Best Beginnings Episode 5: What Alex Christopoulos told us about money, families and the early years

We're publishing this episode to mark Equal Parenting Week. Alex speaks in this conversation not just as Aviva Foundation Lead but as a father, and with real candour. Financial stress is a pressure felt across most families, in different ways.

When we talk about the early years, we tend to focus on development, attachment, play and learning. Money comes up less often, even though it shapes all of those things. This episode of Best Beginnings is about why.

Alex Christopoulos leads the Aviva Foundation, which funds organisations across the UK working on financial resilience for families who need it most. Before that, he spent time at the Lumos Foundation, where he co-authored a Lancet commission on the deinstitutionalisation of children in care globally. He's thought carefully and for a long time about what happens to children when systems fail families. He's also, as he puts it, a terrible duck.

"I thought I'd take to parenting like a duck to water," he tells George. "But I was a terrible duck, and the water was just a lot choppier than I thought it was going to be." He talks openly about the first five years: not sleeping, learning to be responsible for another person, never fully appreciating how hard it would be until he was in it. That honesty sets the tone for the whole conversation.

One of the most useful things Alex does in the episode is explain what financial resilience actually means. He tried explaining it to his own children using a desert island. Low resilience: you're scraping by day to day, just about finding enough water and food, and any change in the weather will hit you hard. High resilience: you've built a shelter, stored some food, started growing things. Unexpected events will still happen, but you've got enough reserves to adapt.

The numbers bear this out. According to the Financial Conduct Authority's Financial Lives survey, one in four people in the UK have low financial resilience. One in ten have no cash savings. Five million people are in a budget deficit, spending more each week than they earn. And that one in four figure isn't static, as Alex points out. A job loss, an illness, a death in the family, and your resilience shifts.

For families with young children, the pressure is sharper. Alex uses the image of a pebble in a rucksack: you can carry one, you can carry two, but if the weight keeps building it eventually slows you down, and if it goes on long enough it can paralyse you. He talks about parents going without food so their children can eat. Going without essentials so their children have them. Parents have this ability to shield their children from what they're feeling, and Alex calls it a superpower. But it comes at a cost: the quality of interaction with a child, the ability to be present and playful, the mental bandwidth to do the things we know matter for early brain development.

Alex draws on his work at Lumos to make the point about early investment. Globally, around 5.4 million children are in institutional care. Roughly 80% of them have a living parent. These are children whose families couldn't afford to keep them, and the children ended up where the money was. His phrase stays with you: "children following the money rather than the money following the children." Investing early and supporting families to stay together is far cheaper than crisis intervention afterwards. The same logic applies in the UK, where we consistently underinvest in the early years and spend heavily when things go wrong.

The Aviva Foundation's approach centres on prevention. Alex talks about the revolving door problem: you help someone manage their debt, they're stable for a few months, but if you haven't addressed the underlying drivers, they're back again. Housing, employment, education, mental health. The whole person approach means stepping back and asking what's actually causing the difficulty, and what the person themselves wants to change.

That philosophy sits close to how Babyzone works too. Alex visited one of our hubs recently. "The second I was in there, my guard was down," he says. He talks about the warmth, the open doors, no hoops to jump through. People come because they want to, not because they have to. And once they're in, there's an opportunity to start conversations they might not have elsewhere. He mentions adults who wouldn't go to a maths class on its own because of the stigma, but who'll drift into an everyday maths session at Babyzone because their children are already playing in the next room and there are no labels on the door.

Babyzone and the Aviva Foundation are working together through the Financial Futures Fund to integrate practical information about financial entitlements into the Baby Buddy app, so parents looking up vaccinations or breastfeeding advice also get a prompt about their employment rights. We're also bringing partners like the Department for Work and Pensions into our community hub days. Alex is clear that none of this will fix everything on its own, but it puts useful information in front of parents at the moment they're most likely to act on it.

The episode also explores what role employers can play. Aviva sits on the Royal Foundation's Early Childhood Business Taskforce, working with businesses across the UK on how they can support families in the early years. Alex talks about three ways in: the products and services they offer (Aviva provides free life insurance for new parents for a year), workplace culture (Aviva's parental leave is the same regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or how you became a parent, and men at Aviva take an average of 22 weeks compared to the two-week statutory minimum), and how they show up in the communities around them.

The gender dimension is particularly relevant for Equal Parenting Week. A lot of inequality in pay, savings and pensions has its fork in the road around childbirth. Supporting women to understand their rights and entitlements during pregnancy and the early years sets a trajectory that lasts well beyond.

Only 44% of people feel comfortable talking about money. For women, 39%. Alex's message to any parent listening who's worried about their finances is two-fold: cut yourself some slack. And then talk to someone. Another parent, a friend, someone at a Babyzone session. You'll likely find shared experiences, and you might find someone who's found a way through something similar. Just getting it out in the open, he says, takes some of the pebbles out of the bag.

When George asks what the financial services sector consistently gets wrong, Alex's answer is pointed. There's a tendency to frame low-income families as having a literacy or capability problem, as if they just need to be taught how to budget. His experience is the opposite: people on low incomes are often the most tenacious budgeters there are, because every penny has to work. "You can't budget your way out of poverty," he says. The real question is whether the systems around families are built with their reality in mind.