They want to be better fathers, one braid at a time

One 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 daughters’ 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 being a dad.”

He was in south London for “Pints and Ponytails”, an event guiding fathers on styling children’s hair. The organisers, Mathew Lewis-Carter and Lawrence Price, who are fathers themselves, began the regular gatherings to help fathers connect with their daughters and normalise a task that often falls to women.

Videos of the events, in which attendees grapple with mannequins and practise 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 childcare, millennial fathers are catching up, with dads in the US spending 2½ 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”.

Lewis-Carter, 37, and Price, 42, who host a podcast about fatherhood, experienced a viral moment after online influencer Andrew Tate called their events “cucked”, a derogatory term for submissive men. They decided to embrace the notoriety, capitalising 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,” Lewis-Carter said as he and Price set up for a recent event. He said 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 haircare brands have also joined the movement by organising classes around Father’s Day.

Many still assume that the mother is the “default parent”, said Jamelia Donaldson, 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.’”

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, 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. (Lewis-Carter and 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 that the event be run by dads.)

Low pony, high pony

Lewis-Carter and 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 saying to men, they need to talk more,” Price said. But in order to do that, he said, men need to feel like they are in the right environment, that they are safe.

In their classes, braiding side by side, dads have opened up about break-ups, 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,” 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”.

Participants looked to one another for feedback. One man showed others the way he held a hair tie. Others crowded around 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 Cort, who shares custody of his eight-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 hero’s signature braids.

By 9.30pm, the group was ready for the final and most difficult style – an elegant crisscross known as the fishtail braid. One participant, Richard Brown, produced a neat, sleek version that prompted admiration from his classmates. Price proclaimed it “a thing of beauty”. NYTIMES