UAE: These community groups bring fathers together for meet-ups and fun activities with children

A few months ago, a health specialist delivered some news to Dave Griffin that hit him like ‘a ton of bricks’. “I was told that there is a possibility that I might have breast cancer,” he recalls, as we speak. One of the first people he broke the news to was Billy Garnon, the group administrator of Dubai Irish Dads. “The kind of support he gave me straight away was amazing,” he recalls.

Billy was, in fact, one of the first people Dave befriended when he moved to the UAE from the UK, more than a year ago. Dave had just become a stay-at-home dad here after working full-time in the UK, and the transition was difficult. But Billy, says Dave, encouraged him to come in for coffee and a chat once a week. “I used to walk away feeling so good and positive,” recalls Dave, who now runs his own construction business. As a member of the group, he has actively participated in many of its activities.

When the other dads heard Dave’s news, they rallied around the family - one of them, who is a life coach, even offered to meet him every week at Starbucks, just to talk. Luckily, further medical tests revealed that he didn’t have cancer and he was given the all-clear by his doctor. “Although I was worried, I remember I was never afraid to talk about it because I knew the kind of response that I would get from the group,” says Dave.

Unlike moms' groups, dads' groups are still rare today. However, a few groups in the UAE, started for and by fathers, provide a platform for members to connect with one another through activities such as regular meet-ups, talks by experts, and fun activities with their children. Dubai Irish Dads, for instance, which was started in 2022, has organised community activities like "family days, dads and kids walks, sporting events, and now, an annual Dad of the Year awards night,” says Billy.

A new platform for dads

Thirty-six-year-old Oliver Mohsen-Taheri relocated to Dubai from London with his wife, Rebecca, and their three-year-old son, Rumi, in 2022. He runs an international real estate investment company, and work brought him to the city. The majority of his friends and family, including his parents, reside in the UK.

The couple is fortunate to have jobs with flexible timings and can manage childcare, but Oliver realised that other dads who are in a similar position may feel isolated and lonely. “That’s why I started The Dad Network DXB,” he says. “I felt like I needed to create a community for dads because men don’t talk about their problems as much as they should, and dads sometimes find it hard. I wanted to create a safe space where dads could feel supported, have a shoulder to cry on, or have someone to put their arm around them and say, ‘Well done, you are doing a great job!’”

He also wants to help dads to ‘level up’ by passing down certain basic life skills to their children, like how to maintain a car – skills that he thinks are fast disappearing as they are no longer passed down through generations. “I don’t think the world is going to be an easy place for our kids to live in the next 20, 30, 40 years, so we need to arm them with as many tools as possible to survive and thrive.”

The group made its debut on Instagram last month and had its first meet-up at Night Jar in Al Quoz on March 26, where “half a dozen dads” turned up. Perhaps there is comfort in anonymity because even though none of them knew each other, Oliver says the group talked about their life situations, overcoming challenges, and their evolving relationships with their partners. “These relationships do change when children come along - not in a bad way, but it does add pressure to the relationship and there was a lot of discussion on how people operate differently as a couple.”

Buoyed by the group's feedback at the meet-up, Oliver has big plans in store – weekly meet-ups with members, monthly workshops with guest speakers on anything from parenting, health and wellness to budget management, basic DIY skills, and cooking, and fun day outs with kids. “We’ve already launched a Substack,” he says. “We are looking to build a website and set up a WhatsApp group for dads. It’s still early days, so we are going to treat it very organically and build it up depending on the dads’ feedback.”

Fostering deep male friendships

Chris Bradwell started British Dads Dubai nearly 10 years ago, but the group’s monthly breakfast meet-ups on the first Tuesday of every month at Arabian Ranches are a fairly new ritual. When we speak, we are days away from the group’s 10th breakfast meet-up. “It’s just a very casual thing, where the dads sit and have breakfast, and talk if they want to,” he says.

He started the group when he was a stay-at-home dad and felt lonely. “I had a very large group of friends back home, and we would spend a lot of time together. I didn’t really know anybody in Dubai, and I was on my own the whole time.” Although he tried to join a few moms' groups, it just didn’t fit, and his wife suggested that he start a group for dads instead. “But I didn’t want to because I didn’t know whether anyone would join it.”

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