Research
Fathers who lose children occupy one of the least visible positions in bereavement — both in research and in the design of support.
This is the work that is trying to change that.
Fathers, Child Loss, and the Limits of What We Know
When a child dies, grief research — and grief support — has historically centred on mothers' experiences. This is not a criticism of that work; it reflects the narratives that have dominated clinical practice and academic literature for decades. But it has left fathers' experiences significantly underexplored, with real consequences for how bereavement services are designed, how practitioners are trained, and whether a grieving father can find language, recognition, and care — or concludes, as many do, that what he is carrying is his alone to manage.
Fathers are not secondary mourners. Their bond with their child, their grief at its loss, and their experience of navigating that grief within the specific pressures of masculinity, family role, and social expectation — all of this is distinct, complex, and largely unexamined in the academic literature.
My research addresses that gap directly.
Between 2020 and 2024, I designed, delivered, and researched Dad's Club — a counsellor-led, fathers-only bereavement support group — in partnership with Reuben's Retreat, a charity supporting families affected by child loss and life-limiting illness in the North West of England.
Over five years of direct practice with bereaved fathers, I developed a depth of clinical and relational understanding that preceded and shaped the research. The study itself — a qualitative investigation into fathers' lived experiences of child loss and of attending a fathers-only support group — was conducted with six participants whose children had died at different ages and in different circumstances, each of whom had been attending the group for between one and five years.
The research was sanctioned by the Ethical Research Board at the University of Salford, and completed in 2024. It was awarded a Masters with Distinction.
The study is currently being prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.
The Study
Why This Research Was Needed
At the time this study was conducted, only one published piece of research existed examining a fathers-only bereavement support group. That is not a niche gap — it is a significant absence in a field that has otherwise developed considerably over recent decades.
The reasons for this absence are themselves worth examining. Bereavement research has tended to study grief through frameworks that centre on mothers, couples, or families as units. Fathers have often appeared at the margins of studies not designed with them in mind, making it difficult to understand their specific experience on its own terms.
Meanwhile, cultural expectations around masculinity — the pressure to hold things together, to prioritise others' grief, to manage difficulty privately — mean that fathers often present differently to services, access support later or not at all, and may find that mixed-gender bereavement provision does not adequately reach them.
The result is a population of grieving fathers who are poorly served both by the research record and by the support systems built from it.
The study used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis — a qualitative research methodology designed to explore, in depth, how individuals make sense of significant personal experiences.
IPA is phenomenological in orientation, meaning it is concerned not with what happened, but with what it was like — with the texture of lived experience, the meanings people attach to events, and the ways in which profound difficulty is understood, processed, and carried over time.
Each participant took part in an in-depth, face-to-face interview lasting approximately seventy-five minutes. These conversations were recorded, transcribed, and analysed over many months — generating more than 120,000 words of data — to identify themes in how fathers experienced both the loss itself and the support available to them.
This methodology was chosen deliberately. The experiences of bereaved fathers are not well served by questionnaires or standardised measures. They require an approach that can hold complexity, sit with contradiction, and allow meaning to emerge from individual accounts rather than averages. The result is research that is rich, specific, and grounded in the actual words and worlds of the men who participated.
How the Research Was Conducted
What the Research Illuminates
Without pre-empting the full findings ahead of publication, the study sheds light on several areas that have significant implications for clinical practice, service design, and how we understand paternal grief:
How fathers experience the loss itself — including the particular ways in which child loss disrupts identity, relationships, and a father's sense of his place in the world, and how that disruption is shaped by both personal history and social expectation.
The specific challenges fathers face in expressing and processing grief — including the tension between the instinct to protect others and the need to acknowledge their own pain, and how that tension intersects with cultural norms around masculinity.
The value and function of fathers-only support spaces — what becomes possible in a male-only group that doesn't happen in mixed settings, and why that matters for how bereavement services are designed.
How fathers maintain their bond with their child — the ways in which fathers keep their child's presence alive over time, and what that reveals about the ongoing nature of grief and love beyond loss.
The role of a skilled counsellor in a peer-support context — and what the combination of lived experience and professional expertise makes possible that neither alone can achieve.
These findings are novel.
They extend what is currently understood about paternal bereavement, challenge several prevailing assumptions about how men grieve, and have direct implications for practitioners, policymakers, and anyone designing support for bereaved fathers.
Whats Coming
The work is at an early stage of a longer trajectory. Current and planned activities include:
Peer-reviewed publication — the Masters research is being prepared for submission to an academic journal. This is the immediate priority and the foundation on which further work will build.
Book — a longer treatment of fathers' experiences of child loss is in development, drawing on the original research, five years of clinical practice, and the broader literature on masculinity, grief, and psychological recognition. The aim is a work that speaks to academic, clinical, and general audiences.
Accessible resources for bereaved fathers — the research was conducted with and for real men navigating real loss. Part of this work's purpose is to ensure that what was learned reaches the people who need it, not just academic readers.
Talks and seminars — I am available to speak on fathers' grief, paternal bereavement, and the design of support for bereaved fathers to clinical, academic, and public audiences.
In Partnership with Reuben's Retreat
This research would not exist without Reuben's Retreat — the charity that gave Dad's Club a home and whose commitment to the full experience of bereaved families made this work possible.
Reuben's Retreat supports families of children with life-limiting illness and families who have experienced child loss. Founded in 2012 following the death of five-year-old Reuben, the charity operates entirely through donations.
If you would like to support their work: Donate to Reuben's Retreat
Get in Touch
If you are a researcher, clinician, journalist, commissioner, or organisation working in the area of paternal bereavement, fathers' mental health, or child loss support — I would welcome a conversation.
I am also available to speak on this subject to academic, clinical, and public audiences.
If you are a bereaved father reading this and want to know more about support available to you, please feel free to reach out directly.
Contact James: james@jameshartley.org