We’ve all been told that anger is a problem: something to control, suppress, or apologise for. But what if the real problem isn’t about the anger that we have, but that we have no idea what to do with it?

This month on the podcast, I sat down with Sam Parker—senior editor at British GQ and author of Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives—to dig into why so many fathers have a broken relationship with this most fundamental emotion. Sam argues that anger isn’t the enemy, and that learning to feel it without shame (rather than turn it inwards on ourselves) might be one of the most important things we can do: for ourselves, our partners, and our kids.

We talk about the moment each of us realised we’d been burying our anger for decades, what happens in your body when a boundary gets crossed, and why regular repair matters much more than never losing your shit in the first place.

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Where to Find Sam Parker

Sam’s website

Find Sam’s book Good Anger on Amazon and Bookshop.org

The Good Father newsletter on Substack

Episode References

The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

The Gottman Institute: The Four Horsemen

Kevin’s essay: “Where’s My Jenny?”

The New Fatherhood Therapy Fund

Inside Out (Pixar, 2015)

Timestamps

00:00 — welcome to the anger episode

03:39 — meet Sam’s family: Jessie, baby Olive, and life in Kent

04:32 — rethinking what anger is for

05:18 — when anger gets swept under the carpet

06:15 — suppression vs. aggression: the anger problem nobody talks about

07:10 — the “I don’t really get angry” myth

9:49 — anger does not have to equal violence

12:39 — how anger can manifest in the body

14:06 — what is “good anger”?

14:48 — the discomfort caveat

17:45 — Sam’s boxing breakthrough

19:11 — anger can be clarifying

20:44 — how anger hijacks the brain

27:50 — managing anger between siblings

33:05 — getting mad near a newborn

39:00 — dad’s role was disciplinarian

42:24 — resentment as anger’s cousin

We’re 34 days out from the US launch, and it’s taking up as much room in my head as my son’s La Liga futbol card collection is taking up in his. Last night he asked: “Instead of reading a book together before bed, could we go through my album, and I can show you my new shiny Barça cards?”

I mean, how can you possibly say no to that?

I wake up every morning and realise the publication date is another day closer. Sometimes, I don’t make it to 7 am, bolting upright in the middle of the night with a mental note to add another name to the outreach tracker. I’ve got a master list of over 150 “dream readers,” and am attempting to get the book in their hands before May 12th. Every day I work through as many as possible—on top of working on client projects, recording the audiobook, pitching op-eds and podcasts, and the never-ending list of parenting to-dos that clog up our inboxes, WhatsApp groups and mental plumbing.

On top of those 150, I started a bold (and some might say entirely stupid) endeavour to send a book to every living person in the index as a way to acknowledge the work on which mine is built. Some have been fairly easy to track down. Others—Daniel Day-Lewis, Kendrick Lamar, Haruki Murakami, Thom Yorke, to name a few—are proving much tougher.

One side effect of this ruthless promo drive is that the headspace required for writing new newsletter essays is thin on the ground. So this week, I’m offering a rerun of this piece from 2023, which pairs with a stunning illustration from our ol’ friend Tony Johnson. I tried to get this one in the book, and was told by my publisher that we would almost certainly be sued for copyright infringement, possibly by three different media conglomerates. Hooray for the internet, eh?

Whilst you won’t see this one between the covers when your book arrives next month, you will see four gorgeous, full-bleed grayscale pieces from Tony, as we make our best collective attempt to channel The Wild Robot into a dad book.

I genuinely can’t wait for you all to get your hands on it.

Pre-order the book

“Am I a good boy?” my son asks, “Or am I a bad one?”

It feels like mere minutes ago the concept was alien to you. You’ll have known whether something was a good thing to do—finishing everything on your plate, saying thank you, or sleeping through the night. You knew some things were good, just as others were bad—hitting your sister, screaming when we turned off your favourite cartoon, or illicitly feeding the dog unwanted carrot sticks under the table. You later learned you could be good or bad at things you loved: how good you became at running, flying down the street as an ersatz Sonic the Hedgehog, accidentally executing a perfect Naruto run—arms straight back, chest towards the ground—without knowing it; or how good you became at puzzles, one of your recent obsessions, as the steam almost comes out of your ears and Beautiful Mind chalk lines form around you as you figure it out.

Are you good, little dude? It’s a hell of a question. Are any of us, truly? What does being good entail? And isn’t that what we’ll wrestle the rest of our lives? You’re asking it now for the first time; you might spend the rest of your life searching for the answer.

The pendulum of morality swings with abandon at this age. You’ve only recently started understanding these abstract concepts, but now these moral poles have been internalised and you’re crossing the Rubicon, moving from wondering “Is this good?” through to “Am I good at this?” to now questioning “Am I, myself, good or bad?”

My moral backbone was informed by an illustrated book of Bible stories, sitting nightly underneath my pillow, supplemented by a weekly homily from a man of the cloth. But as I’ve left my Catholic upbringing behind, rolling my own interpretation of spirituality, I’m less comfortable outsourcing my children’s moral teachings to the Good Book. Morality and religion have always been bedfellows, playing supporting roles in society from day one. Adam and Eve were banished from paradise for unbecoming behaviour: eating the forbidden fruit after being repeatedly told by God to leave it well alone (a tale familiar to all parents). The Egyptians believed that, upon death, Anubis would place your heart on one side of a scale and a feather upon the other. If your heart was lighter—indicating you’d spent your life avoiding sin and accomplishing good deeds—you were welcome to join them in the afterlife for eternity. If your heart tipped the scale in its direction, you’d be sent to the underworld, or eaten on the spot by the lion-hippo-crocodile hybrid goddess Ammit. Christians may be nodding their heads after growing up with an adjacent concept (minus the getting eaten part) with the reckoner St. Peter, and his book of awaiting deeds as you approach the pearly gates of heaven.

My son takes some lessons from a religion that is not my own, learning stories of the Hindu deities passed down through his mother’s side. But where Christian morals are imparted through original sin and its seven deadly cousins, biblical tales and plagues, and the threat of eternal damnation (at least in the Irish Catholic strain that informed the early formation of my own moral compass), Eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism focus on living a life in accordance to Dharma: a moral code that offers ways to live a better life. (Dharma is intricately connected to the more widely known Karma—the law of cause and effect through living a life aligned with, or contradicting, Dharma’s principles.)

