The Dads Yearn for Community
Two hundred strangers, a doula, and what happens when you give grown men an excuse
I’m heading out on a book tour. Deets below.
Last Sunday, my son and I did something fantastic.
Something I never would have done if I weren’t a dad.
As previously foreshadowed mere weeks ago—it’s almost like I plan these in advance, as if my “editorial calendar” wasn’t sketched onto toilet paper in pencil—my son is deep into his football-card-collecting era. With it, he has finally come to understand the value of money. For so long, the concept was alien to him: one Euro was a shiny coin. Nothing more. It was something he saw, not something he could use.
Fast forward a few months. The world has changed, and the exchange rate is crystal clear. He now innately understands that €1 is equal to 1 shiny envelope filled with 7 cards, a number of which may be shinier than others, if he’s lucky. He also inherently understands two 50c pieces can be exchanged for a sobre of cromos. They take anything at the kiosk: 5 x 20c pieces, 10 x 10c pieces, or whatever else he can cobble together from the previously ignored loose change left around the house he suddenly developed an interest in.
He’s got cards on the mind, morning, noon and night. It’s all he wants to talk about. Any new guest to the house is instantly inducted into his collector’s VIP circle, and before long, they’ll know his favourite team, favourite player, favourite card, favourite shiny, which card he wants the most, which kids in his year have said card, and how many are out there on the open swap market.
He knows every card he has: his gots, in the parlance of my youth. His needs. His swaps, or as you’ll hear him talking about in Catalan, his repets. He’s learning not just the value of a Euro, but the value of one card versus another. He knew his spare Kylian Mbappé Panini Gold card was worth at least 10 cards from his classmate’s pile. In the school yard, his potential pool of swaps is limited. Not every kid is going to be collecting them. And amongst the ones that do, some days are less liquid than others, and he might have already exhausted the pool of his needs.
So, to cast a wider net, we hit up a local meetup at Mercat de Sant Antoni, where kids (and, as you’ll soon see, not-kids) gather every Sunday to swap football cards. I bumped into another dad I knew there: we reminisced about the sticker albums from our youth, the ones we’ll never forget. These two naive dads thought this would be an easy way to get our sons swapping with each other. But, alas, my boy was collecting La Liga; his boy was collecting World Cup 2026.
We didn’t let that early own goal set us back. Hanging around the stalls selling cards, I gently introduced my son to the other kids there. “¿Quieres cambiar?” I’d ask. He was a little timid at first, swapping with “randoms” and not his school friends, but after a few early trades, he saw just how generous—and equally obsessed—the other kids were and got right into it. One boy, only four cards away from completing the whole set, let him take a handful of cards for free. Another kid, 10 away from being done, saw one of his needs in my son’s pile and offered him 8 cards in exchange. 30 minutes later, my son was in his element. Zero fear. On the eve of his seventh birthday, getting bigger in size and stature every day.
It wasn’t just the kids. Collectors ranged from five years old to 75 years old—by the time we were leaving, the group had swelled to over 200 parents and children, with an older culé (the local term for a Barça fan) doing his rounds in an attempt to land the rare shiny Míticos Invencible card featuring Messi, Ronaldinho and Ronaldo together. Does my son know who Ronaldinho is? Of course not. Does this give us an excuse to now watch YouTube videos of his greatest moments? You bet your damn boots it does. (Sharing a hobby with your offspring: genuinely one of life’s most generous joy-filled hydrants.)
Against all odds, it wasn’t a complete sausage fest. Girls walking around swapping cards on their own, younger sisters accompanying their big brothers on their adventures. Mums were out in force, fastidiously marking off the list of missing cards for their sons. We were OK solo: I remain amazed at my son’s ability to know not just which Barça players he lacked, but exactly which of the dark-haired, olive-skinned Getafe midfielders (who look exactly the same to me) he needed to complete that page.
The dads present could be easily divided into two packs. Those who were in attendance primarily to make their kids happy. And those, like your humble narrator, who could still feel the blood pumping through their veins the same way they once did as a kid, opening a packet of stickers for the Panini World Cup USA 1994 album as an eleven year old boy: Ireland’s last great World Cup run, the final penalty showdown between Italy and Brazil, when Romário played a blinder and the cup was decided when a ponytailed Roberto Baggio put his penalty over the bar.
Those dads? They had a different glint in their eyes. We all know the baldness gene, the coriander-tastes-like-soap gene and the wee-smells-like-asparagus gene are all passed along hereditarily. Walking around, you couldn’t help but assume the collector gene was encoded in our DNA in a similar way.
