Daddy school: meet the duo putting expectant fathers at ease

For nearly every woman I meet in London who is experiencing the desire to settle down, get married and have kids, I’m now meeting a gay man. Since the legalisation of same-sex marriage last month, and with high-profile people such as Elton John and Tom Ford bringing up kids, gay couples are getting broody. According to the Office for National Statistics there were 13,000 same-sex couples with dependent children in the UK last year, compared to 8,000 in 2011. And you can bet a large portion of them live in the cosmopolitan capital.

I am a freelance fashion editor and celebrity stylist, and I travel constantly. I’ve been in a civil partnership with Fabio, a session hairdresser, for a year. Our friends are largely straight professional couples in their late thirties and early forties who have delayed having families in favour of their careers. We used to party with them and watch the sunrise — now we stand by as they chat about pushchairs and popping out babies. I’ve always thought I wanted kids, but whenever I imagine myself as a father I conveniently fast-forward past infancy to reading the child a bedtime story or going sailing together. Fabio wants a baby, but all the same, in our own ways we are both thinking about the same thing.

Neither of us has a mother nearby: Fabio’s lives in São Paulo, where he is from, and my mother is in Yorkshire. We both have busy careers covering continents, and just don’t have space in our diaries for weekly NCT appointments. And anyway, I don’t much fancy the idea of sitting cross-legged on a beanbag in a room full of awkward couples discussing the merits of bottle over breast milk, while they all wonder whether we’ve gone for adoption or surrogacy.

Cue Confident Dad, a new company run by a pair of slick supernannies, Allegra Barrett and Simone Barrera, who have been friends since school. Their focus is supporting gay men who have had a child by surrogacy. They offer different care and advice packages, from a phone consultation (£35) to a ‘complete infant package’ (from £1,750), to help gay dads master the basics of caring for a newborn before its arrival. ‘When you adopt you get a lot of counselling,’ says Barrett, ‘but with surrogacy you get handed a baby and that’s it.’

With a background in fashion production (I first met her on a Vogue shoot), Barrett, 41, has spent over a decade working with people such as Mario Testino, so she’s firm, fair and, most importantly, used to tight schedules and last-minute requests. Since Confident Dad launched 12 months ago she has balanced being welded to her phone ‘making things happen’ on fashion shoots (a job she now does part-time) with giving advice to new parents. I don’t know how she does it. In fact, I do. Her business partner, Barrera, 38, is a qualified Montessori nursery teacher with 17 years’ nannying experience and a no-nonsense approach. Both women have two young children. They don’t get involved with any legal or moral aspects of surrogacy, but for £350 they offer a two-hour crash course in caring for a baby, with the possibility of further one-hour follow-up sessions at £150. ‘You produce the baby and we’ll help produce the rest,’ says Barrett breezily. The ultimate in peace of mind comes in the form of the most comprehensive package, which will guide you through choosing a maternity nurse from a recommended list to seeing your child take its first steps.

Confident Dad’s client list is, apparently, a who’s who of the gay arts bigwigs and City boys who live mainly in Primrose Hill, Islington and Notting Hill and take home six-figure salaries. While some couples don’t think twice about dropping £1,200 a week on a maternity nurse, Barrett says many of her clients are too proud and want to prove themselves to friends and family. They prefer to go it alone — but with a little help along the way.

Eight months ago, before musicians Tom and Paul collected their surrogate baby girl from the US, they arranged a £35 phone consultation with Confident Dad to seek advice. At this point the surrogate mother was four months pregnant. Barrera talked the couple through everything they would need to take with them for the collection of their daughter and the plane ride back, from hats to Babygros, muslin squares to car seat. The most important thing she told the men was to take English formula to feed the baby from birth, so they would avoid upsetting her stomach once she was home.

John, an artist, was weaning his child while preparing for an exhibition but ‘had no time to prepare baby food’, so Confident Dad arranged for the lucky tot to have fresh organic leeky mac and cheese and kedgeree from Fed By Ned to be delivered to his door within the hour (from £2.50). Another chap, whose baby had an ‘unshakeable cough’ but whose GP was unable to help, placed a call to Confident Dad and a homeopathic doctor and cranial osteopath were suggested. However, call them for an emergency delivery of nappies and you may be given short shrift. ‘We are not a concierge service,’ Barrera is at pains to point out.

Despite a huge cultural shift in attitudes to gay dads, some same-sex couples who have children together might not have a huge network of ‘mummy friends’. It’s men like these who really stand to benefit from Barrera and Barrett’s services. But even those couples who on the surface appear to have it all sorted suffer from the occasional crisis of confidence. Take Alex, a businessman, and his partner, a magazine editor. Both have successful careers and large families with nieces and nephews. After they had experienced the ‘newborn essentials’ package, they presumed all would be fine when they took charge of their twins by a surrogate. But suddenly, with Alex marooned in the countryside and his husband back in the office in London, the couple found that they couldn’t cope with ‘babies you don’t understand and that don’t understand you’, so they booked Confident Dad for an assessment. CD advised that a maternity nurse would be beneficial after all. Alex paid a £100 finder’s fee plus the agency costs — and two months on, she’s still holding the baby.

However much we might want our own children, Fabio and I have had precious little preparation for parenthood. Growing up, neither of us did much babysitting. If and when a baby arrives by surrogate, it will be with a no-returns policy, and there will be no instruction manual. So, naturally, I’m scared. I called Confident Dad to give me a sense of what we could expect when we were expecting.