The ongoing acts of violence in the world remind us of the dangers of applying binary labels of “good” and “bad” to vast swathes of the population. But children yearn for simplicity and situations where things sit on one side of the other. That’s maybe why my son has fallen so deep into rabbit holes of space battles and superheroes. (Perhaps I’m confusing causation and correlation, which wouldn’t be the first time. Apparently, 100% of the people who confuse correlation with causation end up dead.) The ongoing escapades of Disney and its subsidiary companies—the highs and lows of Pixar, the MCU and Star Wars—illuminate his early understanding of complex principles like virtue, ethics and justice. Inside Out brought his emotions to life and helped him understand when his “red guy” was at the controls. The Incredible Hulk is good, but he’s angry—a complex one to parse, his young mind still unable to grasp the idea of the chaotic good alignment. And he hasn’t yet wrapped his head around why the Darth Vader toy we picked up from eBay has Anakin Skywalker under the mask. “But Anakin’s a good guy, right?”

If only it were so clear-cut. But life isn’t that neat. The truth is more complex than the stories we tell ourselves, and the answers we find aren’t easy. Like many, I’ve done my fair share of bad things, and there are moments in my life I’m not proud of. But I’m not the type to find myself asking whether I’ve been bad—that’s not what keeps me awake at night. (“Have you been good enough?” is more likely to have me thrashing into my pillow at 3 am.) In parenting, as in life, morality and discipline are intertwined. Morality influences behaviour. Bad behaviour begets punishment. And whilst discipline today is less severe than what we experienced in our own childhood years—what I would have given for a naughty step to time out on back in the 80s—it can still illuminate the gap between bad and good (or, more accurately, between bad and very bad) for our children.

Whenever the concepts of reward and punishment arise, the carrot-and-stick metaphor remains top of mind. I tend to think of my parenting approach as more orange-tinged—especially when said carrots are offered in Haribo form. But I grew up in a stick-first household, as many in my generation did, and did even more in the generation before. When my mum was little, my grandmother would send a misbehaving child outside to obtain the object of their own demise. She’d return from the back garden with a sally rod—a stick broken off the substantial branches of a nearby willow tree. If she picked a thin stick, my Granny would head outside on her own, searching for a heftier instrument, gifted double the thrashing on her return.

Visible marks fade quickly. Invisible ones—the ones that don’t trouble teachers, other parents, and friends—are harder to shift. Invisible to the eye, they take root inside and burrow underneath, creating inverted scars that define future selves. The lines of morality change over the years—what was acceptable then isn’t acceptable now, if it ever was. But if writer Peggy O’Mara is correct, and “the way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice,” then the way we define morals to our children will form their internal compass, and the way we discipline them will become their inner critic. It’s a sad truth that no one is harder on you than you are on yourself. Children who internalise judgements at an early age will end up spending vast amounts of time (and therapist fees) trying to shake them off as adults.

So, back to where we began. What do I want my son to believe? I want him to know: you are not bad. Sometimes, you do bad things, but that’s OK. You’re a work in progress, just like your old man. Other times, and (mercifully) more often, you do good. What’s important is you’re beginning to understand the difference. If you spend your life chalking up marks in the negative column, you’ll find folks don’t want to be your friend, and life will be more challenging. But if you try your hardest to do good and to be good—considering the feelings of others, being there for your family and friends, and treating others as you’d like to be treated—that’s all you need to worry about for now.

Good Dadvice

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Back to the emails, I suppose!? How was this for you?

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Branding by Selman Design. Illustration by Tony Johnson. Survey by Sprig.

He went digging for answers, and what he found completely changed his perspective on parenting, allowing him to unlock new empathy and show up for his kids in wonderful ways. Thanks for this essay, Brad. If you like this, you can read more of his writing at Life on Hard Mode.

I hear the car pulling into the driveway. It’s the unmistakable, ethereal hum of our electric car—a chorus of angels signalling the rapture. But it’s worse than that. The kids are home, and I haven’t started dinner. Again.

I pound down the stairs, switching on the oven and boiling the kettle, wondering where the time went. I swear it was 2:30 ten minutes ago. I check my watch; it’s past 4 pm. The kids pile in, already at each other’s throats. Their screams puncture the silence. My sanctuary is once again prowled by my unpredictably loud offspring. I wince with every shriek.

I scramble to clean a pan I thought I’d washed earlier. I hadn’t. I’d seen a bird I didn’t recognise through the kitchen window and fell down an ornithological rabbit hole. Yes, I now know the migratory patterns of the Hawfinch, but dinner is no closer to being cooked. I cut. I peel. I slice my finger moving faster than my brain can manage. One kid wants a drink; the other wants TV. I pull myself apart to satisfy the needs. This shouldn’t feel so strenuous, yet here I am.

Food burns in an unattended pan. A fire alarm drills a hole in my skull. My brain glitches over and over. One child pulls at my leg, protesting that they’ve been hit. Counter-accusations fly. Decibels soar. The pressure floods my body. My chest tightens like a vice. I flit between half-finished tasks, achieving less each time. The train is derailing. I can see it happening, yet I cannot stop it.

One more scream slaps me on the back of the head like a cricket bat. Every muscle tenses, and the pressure releases. I shout. I can’t remember the words, but they’re not kind. They are words I swore I wouldn’t use. Not with my kids. It was meant to be different. I was meant to be different.

My wife catches me, once again. She invites me to take five in another room. I retreat. Silence slowly returns, accompanied by the familiar guilt and the ever-present shame.

Growing up, my dad worked a lot. He did his best, but I wanted to be different. I never wanted anything to get in the way of being a present, involved father. I didn’t realise that pursuit, while noble, would drain me far faster than I could imagine. We all know the moment you become a father, the concept of time changes. The ring-fence around your eight hours of sleep comes crashing down. For me, the adjustment felt debilitating.

Our first wasn’t a great sleeper. At any moment, she could burst into an earth-trembling frenzy; usually in the depths of night. Even the smallest noise or movement at night would send me into a panic. My wife made me sleep with noise-cancelling headphones and blaring white noise, just so I’d get at least a couple of hours.

Not knowing what awaited me hour by hour hastened my heartbeat regularly. I walked a tightrope through those first months. Ceaseless dysregulation made me snappy and quick to anger. Getting pee or poo on my skin wasn’t just an inconvenience; the unwanted sensory assault would ruin my day. Feeding her sludgy baby food made me retch.

