One recent Thursday in May, about 30 dads huddled over mannequins at a rooftop bar for a different kind of happy hour. Eyes narrowed and hair ties in hand, they brushed wigs, gathered strands into ponytails and worked to figure out braiding.
Though most arrived as strangers, the men shared two bonds: They all had young daughters — and they all wanted to get better at styling their hair.
“If you’re going to get your daughter ready, then you’ve got to be able to do everything,” said Dharmesh Tailor, a finance worker with an 18-month-old daughter. “This is all part of the repertoire of being a dad.”
Mr. Tailor was in south London for “Pints and Ponytails,” an event guiding fathers through the practicalities of styling children’s hair. The organizers, Mathew Lewis-Carter and Lawrence Price, fathers themselves, began the regular gatherings to help fathers connect with their daughters and normalize a task that often falls to women.
Videos of their events, in which attendees grapple with mannequins and practice braids, have racked up tens of millions of views online. They have also unwittingly tapped into a thorny ideological debate over gender roles and masculinity.
While mothers still spend more time on child care, millennial fathers are catching up, with dads in the United States spending 2.5 hours more per week than they did a decade ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Whether painting their nails or proudly claiming the #girldad moniker, some male influencers are challenging the hyper-traditional, macho version of masculinity being pushed by the ecosystem of conservative self-help influencers known as the “manosphere.”
Mr. Lewis-Carter, 37, and Mr. Price, 42, who host a podcast about fatherhood, experienced a viral moment after the online influencer Andrew Tate called their events “cucked,” a derogatory term for submissive men. They decided to embrace the notoriety, capitalizing on the moment by joking that they had renamed their event “Cucks & Ponytails.”
“Men are put under the microscope so much at the moment — but the dads are here, and they’re here for a reason,” Mr. Lewis-Carter said as he and Mr. Price set up for a recent event. He added in another interview that many men reject traditional gender norms and the clumsy stereotypes of the Homer Simpson-style father.
Learning the Basics
The pair are not the first to run classes targeted at eager “girl dads.” Strider Patton, a San Francisco-based artist and teacher, has amassed around 750,000 followers sharing tutorials on his accounts, named “Dad Braids.” Salons and hair care brands have also joined the burgeoning movement by organizing classes around Father’s Day.
Many still assume that the mother is the “default parent,” said Jamelia Donaldson, the founder of Treasure Tress, a company focused on textured hair whose goal is to teach braiding to 10,000 dads. “What we’re seeing now is men that are stepping up and saying actually, no, I want to be a part of my children’s life in entirety.”
Mr. Patton said he had launched the account as a resource for other fathers after he struggled to teach himself. He said he has received enthusiastic responses from widowers, single parents, gay dads and other men.
Still, the admiration lavished on “girl dads” has its critics, including some exasperated mothers who wonder where their trophies are.
“I’ve never gone viral with a women’s class,” said Annis Waugh, the founder of Braid Maidens, a British business that teaches people to braid hair. It was her first classes for men four years ago, “Braids Basics for Blokes,” that prompted a surge of interest. (Mr. Lewis-Carter and Mr. Price enlisted her as an instructor for the first few “Pints and Ponytails” events, although they now teach the classes themselves, saying they felt it was better the event be run by dads.)
Ms. Waugh said she understood the critics who say hair care is a bare-minimum skill for parenting. But over the years, she said, she had met fathers who were ashamed of their poor hairstyling or worried about hurting their children.
“They can’t do it if they’re scared to pick up a hairbrush,” she said.
Low Pony, High Pony
Mr. Lewis-Carter and Mr. Price, close friends who met at fitness competitions, said that their ambition goes beyond hair: to create a space where fathers can be vulnerable.
“We’re all saying to men, they need to talk more,” said Mr. Price. But in order to do that, he said, “men need to feel like they’re in the right environment, that they are safe.”
In their classes, braiding side by side, dads have opened up about breakups, grief and struggles with abuse in relationships, they said.
Still, the instruction begins with the simple task of brushing hair.
“Don’t just put the brush on the top of the hair and pull it down,” Mr. Lewis-Carter warned at the start of one recent event. “You are asking for tears.”
As they guided the class through low ponytails, high ponytails and braids, the duo encouraged the men to make mistakes and “get things off their chest.”
Attendees looked to each other for feedback. One man showed others the way he held a hair tie. Others crowded around Mr. Price as he demonstrated a three-strand-braid on a mannequin.
Some men said that their wives had flagged the event for them, and encouraged them to sign up. Others like Alex Cort, 58, had come of their own volition.
“I go up to the ponytails but I can’t really do plaits very well,” said Mr. Cort, who shares custody of his 8-year-old daughter. I find my thumbs are just too big.”
He said he had been reading Pippi Longstocking books to his daughter, which naturally led to her request for the fictional Swedish heroine’s signature braids.
Krunal Patel, an engineer whose 4-year-old daughter was about to start school, said that his wife had pointed him to the class. “Neither of us had seen this sort of event before,” he said, adding that he hoped to keep the parenting load as equal as possible. He was taking photos, he said, so he could show them to his daughter.
“Hopefully, she still says, ‘Oh yeah, do that for me, Papa,’” he said.
By 9:30 p.m., the group was ready for their final and most difficult style — an elegant crisscross known as the fishtail braid. One man, Richard Brown, produced a neat, sleek version that prompted admiration from his classmates. Mr. Price proclaimed it “a thing of beauty.”
The minutes spent doing hair in the mornings are more than a practicality but can be precious time between fathers and daughters. Some teachers are bringing classes to incarcerated fathers who have limited time with their children.
Mr. Price, whose daughter has autism, said that brushing her hair can help calm her. “It’s opened up a beautiful gateway for us at home to have more time together,” he said.
The post They Want to Be Better Fathers, One Braid at a Time appeared first on New York Times.
