Nobody Cares About Dad

Father’s Day is, at its most delightful, a harmless coup d’état in which Dad is crowned Emperor of the Living-Room for precisely twenty-four hours. This year my coronation was stage-managed by a seven-year-old valet clutching a massage gun like a royal sceptre: cushions were plumped, tea materialised before I could so much as yawn, and—for one glorious moment—I was addressed with a head nod, fit for a Thai king, I’ve never felt so magnificently unnecessary.

But as the smell of slightly singed toast drifts through some kitchens, other homes are quiet. In the United States about seventeen million children—nearly one in four—live in households where a father isn’t resident. Here in the UK, the latest figures suggest roughly 477 000 households are headed by a lone father, a sliver of the families in which dads love their children from a different address. When the calendar flips to mid-June, that distance can sting like fresh sunburn.

A Letter to the Dads Who Aren’t There (Even Though They Are)

You may spend today scrolling past macaroni-and-glitter portraits that will never hang on your fridge. You might have wrapped a gift you’re not allowed to deliver, or drafted a message you’re afraid will go unanswered. If the ache in your chest had a sound, it would be the hollow click of a phone that doesn’t ring.

Please hear this: your fatherhood is not measured in square footage. Love, inconvenient as ever, recognises neither court order nor postcode. It drifts beneath doors, hums down fibre-optic cables, hides inside lullabies only you and your child know by heart. Every bedtime voice note, every postcard slid between pages of a schoolbook, every moment you choose patience over bitterness—they’re planks in a bridge your child will one day feel underfoot, even if they can’t yet name the carpenter.

You are allowed to grieve. Cry if you must; rage a little, so long as you don’t unpack and live there. Talk to a friend, a counsellor, a support group. You cannot pour from an empty mug, royal-sized or otherwise.

And keep showing up, even imperfectly. Presence is a habit. Keep the habit alive in whatever form the rules allow: reading the same story over video chat, watching the same film “together-apart,” posting a silly selfie every morning so their day starts with your grin. Routine is a love language children learn fluently.

The School Snub (Or, Why My Gears Are Officially Ground)

Now, a small confession. What really chafes this year is the discovery that my child’s school—an otherwise lovely place full of phonics, glue sticks and lost jumpers—treats Mother’s Day like a national holiday and Father’s Day like an administrative error. In March every child is marched home with hand-painted flowerpots and heartfelt poems about the “hardest job in the world.” At the welcome-evening before we joined, they even screened a slick video explaining that motherhood is the planet’s most challenging vocation and the bedrock of civilisation. All true—and yet, on the subject of dads, the film had the narrative depth of a tumbleweed.

June, by contrast, arrives with no glue, no glitter and certainly no poems. The school diary is silent, as though fathers were optional extras—nice to have but not essential to the plot. It’s a shrug in calendar form, and I can’t help wondering what message it sends: that dads are background characters, the B-squad of parenting?

Dads are not decorative. We may tuck our T-shirts awkwardly and replace perfectly good nappies with crooked ones, but we are crucial. We steady bicycles, teach terrible jokes, model how to apologise when we get stuff wrong (which is often), and prove—sometimes by spectacular trial and error—that love can be both strong and gentle. Children deserve to see that celebrated, in classrooms as well as living-rooms.

So, dear schools of the world: glue us a card. Let small hands trace “D-A-D” in wobbly felt-tip. Arrange construction-paper ties and invent a poem about heroic flat-pack assembly. We promise not to mind the glitter, just acknowledge the importance of us Dads. 

A Word to Anyone Listening

If you know a dad who’ll spend today on the wrong side of a front door, send the first text. Offer Sunday dinner. Let him show off photos no one asked to see. Speak warmly about him when his kids are within earshot; children can love two homes without betraying either. And when the chance comes to shape policy—shared parental leave, flexible contact routines, child-first court reforms—raise your voice, because empathy makes good law.

For me its back to the sofa throne where I am writing this blog. To the fathers being fussed over today: savour the pancakes (crispy edges and all) and the novelty socks. To the fathers pacing the kitchen with a phone that won’t buzz: your crown is merely in storage. The bond you share with your child is woven from tougher stuff than geography.

Wherever you sit this Father’s Day—on a couch fortified by extra cushions, on a bus to a supervised-contact centre, or somewhere in between—remember that fatherhood is a marathon run on invisible threads. Some days those threads feel like silk, some days like fishing line, but they hold. They hold.

Happy Father’s Day, kings of every castle and keep-out-sign flat alike. May the children you love always find their way home to you—whether that home is a house, a weekly video call, or simply the steady beat of your stubborn dad-heart.