As the second arrived and the first started school, things only got worse. Where it was once acceptable to stay in pyjamas with the baby, now the eldest needed the nursery run. PE was on Tuesdays, then switched to Wednesdays halfway through the year for no discernible reason. She needed specific clothes packed depending on emails from the school the night before. Keeping up with the maelstrom of child admin was proving impossible for me. On more occasions than I’d like to admit, I had to drive home from drop-off to get my daughter’s shoes. Once, I’d brought her with no shoes at all.

Maintaining a household with two young kids is a constant logistical exercise, and yet I wasn’t pulling my weight with the mental load. More of it fell to my wife, simply because I was proving to be so unreliable. I could sense the resentment building, fuelling the cycle of shame I’d been nursing long before parenthood.

These are things dads around the world contend with. So why was I struggling so badly with inconveniences that others seemed to take in their stride? I always knew I was wired differently. It was one thing for my lack of social and organisational skills to cause me to lose touch with friends, or forget to collect important medication for myself, among many other things.

But when I couldn’t advocate for my own kids because of my social skills? When I forgot their coats on a long walk—leaving them frozen to the bone—because of my own disorganisation? That was a whole other level of failure. I wanted so badly to be the involved father I didn’t have growing up—but I felt like I was failing. At times, part of me wondered if I was better off not being there at all.

I think deep down, I always knew I was autistic. My mum told me I didn’t speak until I was three. An audiologist queried autism, but a family doctor shut it down. Ever since finding out about that in my teens, I held onto the possibility like a precious jewel. Maybe—just maybe—this was why I felt so out of place.

I muddled through life, favouring the French exit from parties, staying on the periphery of social circles. Despite the struggles, I never thought much about it. I had a job, a marriage, a life I could bend to my will. I could avoid the situations that brought me anxiety. And then I had kids. Suddenly, ever-shifting routines sent my stress levels through the roof. Every sense was under attack. And yet, I still didn’t connect the dots.

Why? Because I wasn’t counting toothpicks. I wasn’t Rain Man. I was able to live independently. I was still in the mindset that everyone was “a little autistic”—but that I wasn’t autistic enough to do anything about it.

My wife was the first person to mention ADHD. She showed me accounts from other 30-somethings on social media who were realising they’d been struggling with the difficulty turned up all this time without knowing it. The traits resonated—but I couldn’t quite place myself in that box either. ADHD kids were the hyperactive ones, wrecking classrooms. I was the quiet kid, doodling in margins and staring out the window. “A capable student—if only he’d apply himself more.”

Like Cinderella’s step-sisters, the glass slipper didn’t fit quite right on either. Then one day, my wife sent me a reel featuring an acronym I’d never seen before: AuDHD. Whilst not an official diagnosis in itself, it represents the co-existence of autism and ADHD. It didn’t make sense to me—they seemed such polar opposites. And yet, 20-50% of children with ADHD meet the criteria for an autism diagnosis, and 30-80% vice versa.

Until 2013, you couldn’t be diagnosed with both; clinicians had to pick the “most severe”. But now, the commonality of co-occurrence is medically recognised. I could hardly believe that I may have just found the answer to my eternal question. Cinderella had just entered the room with the other slipper. It fit perfectly.

Every now and then, I think back to the three-year-old boy I used to be. I see so much of myself in my girls, especially my eldest. They don’t have high support needs, but neither did I. The impact of unseen neurodivergence isn’t measured in the immediacy, but in the decades of masking (curating alternative versions of yourself just to fit in) and hiding the real you away from public gaze. Neurodivergence is not a mental health condition, but over a lifetime of denying your true self, your mental health will eventually suffer.

Having my neurodivergence formalised doesn’t change the issues I face. In many ways, the immediate aftermath has been hard. It’s like getting a new car and suddenly noticing that same car everywhere—I’m noticing my traits more acutely than ever, which casts a spotlight on just how out of place in the world I feel at times.

But I no longer think I’m failing as a father. I have the terminology to explain a sensory shutdown. I can give myself grace for forgetting things under pressure. I have a new lens through which to view my life, allowing me to speak to my past self with kindness. Crucially, I’m learning to explain it to my children in an age-appropriate way, laying the foundations for if they ever need to tread the same path.

My great-grandfather took his own life when his son—my granddad—was the same age as my eldest daughter is now. On his death certificate, it says “suicide whilst the balance of his mind was disturbed.” I don’t know the nature of the demons he was battling. But we know that autism and ADHD both run in families: ADHD is 74% heritable, and autism 83%. I know how hard it has been to bear living in a world that doesn’t understand me for 35 years—and honestly, I don’t know if I could have made it through another 35 without knowing why.

I’m privileged to live in a time that allows me to find this pivotal piece of my puzzle. It’s the greatest thing I can do for my children—to help them discover themselves, and their place in the world. A few weeks ago, the school run descended into a familiar kind of chaos. I was running behind with everything, then my eldest screamed out in anguish, sending a shot of cortisol through me. The pressure in my chest was threatening to boil over again. Before I went to investigate, I grabbed my noise-cancelling headphones—my new weapon against creeping decibel levels. My assessment and a new round of neuro-affirming therapy taught me that loud noises were a far bigger trigger for me than I realised. Knowing this has been a game-changer.

In her room, my daughter sat on the edge of her bed, clawing at the end of her tights so intensely it was as if they were burning her. In a way, they were. The seam wouldn’t sit quite right on her toes—a recurring problem that’d always make her very agitated. Usually, I’d have tried my best to adjust it to her satisfaction and then given up, weighed down by the ticking of the clock and the ticking of my sensory time bomb.

But this time, I’d made an adjustment for myself. The headphones took the edge off all the noise. I was calm. Time slowed. I sat down in front of her with a level head and really saw what was happening. This is a sensory nightmare for her—I hate the seams of my socks being crooked in my shoes as well. We both cut out all the labels from our clothes, too.

We took the time to ditch the tights and find some leggings instead. Yes, we were still late for school. But at least I could watch her skip into her classroom feeling something I never did growing up—understood.

