How middle-class is your dad?

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Josiah Gogarty has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Not all Facebook groups are forums for insurrection, anti-vaccine propaganda and rude remarks about Bill Gates. Some are just places where people talk about their dads. ‘Middle Class “Your Dad” Talk’ is a group where some 23,000 members share observations and witticisms that all follow the same format: ‘your dad is extremely specific about how the dishwasher is loaded’; ‘your dad judges others’ success by how big their kitchen island is’; ‘your dad was building up the courage to confront the postman about leaving the garden gate open until he saw he had a tattoo on his arm’. Mums are generally left alone.

‘Your dad is extremely specific about how the dishwasher is loaded,’ reads one entry

The group was set up in December 2015 by Ned Kemp, a 29-year-old who works in criminal law in Bristol. For the first four years he wrote the vast majority of posts, and by last January membership had plateaued at 2,000. But during the first lockdown in March, there was a mass exodus of twentysomethings from boxy flats to their parents’ houses. Middle-class dads and their children were thrown together again; those children needed somewhere to vent about it. Thousands joined Kemp’s group, which now has nearly 2,000 posts a month.

The posts all refer to a host of different ‘middle-class dads’. Everyone seems to have a slightly different idea of what middle–class means. But three distinct varieties emerge. One is the metropolitan centrist, who makes his own chutney, learns conversational French on Rosetta Stone, hands out Green and Black’s chocolate at Halloween, and reckons that ‘the wrong Miliband got in’ back in 2010.