Dad Groups Don't Exist. Or If They Do, Nobody Told Me.

Claire has three WhatsApp groups specifically for parents she met through Ellie's nursery. One for the class parents generally, one for a subset of mums who get on particularly well, and one that I believe began as logistics for a birthday party and has since evolved into something closer to a mutual support network, a book club, and an ongoing outlet for feelings about the school reading scheme.

I have a group chat with two men I know who are also fathers. We have been in this group for three years. In that time we have organised one actual meetup, discussed our children on approximately six occasions, and sent each other football scores, memes, and a very long thread about whether the new Dacia is actually any good.

I do not say this critically. The group is genuinely useful. But it is not, by any stretch, community.

The infrastructure gap

Here is what I have observed: there is a substantial, funded, socially sanctioned infrastructure for maternal community in this country, and approximately nothing equivalent for fathers.

Mum and baby groups are available in every church hall, library, and leisure centre in Britain. They are advertised on community boards and GP waiting room posters. They are recommended by health visitors. Some of them are free. Most of them are drop-in. The implicit message is: this is hard, you should not do it alone, here are people going through the same thing.

The paternal equivalent is the pub. Which is not always accessible, requires childcare to attend, and is not particularly conducive to saying out loud: "I am finding this harder than I expected and I do not know who to talk to about it."

I spent the first two years of Ellie's life assuming I was fine. I am a fairly self-sufficient person. I have a good marriage. I work from home, which means I am around more than many fathers. I was not, by any objective measure, isolated.

And yet there was a particular kind of loneliness I carried throughout that period that I couldn't quite name until I heard another older dad describe it almost exactly, on a forum, at eleven o'clock on a Wednesday night.

The particular isolation of the older dad

The loneliness I am describing is not primarily about not having friends. I have friends. Some of them are even good ones.

The issue is that the friends I have are mostly my age, which means their children are mostly twelve to seventeen. Their parenting concerns are GCSEs and screen time and whether to let a fifteen-year-old go to a festival. My parenting concerns are sleep regressions and whether Ellie is eating enough and what to do when Sam bites things that are not food.

The gap is not unfriendly — they are interested, they remember, they are kind about it. But it is a gap. The particular solidarity that comes from being in the same crisis at the same time does not exist.

At the nursery gate, I am the oldest parent by a significant margin. The other dads are 29, 31, 34. Good men, easy company. But they are at a different stage of their lives, and of their careers, and of their relationship with their own bodies. Our experience of the same event — watching your child start nursery, say — is filtered through entirely different contexts.

I remember being 31. I was energetic and fairly oblivious. I did not know yet what I didn't know.

What I eventually found

Not what I was looking for, which was a community of older dads in my actual geographic area who met in person and had real conversations. That does not appear to exist, or at least not in my part of the suburbs.

What I found instead was online, which I had resisted for a while because I am a software engineer who spends most of his working life staring at a screen and the last thing I wanted was to spend my evenings doing the same.

But the thread I mentioned — the one where I found someone describing exactly what I had been feeling — was in a subreddit called r/daddit. It is not specifically for older dads. It is just for dads. What surprised me was how often the thing I had assumed was peculiar to my age and circumstances turned out to be simply the thing. The exhaustion. The uncertainty. The feeling of having arrived at a thing you wanted with no preparation adequate to the wanting.

What I also found, more recently, were a handful of people writing honestly about late parenthood. Not many. Not enough. But some.

And then I started writing this, which is its own form of finding community — sending words into a space and discovering that other people were sitting in the same room.

What I wish existed

I want to be clear that I am not opposed to WhatsApp groups. I am not opposed to the pub. I am not opposed to the vague and bumbling ways that men manage to maintain connection with each other despite being poorly equipped by culture and upbringing for the explicit communication of emotional states.

But I do think there is a real gap in provision, and I think it matters more for older dads than for younger ones, because older dads are less likely to find themselves in the same social cohort as other new parents. The 31-year-old at the nursery gate is surrounded by peers in the same life stage. The 44-year-old is not.

If you are reading this and you are that 44-year-old: the Reddit forums are less terrible than you think. The comment threads on this blog are open and moderated. And if you have genuinely found something that works — a group, a forum, an actual room full of actual people — I would be very glad to hear about it in the comments.

There is no shame in looking for the manual. I've said that before. There is also no shame in looking for other people who needed the same one.