3 things to read this week

1. “Why Are Women Training for Pregnancy Like a Marathon?” by Currie Engel in Wired. A deep look at the growing “zero trimester” movement: women spending months or years prepping their bodies for conception, fuelled by influencers and a wellness industry happy to sell them the tools. This piece unpacks how pregnancy prep has transformed into a multi-thousand-dollar optimisation project, complete with organ meat supplements and sunrise protocols, tracing the roots of this focus to a Harvard study that claimed, “carrying a baby was the equivalent to running more than a dozen marathons.”

2. “Men Are Taking Prenatal Vitamins Now” by Erica Schwiegershausen in The Cut. And it’s not just the women. Men are now injecting themselves with pregnancy hormones, icing their testicles between emails, and buying $38 cotton boxer briefs marketed as “better for your balls.” The biohacker fertility obsession meets the peptide global takeover—with supplement brands lining up to sell wannabe dads the cure. Is optimal health—and super sperm—required for pregnancy? Not at all, notes one doctor in the piece: “A lot of unhealthy men have been able to have kids for many years.”

3. “The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage” by Leslie Jamison in The New Yorker. Finally, wrapping up with this essay from 2024: Jamison, American novelist and essayist, takes her newborn on a book tour, pumps milk between classes, and realises—slowly, then all at once—that the baby didn’t save her marriage, but instead illuminated why it was over: “Because I could not hurl myself constantly into work and trips and teaching and deadlines, I had to look more closely at the life I’d built.”

Good Dadvice

Where’s My Snare, I Need More Snare

This week I’ve been in the studio laying down bars recording the audiobook. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it’s been a surprisingly delightful (and emotionally overwhelming) experience. I got choked up, repeatedly: it was the first time I’d read huge chunks of the book out loud, vocalising my battle with paternal postnatal depression, the process of learning to love my son, and getting to a place where I can give myself grace. Fun fact you might like to know—the audiobook comes out the same day worldwide, May 12th. Fun fact I’d quite like to know: do I actually get paid royalties if people listen to it for free on Audible or Spotify? Answers on a postcard, or maybe I should send an email to my editor …

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How did you like this week’s issue? Your feedback helps me make this great.

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This is the last newsletter of March, so your final call to sign up for a paid subscription and ensure 100% of your cash goes directly to a TNF dad who needs therapy and can’t get it. Here’s what one dad said about the experience:

As a dad who found himself struggling with a horrendous situation, the therapy I received through Kevin’s work enabled me to take a step back from problems and give some time to myself. To be able to talk openly to a professional about my feelings, issues, and current difficulties helped relieve some of the pressure I am under and allowed me to understand why I’m feeling how I am, and what steps I can take to help myself. It’s a massive weight off my shoulders sharing my experiences, which ultimately helps me be the best dad I can be.

If you’re a dad who already supports the newsletter with a paid subscription, I sincerely hope you feel a warm glow as you read that, and a sense of satisfaction that you helped make it happen. And if you’re a dad that could do with a little help, you can get details on how to access the therapy fund here.

I’m travelling for work this week—currently sat in Liverpool airport putting the finishing touches to this intro—so resharing a favourite essay from the archive, originally published in April 2022. (Which is paired with one of my favourite Tony illustrations too.) It’s about what happens when you suddenly find yourself with a weekend entirely to yourself, and why every parent should try it. Almost four years later, I feel even more strongly about this. That solo weekend in Barcelona also led to the psychedelic parenting essay: proof that giving yourself space to think can take you to some unexpected places.

When that final email whooooooshed out on Friday lunchtime, the overwhelming sense of possibility hit. What was I going to do? A three-day weekend to myself. No children. No one else. It’s an odd feeling, considering what you might do, rather than what we might do. Not that we’re spending our weekends being marched from event to event, against our will, through gritted teeth. But there’s an exhaustion that comes with constantly interrogating one another, the parenting equivalent of the journalistic six: Who (are we going to see)? What (are the kids going to eat)? Where (are we going to go)? When (WILL WE BEEEEEE THERE DAD)? How (the hell are we expected to hold things together)?

Freed from the responsibility of children, and relinquished from the never-ending discussion of “what to do”, the choice becomes yours, and yours alone. It can be daunting. Parenthood becomes so all-encompassing: a cave you descend into, filled with equal parts terror and delight, in there so long you forget what life was like above ground. It’s easy to lose sight of who we are underneath it all — the constant logistics, the Sisyphean to-do lists, eternal Tetris played with the family calendar. The longer you’re away from yourself, the harder it becomes to tune back to what’s beneath; time spent deciding as an “us” making it harder to remember what you, individually, actually want, if given the choice; the inevitable dread and spiral of panic that comes when you get said choice, and fret about frittering away the free time you have, before descending into despair, realising you’ve squandered it.

My weekend wasn’t wasted, I’m delighted to say. Friday afternoon was spent helping out a shift at my favourite local restaurant, where I’ve been helping out a few hours a week (a story for another time, and at least 2,000 more words, but I promise you: it’s a doozy.) I returned for dinner later that evening, sat “on the marble” (the table closest to the kitchen) and ate a little bit of everything. After closing time, enjoyed a few drinks with the staff, who have become good friends, before heading separate ways into the night. I arrived home, more than a little tipsy, and wrote a glowing review for the place 2am. Hey, when you gotta write, you gotta write.

The rest of the weekend was spent free from formal plans, allowing serendipity to take centre stage: walking round the city with friends, long lunches turning into longer dinners, beers turning into crashed dinner reservations, fortuitous “bumping intos” that recalled life as it once was, before we started planning our personal lives as meticulously as our professional ones. (“Great, dinner on the second Thursday next month at 7pm? PERFECT!”)

This wasn’t the first time we’ve taken time to ourselves—my wife and I have been trying to carve out a few solo weekends over the last year, and I’ve already written about how barely distinguishable these are from our regular family holidays:

“I didn’t expect the week to be so transformational. I’ve had time away from the kids, sure. But it was always for work. This was dramatically different. When I came back, I felt like I’d been away for a spa week, or a meditation retreat. Recharged, afresh, anew. And so glad to see them again. I’d missed them so much, and realised I actually missed missing them — we’d been together so much I’d forgotten how that felt.”

The Calendarization of Parenthood

In the years BC (Before Children), you may have left the house early on a Saturday morning for a coffee—no idea where the day might take you—and return early the next morning, watching the sun rising on a new collection of stories, enough to last a year, gathered in less than a day.

