Meet our dads!
The Following Young Fathers Further study has been researching with 44 young fathers since January 2020. We believe young dads are the 'experts by experience' and that their voices and lived realities are essential to shaping better practice and policy. That's why speaking to young dads and hearing from them over an extended period has been so powerful.
All of the young fathers involved in the study were aged 15-25 when they first became fathers. Most live across different areas of the UK, but we've also interviewed 10 fathers in Sweden.
Remarkably, 11 of the UK dads have been involved in the research for over 10 years because they were also interviewed for our previous study Following Young Fathers! This long-term commitment has given us invaluable insights into how fatherhood evolves across time.
Each father has been interviewed multiple times, allowing us to understand how their parenting experiences change and develop.
We've conducted three core waves of interviews exploring:
- The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Ideas about gender and fatherhood
- Housing, parental leave and the cost-of-living crisis
We've also worked with a smaller group exploring mental health, using creative methods like photovoice and zine making, to capture experiences in different ways.
Supporting Young Fathers
You might have spotted our community stamp dotted around the website. This stamp has been created to represent our diverse and vibrant community of young fathers, professionals, researchers, and advocates. We share a vision of creating a more supportive environment for young fathers and their families.Watch the journeys of a select sample of young fathers who have long participated in the study
This video series brings to life the voices and experiences of young fathers, including quotes from their interviews conducted as part of our research study. Created by SoJo Animation, these films creatively present the joys and challenges of young fatherhood through the words of young dads themselves, tracing their journeys over time as their lives, relationships, and circumstances evolved.
Each video explores key themes from the study, including young fathers' experiences of education and employment, their relationships with children and co-parents, their support needs, and their engagements with services. By following young fathers longitudinally, we capture not just snapshots but evolving narratives showing how their experiences of parenting, support, and identity developed across different life stages and transitions.
As part of our commitment to public sociology, we present these narratives to challenge common stereotypes about young fatherhood and highlight the importance of relational, peer-led support that recognises young fathers' strengths, acknowledges their circumstances, and creates pathways toward greater confidence, wellbeing, and social participation.
Adam
Adam (not his real name!) has been part of our study since the very beginning and we've interviewed him 8 times over the past decade! Following his story over such a long period means we have seen both the ups and downs of his parenting journey: the happy moments and the tough times, his questions about what it means to be a good father and a man, and his experiences with the different services and systems meant to support him (sometimes that helped and sometimes got in the way).
Liam
Liam is a father of four who we interviewed three times for the study. He talks about growing up with neglect and abuse, and his own difficult journey trying to gain legal parental responsibility for his daughter. Liam's story shows just how far young fathers will go to stay involved in their children's lives, even if that means taking things to court, and why the right kind of support matters so much.
Jayden
Jayden became a dad at 18. His story offers insights into the challenges young fathers face when they're trying to build independent lives as parents. Jayden's experience reveals how hard it can be to find a stable home, secure reliable work, and work out childcare arrangements with your child's other parent. Despite all these obstacles, young fathers like Jayden are determined to support other young dads and help them have a better experience.
Raj
Raj is a father to children with different partners, who struggles to stay in regular contact with his kids and be an involved dad even though he wants to. He shares the difficulties when professionals get involved, but also how important the right support can be in helping him maintain contact. Raj's story highlights something we found throughout the study: that a dad's involvement often depends on having a good relationship with their child's mum and both parents being able to work out positive co-parenting arrangements over time.
From our partners and young dads
“[daughter]'s almost two-year-old. She came up the house and she actually really liked it. Preferably my house is the best place for her to, for the contact to be, if I’m honest, 'cause we just buy toys for her all the time. We’ve got a lovely garden that she can play in, lovely, big, and we’ve got a sandpit in there. We’ve been buying loads of things for her to play with to keep her occupied.”
“[Speaking about support of young fathers] We’ve done a lot of kind of advocation and representing them, a lot of the time there’s involvement with statutory services. They don’t have the care of the young person, the care’s provided by the state or the mother, so we’ve attended lots of meetings with the young person to offer additional support and facilitated contact where necessary and offered just general emotional wellbeing, support, improving robustness and resilience, encouraging them to have as amicable relationship as possible.”
“And I suppose it goes back to what we were saying before about behaviours, maybe the education side of stuff and the fact that men aren’t involved in those early conversations, you know, whether it is, I know they’re invited to come along to bumps to babies but I don’t know whether we go into the detail around some of that brain development side of stuff and things like that. Maybe that is the thing that really would change things. You know, if you were given all of that information about what happens to a child as they grow, in a scientific way, as easy to understand as possible, could be the thing that impacted on behaviour in the home.”
“If your child’s with the mother, like your relationship with her depends on your relationship with the child, innit. That’s what I realised a lot, like you can try and be bitter, you can try and be this, be that, but it’s just gonna push you further away from your child, innit.”
“I wanna fight for more stuff for dads. Like I do wanna have that extra support for new dads or even existing dads that we don’t get now 'cause we’re still important too although obviously the mum does need the majority a’ the care because obviously of the after care and the birth. But like the dads take it extremely hard as well. And obviously with having no support I think it increases the rise of mental health.”
“I think both a mother and father combined, it’s communicating and both being on the same page of what’s best for your child or children, and for both, it’s just being there 100% for them and not, like, putting yourself first, it’s, you know, putting the child’s interests first... ”
“We need to be including, we need to not [just] be focusing on mum and child […] That’s a great focus but dad … dad’s not invisible, dad needs to be in the picture as well because there’s research that shows you the effect it has on children and families as a whole when dad isn’t in the picture, so services need to be changing the way in which they work so it’s more inclusive.”
“Cause I think a lot of the time, some of young people who end up having children have been through the care system or support systems and they can feel quite judged or labelled by organisations and it’s breaking the cycle and breaking them out of that to feel empowered to be able to take stuff back, that’s the real interest to me. So, it’s about getting support right, as in being there and giving advice and guidance and all them things that we can do, but also making sure that we are doing with people as opposed to people.”
“One of the most successful projects we ever did was an informal dads’ group, and it used to be on Saturdays […] they did what they wanted, they used to do things like breakfast, and they would have breakfast together and talk about dad stuff and where they were taking their kids. And that group was always really well attended because there was never an agenda. They were never judged. They were just there together.”
“...the whole stay at home dad thing is not something to be ashamed of, you know, if you’re a dad and you wanna take your daughter out for the day, or you wanna take your kid out for the day on your own, well why is that frowned upon, why can’t you take your child out for the day ”
“Oh…patience…compassion…tolerance, a whole boatload a’ that! Honestly, I like a whole lot of life. Sacrifice…compromise, yeah I think, yeah I think they, they would be the, the big, the five, I feel, I think that was five, they would be the main. ”
“We’re currently in touch with social services for two [dads] because they don’t understand why they can’t see their children because they haven’t been informed by social services, their partner. So there’s a massive communication breakdown with those young men, so that’s the main focus of what we’re dealing with at the minute.”
“it’s still…the…sense of judgement I get from other people when they find out that I have a child.And they say, ‘oh how old is she’.I say, ‘oh she’s ten’. And they say, ‘oh how old are you?’. Like you don’t need to know that....I know exactly where that thought process is going, you know. It’s like, ‘oh you look really young and you’ve had a kid’. It’s like, ‘yeah I know, I was there!’”
Partners
