For three years, on every Saturday the park has been open, a group of fathers has pushed strollers into a hard-to-find fitness room at Virginia Avenue Park, poured free coffee and sat down on the floor to watch their young children play.
The sessions, called DadTime, are run by the nonprofit Early Engagement and cost nothing to attend. Fathers bring children from birth to age 3 for peer support and parenting guidance from Early Engagement Executive Director Ben Swett and co-facilitator Luis Salgado, the infant and toddler director at Growing Place Lab School. Small local grants, support from partners including the Santa Monica Malibu School District and the Bahala Foundation, and contributions from participating dads cover the expenses, including the coffee.
What keeps the program going, organizers say, is the same thing that makes it unusual: it is free, consistent and open to any father who finds his way in.
The dads come mostly from the nearby Pico neighborhood, walking strollers over from home. Others drive in from the valley, Inglewood and as far as Boyle Heights. They are truck drivers and rocket scientists, teachers and tech workers, united by the shared challenges of raising very small children.
"We've got millionaire tech dudes and guys who depend on SNAP benefits," Swett said. "They all hang together, partly because of the values of the room, and because the challenges of dealing with a 2-year-old cut across any bounds of race, class or income."
A typical session begins before the fathers arrive. Swett and Salgado get to the park around 8 a.m. to set up a room built for a specific kind of play. They lay out a wooden climbing structure called a Pikler triangle, blocks, a few stuffed animals and an assortment of dollar-store kitchen items — pie tins, bowls and graspable "O-balls" that infants can hold and toddlers can kick.
Because the fitness room is tucked inside the park's headquarters and hard to find, the pair tape hand-painted signs reading "Dads," with arrows, around the grounds.
"Eventually, the signs make them curious," Salgado said. "We joke that dads find their way to us when they're ready, or when they really crave air conditioning."
Fathers begin arriving around 9 a.m. Old friends greet each other with hugs. Men sit on the floor to signal to their children that the space is safe. Some children nap; others stack blocks, climb or throw metal pans that clatter when they land.
What looks like chaos is the point. The facilitators call it free play, and they describe it as the foundation of early brain development.
"This is the most important learning of a child's life," Salgado said. "By experimenting with their environment, they are building lifelong mental tools — the thinking, feeling and people skills they will depend on and build on for the rest of their lives."
The harder part, organizers say, is for the adults. A large sign on the wall, "The Rules of the Room," advises that "Free Play requires Boundaries for Adults." The rules discourage interrupting, intervening or directing a child. Regulars can recite the maxims — "Information, not direction," "connect and then correct" — which are also inscribed on the Pikler triangle.
"We have a deep instinct to protect our children, to help them and to serve them, but they need to experiment on their own to learn," Swett said. "So we're trying to move the center of choice from the parent to the child."
Around 10:15 a.m., Swett gives a short talk inspired by something he has seen in one of his sessions — "a little philosophy and a few helpful tips, on a theme." By 11:30 a.m., children begin rubbing their eyes or asking for strawberries from the farmers market outside.
For some fathers, the program fills a gap in their own lives.
"DadTime has been a tremendous help in my life, the fact that it is giving me a structure and a foundation to be a parent ... without having an actual father in my own life," said Ron Dansby of Inglewood, father of Dhakari.
Others describe it as a fixed point in the week. "It's our family's Saturday morning ritual," said Nimbus Goehausen of Santa Monica, father of Pasha and Elijah. "I've made a lot of friends here, and learned a lot about being a dad."
All caregivers are welcome, including mothers, nannies and grandparents, as long as they follow the rules of the room.
The distance some fathers travel to attend, organizers say, reflects both demand and scarcity. Fathering expert Richard Cohen has noted that about half of all parents are men, yet almost all infant and toddler programs are aimed at mothers. There are good reasons for that, including that mothers still do most of the work — but dads need a space, too.