Then you had a baby. And your world immediately became dictated by The Routine. Your routine was different from mine: maybe you did Tracey’s E.A.S.Y method and clung onto the Y for dear life; or you decided to go all Gina Ford in the bedroom, a la boss. Maybe you had no say on what the routine was, but learned to follow it religiously. Whatever route you took, life changed—chained to a new schedule, as chained as your wife was, clearly. But a world apart from what it once was. Confined and restricted at first: a time-based straight-jacket, covering yourself Memento-style in reminders on nap times, feeding quantities and the occasional “do this, because if you forget, bad things will happen.” Structure might be something you relish. Or it might have been uncomfortably born by a formerly laid-back (but not laying back) person. As the baby gets older, the binds begin to slack. “There’s only one nap, they can have it in the buggy now”, or “so long as they’ve eaten by 6 pm and we’re back for bath, we should be OK.” But those structures are still there. It’s the Calendarization of Parenthood, life outside of work a mirror of life inside it; juggling personal, professional and shared family calendars, spontaneity nothing but a distant memory. And all the planning. The never-ending planning. What shall we cook for dinner? What do we need to help them with? What shall we do with them this weekend?

Then you’re liberated from it all. For a weekend. Completely free, to do whatever your heart desires (within reason.) I wanted to know if more parents were seeking this out, or whether it was something they craved. So I asked (back on 2022 Twitter, before it became a cesspool):

Yes, I know the sample size is too small, the results are biased to those who follow me, and all the other reasons this isn’t a statistically significant survey. (Sit down, stats nerds, your time will come.) But with 75% of us wanting to take more, or already taking more, time alone, there’s a huge unmet need here. We need to normalise this behaviour, remove the stigma around spending time away from the ones we love most, and promote the idea of plugging back into yourself. To show our children that we’re more than just parents, and that while we love them, we also need to look after ourselves.

A bunch of dads started discussing solo time in the community, and numbers were similar. The same weekend I was sauntering around the streets of the city, Dadscord dad Ivor posted a photo of himself atop the Dolomites, two beers rapidly cooling in the ice. “I keep thinking about my family, thinking how important, essential, fundamental it is to get some time to yourself, preferably in nature, to be able to step back. Free time without the constant pull of someone else is a balm for me and my head, so I will think how we can do this regularly.”

Other dads had barriers to overcome. Guilt came through as a significant theme:

“I would love to do this more often, but don’t get a chance. Now more than ever and that the second born is getting older. My thing is guilt. My wife always tells me to do it, and encourages it. But I end up feeling like I dumped a load on her and then can’t enjoy it as much as I could. I also encourage her to do it, but I think she also avoids it for similar reasons.”

“We both feel guilty doing stuff for ourselves. I think in different ways there’s cultural baggage from both of our parents. I don’t think either of our mum and dad ever did stuff for themselves.”

“The guilt can be resolved if you gift each other the time, rather than feeling like you’re taking it,” Ivor suggested. “And the guilt is different once you get past the first time,” another dad shared. Ivor shared a photo of himself drinking an ice cold beer atop of a snowy mountain, but admitted to us all that “I almost didn’t post that photo because I thought it might come across as a humblebrag (‘Look at me! Up a mountain sans baby!’). The guilt is strong for me too.”

I’d held back from posting photos of myself in the Dadscord that weekend, hesitant to share the delight of a kid-free weekend, worried I was rubbing my freedom in the noses of other dads, frantic with their kids on Easter Sunday. Another dad piped up and told me exactly what I needed to hear: “I don’t think anyone should feel guilty about posting anything here. That’s something that should be celebrated.”

Another reminder on how important it is to open up, lean into the discomfort, and see it as an opportunity to learn more about yourself in the process. After all these years of writing here, I thought I’d have fully understood that lesson by now. Turns out I still have a ways to go.

Might lose my jacket, and hit a solo [one time]

We need more parents to take more time without their kids. Doing it together as a couple: date nights, life as a couple, and reconnecting with that pre-parent period, when life was all about each other. But time alone too: space with our own thoughts, to figure out our own shit. I ended my solo weekend with a series of unlocks on major professional and personal issues, some of which I’d been grappling with for months. All the problems needed was a little room to breathe, combined with the right input from the right person at exactly the right time.

So, let’s get into it. For those dads who’d love a weekend alone, but don’t know where to start, here are some thoughts from other dads who’ve done the same, along with a small caveat: whilst I endeavour to always make TNF relevant for all shapes and sizes of family, this advice probably works best for those cohabiting with a partner.

1. This won’t happen if you’re just waiting for it. So you’ll have to put your hand up, get out there, and be intentional about making the change.

2. It can only work (and the guilt be navigated, for the many who clearly feel it) if both parents take the plunge. Dad needs to be able to take the kids on his own for long enough that Mum can recharge too. And that’s not an easy hurdle to overcome. 7 days alone, looking after my two, was the most exhausting week of my life. But I was — without a sliver of a doubt — closer to them after it than I was before. My son, always one to go straight to mum with any “poopa” (a Spanish classic), would start coming to me a little more often (though still nowhere near equally.) I spent large chunks of 2024 and 2025 solo parenting, and whilst it isn’t easy, it did bring me much closer to my kids. “I love the challenge of a solo weekend,” another dad shared, “it’s exhausting, and difficult, but it deepens my bond with my daughter.”

3. Get talking. Be open and talk about your needs, and how you can make it happen. Forward this email to your significant other, and suggest they take their own time away. Take your weekend with the kids first. Lead by example.

I’ll leave the last word to two dads in the community, sharing their own experiences:

The most important thing is to have an open, equitable conversation with your partner about why you want this. At its best, it’s a wonderful gift to give each other. Felt like the ultimate life hack the first time we did it.

It’s got to be a quid pro quo, and it needs to come from a place of honesty about each other’s needs, and be patient with your partner if they’re not open to it — they may think you’re shirking. Offer to take the kids yourself first, or start small and build up to a night or two away. For us we’re open about the fact that we can’t look after our daughter, or each other, if we don’t look after ourselves first.

Had a weekend to yourself recently? Or hoping to make it work? Drop a comment over the weekend, let’s see if we can support each other and help make it happen.

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If you’ve been paying attention this Oscar season, you’ve noticed something: dads are everywhere. Not the cartoonish deadbeat or the overbearing patriarch—but something more honest and multidimensional than ever before.

