Introduction
Elliott Rae went back to work days after nearly losing his wife and newborn daughter. There had been a traumatic birth, an infection called Group B Strep, an unexplained bump on his daughter's head, a night spent crying and praying with a midwife who refused to leave the room. Then the hospital said they could go home, and a few weeks later he was expected to show up to a senior civil service job and perform as if none of it had happened.
He did. For eighteen months. And underneath it, undiagnosed, he was carrying trauma that came out sideways: panic attacks in meetings, tears on the train home, mornings where he could not get a "good morning" out to his own team. Nobody around him knew. That gap, between what a leader shows and what a leader is actually carrying, is the thread running through this conversation with Elliott Rae, founder of Music Football Fatherhood and author of Dad, on family, ego and the work of becoming a man before becoming anything else.
The weight of performing after almost losing everything
Elliott Rae's daughter was born with Group B Strep, an infection serious enough to put her in intensive care for weeks. His wife was bleeding heavily during the birth. There were days the infection seemed to clear and days it came back aggressively. On the night before an MRI scan to check an unexplained bump on their daughter's head, a midwife called Nagme sat with the family through hours of crying and praying rather than leaving the room. The scan came back clear. It was bone structure, nothing to worry about.
Then came the part nobody warns new parents about: the return to normal life. Rae went back to a senior, high-pressure civil service role within weeks. His wife was later diagnosed with postnatal anxiety and found it difficult to leave the house. The family were in accident and emergency roughly once a week for the first two or three months, still paranoid about their daughter's health. And Rae, by his own description a confident, extroverted person with no prior mental health history, simply carried on.
Why family stability shapes the people we become
Rae credits his own stability, not luck or talent, as the reason he stayed out of trouble as a young man growing up around music, football and community work in London. His parents, who had come to the UK from Grenada and St Vincent, modelled something he only later recognised as valuable: constant communication. He remembers lying in his room as a child, not able to make out the words, just hearing his mum and dad talking to each other, night after night. His father later told him, before his wedding, that the one thing that mattered in a marriage was to always keep talking. Rae says the advice landed because he had already seen it lived, not just heard it said.
That stability had a practical cost and a practical benefit. He and his wife moved back in with his parents twice as adults, once after university when he could not find work, and again with a wife and baby when renting made it impossible to save for a house. Eighteen months of living at home again, tension and power dynamics included, meant no rent, no council tax, and help with childcare. It is also, he is careful to say, not a universal formula. Good parenting does not guarantee a good outcome for every child. But for him, the accountability of not wanting to let his family down did more to keep him on track than fear of any external consequence.
The man before the dad
Asked what it means to be a modern father, Rae reframes the question. He refuses to be positioned as what he calls a "dad guru," and is upfront that he still gets impatient, still raises his voice over brushed teeth and late mornings. His answer instead starts one level up: you are a man, or a person, before you are a parent, and most of us try to build a parenting identity without first doing the harder work of building a personal one.
That work means figuring out your own values, what you believe, how you want your relationships to look, largely stripped of the inherited models of what a "good man" is supposed to be. Some of those inherited models are healthy. Many, he argues, such as permanent stoicism or an unwillingness to ask for help, are not. Rae calls the process of shedding them "overcoming ourselves," and describes it as one of the biggest barriers to anyone reaching their potential, alongside the very real structural barriers of access and inequality. He traces his own version of that work back to two moments: being robbed at gunpoint at eighteen, an experience he says left him more concerned with how it looked to others than with his own wellbeing, and meeting his wife, whose capacity for friendship taught him something about acceptance he says he is still learning from.
What eighteen months of masking taught him
The clearest cost of not doing that identity work showed up after his daughter's birth. Rae describes eighteen months where he could not name what was happening to him, so he simply worked harder and performed normally, a pattern he later learned is a common response to unprocessed trauma. He was eventually identified and supported by a birth trauma specialist he met by chance.
What stayed with him afterwards was not the diagnosis but the realisation of how easily people mask. He used to wonder, when he heard about someone's mental health crisis, how the people closest to them had not noticed. He does not wonder that any more. He knows now that someone can be the loud one, the funny one, seemingly relaxed on the surface, while going through the worst period of their life. It is a pattern he now sees constantly in the corporate rooms he works in as a facilitator: put twenty, forty, a hundred people in a room for an honest conversation about fatherhood or masculinity, and there is reliably at least one person quietly going through something nobody else in that room knows about.
Backing yourself twice
Music Football Fatherhood started as something closer to a coping mechanism than a business plan. In the middle of those eighteen unprocessed months, Rae taught himself basic coding, adapted a website template, and started writing late at night because it was one of the only things in his life he felt in control of. Almost nobody read it at first. He kept writing anyway.
The turning point came in 2017, when a BBC journalist featured the blog and described it, in his words, as "the Mumsnet for dads." An article he wrote for The Independent about being a Black father was shared around eighteen thousand times in a day. From there the platform grew slowly and deliberately into what it is now: a monthly online community session called The Lodge, a podcast, football club partnerships built around fatherhood conversations, and a volunteer team of around twenty people.
Rae describes backing himself twice. The first time was in the early years of Music Football Fatherhood, in the unglamorous stretch after the initial excitement fades and before any real traction arrives, when it would have been easy to quietly let it go. The second was leaving a senior role at HM Treasury to work on the platform and his book, Dad, full time, at a point when his father-in-law had recently passed away, his wife was grieving, and money was genuinely tight. He describes the calculation bluntly: work out the minimum you need to make each month to avoid disaster, and take the leap anyway. The book went on to do well, inspired a BBC documentary, and became the foundation of his current work as a speaker and facilitator.
