By John Adams

The other day I found myself at home on my own. It was a rare moment; these things don’t happen often.

Helen was at school, Elizabeth was at pre-school and I was supposed to be in London for a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood. Alas, I had transport issues so had to bail at the last minute.

With an empty house, however, I decided to put together a quick YouTube video about social isolation and how it impacts on stay at home dads. I was, after all, wearing smart clothes that would look good on film (vain? Moi? Absolutely!).

Social isolation is, of course, a massive issue for mums. I would never want to play that down and I know mums that have struggled with it.

The thing is, us SAHDs face some particular issues. Support groups for dads, for instance, invariably run at weekends for the benefit of working fathers. It is also very, very difficult to be accepted into tight, social groups of women who have probably been socialising and known each other since they were going to NCT classes before they even had kids. Also, if mum works full time and commutes, you can bet she has no “mum friends” of her own in the locality.

As a blogger, I regularly read blog posts written by women about the importance of having supportive “mum friends”. I fear the SAHD doesn’t really have that luxury.

I shot this video, placed it on my YouTube channel and thought little of it. I wasn’t even going to embed it in a blog post. To my surprise, however, it has proved remarkably popular and so I thought I would place it on the blog. Please do have a watch and tell me what you think.

You can read more from John Adams at Dadbloguk.com; a parenting, fatherhood and lifestyle blog from John Adams, father, blogger, writer and published author.