In Sentimental Value, Stellan Skarsgård’s character showed up after years of absence, expecting forgiveness. Jay Kelly built a career and lost his kids along the way. Train Dreams showed us what happens when a father’s need to provide comes in direct conflict with his need to protect, and Marty Supreme was so locked into his dream that he couldn’t see what mattered—until it was right in front of him. These aren’t bad dads. They’re dads living through the tradeoffs many men actually face: between ambition and presence, between providing for a family and being part of one.

This month on the podcast, I sat down with Bilge Ebiri, film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture, to dig into what 2025’s best films are really saying about fatherhood—and why so many of this year’s Oscar contenders gave us something we haven’t quite seen before: fathers complicated enough to break your heart.

Subscribe to the Podcast

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Where to Find More From Bilge Ebiri

• Bilge’s writing on Vulture

• Bilge’s dad’s film notebooks

• Review of Train Dreams

• Review of Jay Kelly

• Review of Hamnet

• Review of One Battle After Another

Bilge’s Watchlist

• The Champ

• The Shining

• Bigger Than Life

• Train Dreams

• Jay Kelly

• One Battle After Another

• Walking with Dinosaurs

Timestamps

00:00 Hello

00:31 Becoming Nemo’s Dad

03:30 Let’s talk movies!

05:00 Film diaries c. 1940s

06:10 Apocalypse Now

07:20 Present dad award

10:43 Core memory of The Shining

15:00 Masculinity crisis

16:48 [SPOILERS] Train Dreams

19:15 Providing vs. protecting

19:58 [SPOILERS] Hamnet

20:20 [SPOILERS] Sentimental Value

21:04 [SPOILERS] Jay Kelly

23:50 [SPOILERS] more Train Dreams

27:24 [SPOILERS] Leo is 2025’s best film dad

29:10 The Shining easter egg

31:21 Letting go in the teen years

33:00 Watching movies with your kids

36:43 The outcast dinosaur

Credits

Host: Kevin Maguire

Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Sound Editor: Sam Williams

Theme Music: SOHN

This morning, the book was already at #5 in hot new releases for fatherhood books, and I’m also 171st in the “Family and Lifestyle Depression” chart, so I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious. This week, I went live with a rather lovely-looking (if I do say so myself) website for the book, where you can see the endorsements from early readers of the book, find details of all the pre-order goodies, and learn all about what to expect when you’re expecting (to get the book through your letterbox in May). Onwards and upwards!

I started the year writing about the curious incident of the dad at the playtime, featuring a dad who only wanted to play with his son for a maximum of 10 minutes a day. It’s worth noting his follow-up showed that he was actually listening, calling out his addiction to his phone and his job. And whilst I didn’t agree with his positioning, I did empathise with the result: hundreds of strangers on the internet lighting up his notifications to tell him he was a terrible human. That can’t have felt good. And I knew it firsthand, because I’d had an internet pile-on of my own a few weeks earlier.

You’ve heard me here, bitching away about how social media is driving global dissatisfaction by drip-feeding us picture-perfect lives of others, or stirring up rage to keep you stuck in the app whilst they fire another four-hundred adverts into your eyeballs. But there’s a dirty secret I haven’t shared: I fucking love TikTok. It reminds me of the old internet: the one where people would literally fuck around (do cool things) and find out (that other people were into them). It scratches that itch that Tumblr once did, many moons ago. It is a constant source of humour in my life, the algorithm “gets me” in a terrifying way, and it’s not a lie to say 80% of what I cook for the kids, I discovered on the app (my recipe collection there now stands 170 dishes strong, and shows no signs of slowing down). I can’t trust myself: I use Screen Time to force a 30-minute-per-day block, knowing that a few more videos are only a “15 more minutes” tap away. I’ve broken free of almost all digital addictions, but this small vice is one I allow myself, as a little treat. It’s like I’ve quit smoking, but am still allowing a little hit on the Lost Mary vape once a day.

Christmas came and went. The algo decided it was time I got into shape. And it wasn’t wrong—after a steady decline in weight and increase in strength and muscle mass during the first half of 2025, the book deadline kicked in and was followed by an onslaught of other deadlines after it. I started eating my feelings (or, more accurately, drinking them in fermented yeast liquids) and finished the year more than a few kilos heavier than I started. As we reached the end of December, at least half of the videos I was being served were fitness-related, promising get-thin-quick plans, washboard abs and “one trick” that could turn my flab into something fab (spoiler alert: it was a GLP-1). The content was better than your average slop, and I started following a few fitness influencers. The mistake I made wasn’t watching their videos. The mistake was writing the comment.

One of the many reasons I started this newsletter was my sheer exhaustion in being force-fed fatherhood success stories that felt impossible to achieve. You know the kind: the only way to be a present dad and successful in your job was to adopt that rise and grind energy; if your kids were making you tired, then just suck it up, or prepare to be overlooked for promotions at work; the only thing standing between you and the best version of yourself was your willingness to sacrifice your sleep in the pursuit of greatness.

And the one thing that always riled me up—and continues to rile me up, as you’ll see—was the idea that if you weren’t doing this as a dad, you were missing your opportunity, not taking your shot, or just not turning up—for yourself, and for your family. I’ve long lived in a house with two children who, from 9pm–6am, could sleep through an earthquake. But, as soon as the sun begins to break above the horizon, a feather hitting the ground in our neighbour’s place would wake them from their slumber.

So one morning, after returning from a rather stressful school run—nothing out of the ordinary, just your regular combination of I don’t want to go today / I hate these shoes / It’s not fair that I have to do these tests / Why is the dog looking at me funny—I was served a video from a fitness influencer I follow, who was telling his two million followers about his “elite morning routine” that anyone could follow, with three simple steps that started innocuously enough:

1. Get up, immediately drink water with electrolytes

2. Spend 60–90 seconds in a cold water shower

3. Take a 15–20 minute walk within the first hour of waking up, which he “pairs with a coffee run, so it’s perfect”

You can see where this falls apart, right? This mistaken assumption that your mornings are still your own when you’re a parent. It takes everything I have to get my two out the door on time and with as few things forgotten as possible. So, twenty minutes to myself for a walk and a coffee? Sure thing, buddy, sounds great. I’ll take a handjob from Scarlett Johansson whilst you’re at it. Man alive, 15–20 seconds to myself in the morning feels like a win. I jumped into the comments to see if any other parents had noticed this minor flaw in the plan. When I didn’t see any, I simply tapped out: “CRIES IN RAISING TWO CHILDREN,” pressed comment, and went about my day.