I once read that if you want to be an interesting writer, you should live an interesting life. Hemingway said it better: “In order to write about life, first you must live it.” However it is articulated, it’s a deep truth.
So if offered an opportunity to make things interesting, I’ll take it. I was recently introduced to Krishinda, a midwife and doula here in Barcelona, who helps women give birth at home.1 In a country where ~25% of births are via caesarean, and only 0.3% are delivered at home, her guidance is necessary for expectant parents who don’t foresee a hospital trip in their birth plan. She’d just delivered a friend’s baby. We got a coffee and talked about life, raising kids in Barcelona. She told me she ran a course helping expectant parents get ready for the big transition, and spoke of how she’d see dads attend like rabbits in the headlights. She asked if I’d come along and talk to her next set of students. I was happy to oblige.
Sitting in a room with six expectant dads—all waiting on the arrival of their first child—I realised that it was a little under 12 years ago when I sat in their place. It feels like a lifetime ago: gloriously naive, unaware of what was to come, The Tunnel I was heading into. And here, I had the opportunity to tell them what I wish someone had told me back then: “If there’s one thing you take from this conversation, it should be each other. Get into a WhatsApp group together, reach out and share the highs, the lows, what’s easy and what’s impossible.” I imparted what I’ve learned seeing the dads who have joined the Dadscord in the same headspace: entering fatherhood with genuine curiosity, not faux certainty. Not afraid to ask for help when needed.
Krishinda asked if she could share the local Dadurday group with some of the alumni dads who had come through her program. “They need this so much,” she offered. Of course they were welcome. Those dads need support—exactly the same kind of support I was missing in the early days of my son’s birth, exactly the support that might have helped me avoid the slip into my episode of paternal postnatal depression. I was expecting a few dads to take her up on her offer, but was shocked by the response: over the course of a few days, 30 dads pulled up, bringing our local group to over 100.
The dads yearn for community. The kids yearn for it too. But it doesn’t happen by accident. It needs work. My son found his in a group of kids swapping cards. I found mine in a group of dads who meet once a month for a beer, the local arm of a breakfast club I run with a friend, the coffee shop where I became a regular. My son might not need me much longer. But for now, we’ll keep heading down to the market. His grandad has just left town, and he’s got a fresh stack of repets.
The reviews are in
A review is in
12 days until the book goes on sale, and it has received its first review. And it’s not my sister writing under a pseudonym from Manchester. (She listened to the audiobook and gave it a glowing review, but she’s biased.) It’s from Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine for the publishing industry, depended upon by librarians, bookstore owners, and industry folks to get an idea of what’s coming out soon.
Around 5% of the books they review get a coveted “starred review,” which signifies a book “of outstanding quality.” And, who’d have thunk it, this book picked one up. Apparently, I’m a “smart and self-aware guide, candid about personal challenges” who has written a book that “will resonate with modern dads frustrated with outmoded parenting advice.”
I’m excited for you all to read it. Two weeks and counting.
The Book Launch Tour. Coming to a town near you (if that town is called New York, Barcelona or Manchester)
Going out on the road. Hope to see some of you there. Tour t-shirts, not included. Good dad chats, guaranteed.
Tuesday, May 12th: New York, in conversation with Sam Graham-Felsen. Lofty Pigeon Books, Brooklyn. 6.30pm–8.00pm. RSVP here
Tuesday, June 2nd: Manchester, in conversation with Sacha Lord.
House of Books and Friends, King Street. 6.00pm–7.00pm. RSVP hereFriday, June 12th: Barcelona, in conversation with Aaron Shulman.
Backstory Bookshop, Carrer de Mallorca 330. 6.00pm–7.30pm. RSVP here
Lofty Pigeon has kindly offered to distribute signed copies anywhere in the US, so if you’d like one, you can order it on their site and ask for it to be signed/personalised at checkout.
London dads, I’ll be there around the time of the UK launch (May 28th). Location TBC. If you know of a nice bookstore that might be willing to host us, please hit me up at kevin@newfatherhood.email or press reply.
Say Hello
How did you like this week’s essay? Your feedback helps me keep this ship on the straight and narrow as we count down the days until launch.
Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad
“What is he doing talking to a doula? Isn’t he already out of The Tunnel?”
I love this! We never made it over to the Mercat de Sant Antoni when we were in Barcelona - sounds like a fun scene. Also, huge congrats on the starred review. I'm jealous!