango. So you know there won’t be equality unless we recognise those two sides. 

“…My daughter initially said to me, ‘Mummy, sometimes I think you don’t like me very much when you’re on the phone.”

What has been the most challenging time in your life since having to juggle both work and parenthood?

Anna: “I think this is probably something every one of your readers has gone through. Regardless of whether you are, I hate the term stay-at-home-mum because no parent stays at home, you’re out doing things all the time and everyone’s a full time mum. I think it’s really offensive when you hear, I’m a full time mum. Well no actually, I’m a full time mum too. Everyone’s a full time mum because even when you’re working, you’re still carrying the weight of parenting at the same time, That’s why it’s heavy for us all at times. The administration of that [parenting]. You’re carrying your child from birth to primary school even at secondary school and beyond. I think a lot of your readers would probably relate here, regardless of, if you’re a ‘stay-at-home mum’ or, you know, you work, in an office or away… when that moment where your child says ‘Mummy, why are you on your phone?’ And there’s this moment that happens, in every single parent’s day where you’re caught between everything you need to do and just being with your child. My daughter initially said to me, ‘mummy, sometimes I think you don’t like me very much when you’re on the phone.’ And it broke me. So that is the kind of thing that is challenging. It’s trying to mentally balance the love I have for them, knowing that my heart is with them, but my head is with my mortgage, with the things I need to add structure to their lives, safety, security and recognising that is also love for them. And I’m actually split in the middle and I think that our phones are quite representative of that split, that divide, that tension. Because what parent hasn’t said to their child. ‘Just a minute, just a minute.’ And then they look at you and they say, ‘has it been a minute yet.’ And you’re like, ‘just a second’ and then they’ll ask ‘Is it a second yet?.’ Then you can feel yourself rising and you feel that feeling in your chest, because what you’re trying to do is answer an email or message or a client request in the middle of maybe cooking their dinner, or do one of the thousand other things that need doing. You can then get to a point where you lose it. And I lost it the other day, I said ‘if you don’t stop fighting (over some toy that neither of them cared about) …if you don’t stop doing that, Mum is going to lose her temperature!’ And as I said temperature, they just burst out laughing. [She laughs] But that’s kind of how it feels. You’re kind of like a kettle boiling. And as you do lose your temperature, you lose your temper, you lose your marbles, you lose your mind! You know, there’s so much loss in motherhood. There’s loss of hair. There’s a loss of glow. You know, you go from pregnant to not pregnant. There’s lots of skin that used to be firm and isn’t anymore. There’s loss of self. There’s loss of conversation etc. But in all of that, in the fragments of that loss, you find yourself. The best bit of standing in the middle of what can seem like rubble is looking at my two little girls and thinking, ‘I get to be your mother, I get to be your parent.”  But yes, all that extra pressure that comes with being a mum I would say probably remains the most challenging job Mother Nature could ever bestow [she laughs.]”

And to end on a high note, what has been the highlight of your career so far?” 

Anna: “I think the highlight of my career is actually, moments with my two girls. I’m really trying to carve that time out. I think it’s really easy to go to kind of accolades or moments or legislation or, you know, maybe hosting something or quite big tangible things, but the biggest thing for me is reclaiming time with them. That’s my success story. Time that I know a more archaic employer would have taken from me. So I think it’s probably sitting on the sofa on a Sunday morning, when we’re all in our PJs, whilst they eat Cheerios and you end up with one in your bra stuck to you. Those moments where they are snuggled up with you, and you can feel the warmth of their little bodies, whilst watching some inane cartoon; those are the moments you live for.

 If I was going to say on a tangible level, it would be changing the law of flexible working. The flexible working bill that came into effect in April of this year. I didn’t do it on my own though, there were a hell of a lot of other organisations involved in that. But the reason that matters is because it’s something where I can say to my little girls,  I did that because I’m not letting you go through what I went through. [Anna voice quivers and her eyes fill with tears] I’m not letting you go through that. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t watch them go do their ABCs, and then their GCSEs and their A-levels and maybe get that first job. You know when you get a phone on a computer. Going from the excitement of that to then having someone take it away. I’m not letting them go through that. That’s what happened to me and it’s certainly not happening to this one [She rubs her stomach] So yeah, I think it’s to change the structure of the world that has written us, as little girls, off!”

You can follow the inspirational Anna Whitehouse on Instagram @Mother_Pukka or visit her website: www.motherpukka.co.uk/ 

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