All done. Or so I thought, until my notifications started blowing up. Said influencer, using the TikTok video reply feature, called me out with my “dumb” comment pinned onto his video, telling me, and his many followers:

“Every time I bring up doing the bare minimum for your health, someone says some dumb shit like this. My brother Kevin, I say this with love: having two kids is not an excuse to not walk for 10 minutes, take a 2-minute cold shower, and drink water. That’s literally what I said in this video. We’re talking 12 to 15 minutes of your life. The bigger problem here is using your kids as a cope to not take care of yourself. There are people with this many kids, twice as many kids, and twice as busy a job, who are way healthier than I am, doing way more for themselves. This is nothing more than an excuse to continue your bad habits.”

Today, two months and almost 1,000 comments later, I’m still getting it in the neck from strangers across the internet. Could I have been clearer? Of course. But all the world and sundry, piling on to tell me that I should stop hiding behind my kids, led me scurrying back to a safe space: I shared the video in the Dadscord, where fellow parent Alex asked, “Does he have kids? No? Then he should definitely shut the fuck up.”

Here’s what I wanted to clap back, but didn’t, because I’ve learned that the comments are not the place for nuance: You’re right. I should look after myself better. I know this. I’ve written a whole book about it. But telling people that a parent who says “my mornings are chaos” is making excuses doesn’t hit right. There’s a huge chasm between “put your oxygen mask on first” and “quit using your kids as an excuse.” One is an invitation. The other is a public shaming. And, if you don’t have kids, you should probably, to quote a fellow parent, “shut the fuck up.”

Let’s help dads get healthier. But rather than telling them the problem is discipline, let’s start by acknowledging the problem is design: their lives are no longer built for elite morning routines, they are built for school runs. There is no “first hour of waking up.” There is only triage. I should walk more? Great. Tell me how to do it while carrying two backpacks, an Olympic torch that I made out of craft paper late last night after learning it had to be ready this morning, and the emotional weight of an eleven-year-old battling with her former best friend, who has just remembered she has a science test this afternoon. The best encouragement isn’t the kind that shames parents for not going the extra mile. It’s the kind that meets them where they are—which is, most mornings, standing in the kitchen in yesterday’s t-shirt, spreading cream cheese onto a tortilla wrap, and wondering where the hell that other shoe went.

3 things to read this week

1. ”The Rise of FAFO Parenting” by Emine Saner in The Guardian. How did we get from carefully naming every emotion our toddler is feeling to throwing their iPads out of car windows? FAFO parenting — “fuck around and find out” — is the TikTok-fuelled backlash against gentle parenting, and Emine Saner’s piece does a nice job of tracing the arc. The truth, as always, is that the sensible version of both styles looks pretty similar: boundaries, consequences, presence—for them and us. But in a world where clicks mean cash, nuance is out, and polarisation is in. The best line comes from psychologist Emma Svanberg: “What many people have practised under the guise of ‘gentle parenting’ is actually high-intensity, child-centred, permissive parenting with very little attention to adult limits, power or context.”

2. “How to Raise Children” by Mike Monteiro in Good News. A reader asks what every kid should grow up knowing? Monteiro’s answer is simple: that they are loved. Then he tells you why, and rips your heart in two. He grew up in an abusive household, a childhood where love appeared just often enough to let him know what he was missing. The essay is raw and tender and funny—railing against parents who schedule every minute of their kid’s life while complaining they have no time, and reminding us that our children arrive full of love and curiosity, and our job is to nurture, rather than negate, this outlook on life.

3. ”Let Your Kids Fail” by Russell Shaw in The Atlantic. For years, doctors told parents to keep kids away from peanuts to prevent allergies, and allergies spiked. Then they reversed the advice and saw them decline. Shaw, a school head in Washington DC, argues that failure works the same way: shield your kids from every setback and they never develop what he calls “failure immunity,” the ability to encounter disappointment without falling apart. He’s watched parents launch grade appeals, hire sorority rush consultants, and email administrators the moment their kid faces a consequence. Each intervention sends their children the same message: ”You can’t handle this, let mom do it for you.”

Watch This Beautiful Poem on Raising Boys

As if by magic, as I was putting the final touches to this week’s newsletter, TikTok offered up this powerful poem from Irishman Daragh Fleming titled “If I Ever Have Boys.” This is one minute and twenty-seven seconds of your life that you will be glad you spent here.

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Damn, did you see that book website? And what happens when you click the book? Hella fly.

Many of you found your way here after Emily Oster shared this story in her ParentData newsletter. And a fresh version of this story will be among the first things dads read in my book when it comes out in May. This story has grown, been reshaped and expanded through conversations with dads across the world, but the core of it remains the same. I’m running it again today with a very deliberate, on-the-nose headline—because I remember Googling “new dad depression” and “new dad sad” in vain, on long dark nights when things were falling apart. The entire reason I started this newsletter was the hope that other dads might find help in their time of need.

And now, if one of those dads arrives on these shores, I want him to find something I didn’t have: a tool. I’ve built a paternal postpartum depression assessment, developed using the latest peer-reviewed research and with input from three therapists and counsellors—Alan P. Bader, Maria Lee, and Gareth Clark Jones—who all work with dads via The New Fatherhood Therapy Fund. (Also, shout out to Claude Code, who played a huge part too.) If you’re a dad reading this and things don’t feel right, take the assessment here. And if you’d like to speak to a counsellor, wherever you are in the world, you can apply to our direct access fund here.

One last thing. For the last few days of February and the entire month of March, 100% of paid subscriptions that come through this newsletter will go directly into the Therapy Fund to help dads who need it most. If you’d like to donate without Substack taking a cut, you can do so here.

After my son was born, at around 8 p.m. each day, once the kids were tucked up in bed, I’d take the dog for a walk—just the two of us. The smell of the balmy Mediterranean evening, a warm glow slowly setting on the horizon. I’d walk to a park—far enough from home to prevent bumping into someone I knew, but close enough not to arouse suspicion—to sit on a bench. And cry.

