Redefining Masculinity: How This Girl-Dad Influencer Found Himself Through Being a Father

When he was a kid, Simon Hooper says his dad was a calm, constant presence in his life. “I don't remember him ever raising his voice really,” he tells Tim. That stood in contrast to some of his fathers who acted distant around their kids, begrudgingly picking their kids up from the playground and angrily barking orders. But even though Simon’s dad wasn’t “scary” like some other fathers, being open with his dad wasn’t always easy. Only a few months after graduating from university, Simon was surprised to learn that his then-girlfriend, now-wife, Clementine, was pregnant with their first child. “I remember finding out and my knees kind of buckled,” Simon tells Tim. “But the biggest thing for me was telling my parents and more specifically my dad.” Simon and Clementine drove to his parents’ house and had dinner, and then dessert, but Simon was still too anxious to break the news, worried that his dad would be upset or it would change their relationship. It wasn’t until Simon was out the door that he got the courage to come back inside and tell his dad that they were expecting a baby. “He stuck his hand out and he shook my hand and said ‘Congratulations, that is brilliant news,’” Simon says. “A huge moment in my journey to fatherhood was to tell my dad and to kind of… get his blessing.”

That was more than eighteen years ago, and Simon is now thoroughly outnumbered as the father of four daughters. In the mid 2010s, in the thick of parenting, he started to notice more and more moms online were making content about their lives and using it to connect with each other. He thought, there are so few dads making this kind of content, but I could be one of the first. His Instagram account @father-of-daughters now has almost a million followers. It’s where he shares his parenting joys and failures, and also tries to “...find some humor in the mundane,” he tells Tim, “because we all go through the mundane as part of parenting.”

Nowadays, Simon is proud to be a part of a generation of dads who are more and more involved in their kids' lives, and who reject the idea that fathers should only be stoic heads-of-households. His advice for young dads is to try not to absorb too many external messages about what fatherhood or masculinity should look like. “Don't go into [parenting] with too much of a preconception around what type of father you should be,” he says. “You will learn it as you go.”

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Simon Hooper is a Global Operations Director for a consultancy firm in London and the author of the book, “Forever Outnumbered: Tales of Our Family Life.” You can see Simon’s girl-dad adventures on Instagram, with his handle @father_of_daughters.

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Our theme music was written by Andy Ogden and produced by Tim Lauer, Andy Ogden and Julian Raymond. All other music that you hear in this episode is courtesy of Epidemic Sound.

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