How Atlanta’s Library Dads Turned Story Hour Into a Brotherhood
Inside a metro-Atlanta library branch, a room of fathers raises their arms for something called the Daddy Wave. A roller coaster climbs across a screen. There is a group sing-along, and then a stretch the kids know as tickle time. This is story hour, run by dads.
They call themselves The Library Dads, and the whole thing grew out of one father’s habit. Khari Arnold began carrying his daughter Ariah into the library when she was four months old, reading aloud to a baby who could not answer back yet. The library gave him a free place to do it and a shelf of books to work through.
He kept at it for about a year before he opened the door to other fathers.
After a year, I decided it would make sense to get other dads involved in learning how to bond through books.
The dads who came kept coming. “From there, we built a brotherhood,” Arnold said.
The format holds a young child’s attention and a grown man’s at the same time. The Daddy Wave, the on-screen roller coaster, the songs, and tickle time give the kids a reason to stay put while the fathers do the reading.
The habit showed up in Ariah’s vocabulary. By 18 months she had a working vocabulary of 250 words, which Arnold traces to the language she absorbed long before she could talk. “That’s because she constantly heard those sounds and syllables being planted inside her brain,” he said.
As CBS News Atlanta reported, Arnold built the meetups around two problems at once: the literacy crisis, and the isolation some fathers feel.
A room full of dads who show up
Kassell Scott felt it the first time he brought his three-year-old, Amahle. “It was eye-opening to see other dads like myself who are engaged,” he said, “and it was motivating as well.”
Derrick Lampkin has been coming for a year with his sons, Dominique and Tristan, and now brings his seven-month-old daughter, Madeleine Sophia. He keeps the family in the rotation for a reason his boys can watch play out.
We continue coming because it shows my boys that dads show up.
Arnold saw the payoff in his own daughter, and the other fathers are working toward the same thing for their kids: a head start with words before they ever step into a classroom.
The sessions are free and they fill up, so families register online before they go. The Library Dads run a rotating tour through metro-Atlanta branches, which means the next Daddy Wave could be one library over.
