Where Are All the Dad Groups?
Exploring isolation, support groups, and my very first byline!
Hey there, y’all!
I’ve got some fun news to share - I’ve had my first piece published! The team over at Yahoo! was kind enough to give me a shot, which I gladly took. Thanks to their feedback & advice, as well as your support, I’ve got my very first byline, which I gotta say, is pretty neat. Seriously, thank you to everyone who has given me feedback, advice and encouragement since I started writing here - while it’s one step in a much larger journey, it is a big one for me.
You can find the link to full piece on Yahoo! in the link below, but I’m including a quick preview for you to check out as well. Enjoy!
Plenty of moms have parent groups. Why don't dads?
“When Jack and his wife joined a local parent resource group in Brooklyn, they were placed in a cohort with other parents due to give birth the same month. The difference between how moms and dads engaged showed up almost immediately.
“The moms were very active on the messaging threads, and the dads not so much,” Jack says. His wife joked that the moms were deep into pregnancy symptoms, while the dads were mostly trying to find a good neighborhood mechanic.
Jack didn’t take the silence as indifference. He saw it as a mismatch between how the group functioned and how the dads wanted to participate. So he suggested something more concrete: a meetup at a neighborhood bar about a month before their babies were due. “I was pleasantly surprised when 10 other dads showed up.”
The interest was clearly there. It just needed a different setting.
The budding dad group stayed together. There’s a group chat, coffee meetups during paternity leave and a standing monthly happy hour. By most conventional measures, it works. But Jack is clear-eyed about its limitations.
“We haven’t meshed into friends who are dads but are still dads who meet to talk about dad-related topics,” he says. “That might be holding us back.”
You can find the full piece here: Plenty of moms have parent groups. Why don’t dads?
A great company that’s based in Boston, Nurture by Naps, runs an amazing Dad support group alongside their options for Moms. The facilitator is pretty great, and happens to be my husband! And it’s virtual, so Dads can join from anywhere!
Started reading about Jack and having an out of body experience and then remembered our conversation. Great to see the full piece!