I spent most of the summer of 2019 wondering what was wrong with me, and why I didn’t love my son. He was born three months earlier: happy, healthy, and everything we could have asked for. After settling into the unique cadence new parents face—moving abruptly between adorable vignettes and constant sleep deprivation—I started to sense something wasn’t right. The thought didn’t arrive fully formed; a dull background static, initially attributed to exhaustion. But when it remained, after even the occasional eight hours of sleep, I started to question what I was feeling. A darkness had crept upon me since his birth. I was getting angry all the time, over the smallest things. I didn’t want to be close to my wife. Didn’t want to play with my daughter. Didn’t want to talk to friends. Getting through each day was a struggle, like wading through mud with a 50-kilo weight strapped to my back. And, most painfully of all, I didn’t want to be near my son.

Hearing him cry was like nails scraping down a chalkboard. And he cried—a lot. At least I thought he did, though I now realise my mind was playing tricks on me, blowing this small thing out of proportion, like it was treating everything else: molehills transformed into mountains, trapping me within. I avoided any attempt to solve the problem he had, because my mind told me he’d only start crying again soon after. What would even be the point?

So I shrunk away. From being a husband. From being a father. I went to a dark place.

While sitting on that bench crying, my eternally sad basset hound watching tears run down my face, I tried to get a handle on what was happening. With hindsight, I’m lucky this was my second child and I had some kind of benchmark to compare it against. I knew that what I was feeling wasn’t “normal,” so I started searching online about why I might be feeling this way. Whilst googling things like new dad sad and why am I crying new dad, I came across an article written by a doctor who had trouble connecting with his second child. I read the symptoms and felt an odd sense of relief: ongoing feelings of anger towards your partner and child, feeling numb and empty, increased irritability, increased use of alcohol, significant weight gain or loss, loss of interest in work or hobbies, feeling sad and crying for no reason.

Paternal postpartum depression. PPPD. I had no idea it existed.

I was aware of postpartum depression. All dads-to-be are. We’re warned about it, advised on the signs to look out for when your wife, or other women in your life, have a baby. But there were slim pickings when trying to learn more about a father’s mental health after a newborn comes into their life. On the World Health Organization’s website, searching for paternal mental health returned the non-helpful “Did you mean: maternal mental health?” Paternal postnatal depression still returns zero results on the UK National Health Service’s website, and back in 2019 I’d read that some mental health charities wouldn’t allow male writers to use the term paternal postnatal depression when talking about the problem—they were only allowed to refer to it as “depression for dads.”

PPPD is not as widely acknowledged or well-researched as postpartum depression in mothers, so the papers we rely on are spread across decades, not years. A 2003 paper said it could affect as many as 25% of new fathers (or 50% for those whose partners already show signs of postpartum depression), a 2015 paper from Japan pegged the number at a very precise 13.6%, whilst a meta-analysis from 2010 suggested the figure as somewhere between 8% and 13%. But it’s impossible to know the true number, because men are less likely to seek help, to reveal negative thoughts to partners, friends, or health-care professionals, or to be routinely screened in the way new mothers are.

The Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) has become the go-to method of screening postpartum depression in new mothers, and many countries will routinely administer it, passing cases forward if the score indicates the potential of PND. But fathers are not asked the same questions, even though research suggests that the same questionnaire, with a lower cut-off point, would uncover many cases.

How many cases might that be? Let’s take a look at the UK, where I’m from and where the EPDS originated. Assuming the 2019 ONS figures of 640,370 new babies born in the UK (and removing 12.8% of lone-parent mother households), there are around 558,000 new fathers in the UK each year. Even assuming a fairly conservative estimate of 10% of new fathers experiencing PPPD, that means as many as 55,000 men, each and every year, with the vast majority suffering in silence.

Research shows the knock-on effects of undiagnosed cases can harm generations to come—for example, with children of depressed fathers twice as likely to develop a psychiatric disorder by age 7, and 2.8 times as likely to use mental health services when they become adults.

The changes happening in fatherhood are altering the very landscape of parenting. A problem previously thought of as only happening to mums now needs to be considered for dads, too. As men take more active roles in the upbringing of their children—with many attempting to equally co-parent, or the increasing number choosing to become stay-at-home dads—we’re shouldering the burden of sleep deprivation, the pressure to be both a perfect parent and productive employee, and the many things that have contributed to postpartum depression in women over the years.

When I look back on photos from that time, I don’t recognise the man in the picture. Of course, there are photos of me holding my son and smiling; I knew well enough to put on a happy face for those. But there are other photos—ones where I don’t know I’m in the background, walking in the park, or sitting on the sofa. And that man looks broken. Truly defeated. Empty. Shattered, in every meaning of the word. I look at him and realise what my wife must have felt, seeing the man she loves so far removed from the person she fell in love with. I needed help. I’m thankful that she was there to give it.

We figured it out together. Worked on a routine to get things back on track. I started therapy, a daily meditation practice, and exercised regularly. Worked hard to get a good routine back into my daily life. Cut out bad habits that were putting me in a negative headspace. And purposefully spent time with my son, on our own, building the belief that I could do this.

One thing that helped was opening up to other dads in my life. I started talking to friends about my problems, and realised that I wasn’t alone in these feelings. When I started to feel better, I began reaching out to friends who had recently become dads, making sure they were doing okay (and telling them it was fine to talk if they weren’t). I started writing about my experience in the hope it might help others—these essays became the start of The New Fatherhood, a weekly newsletter I’ve continued writing about the highs and lows of being a modern dad. Since first sharing my PPPD story, I’ve had dozens of emails from people thanking me for opening up, helping them identify the same symptoms, encouraged to seek help. I’ve continued writing about the importance of mental health since. Since 2022, I’ve used the revenue from my newsletter to create a direct-action therapy fund that helps dads access therapeutic support, no matter where they are. The dads (and curious mums) reading contributed enough to help almost a dozen dads.

Paternal postpartum depression tears families apart. It makes men resent their children—at one of the most pivotal, wonderful times of their lives, and maybe forever—because they don’t get the help they need. There are thousands of undiagnosed dads, silently suffering, unsure of why they feel this way. Taking it out on themselves. Their partners. Their family and friends. And, worst of all, on their children. It’s only through bringing these issues into the open—be it a newsletter about fatherhood, or a moment of vulnerability between two friends—that we can hope to change things for the better.

Let’s Hear From Other Dads

In the five years since publishing this essay, I’ve heard from dozens of dads. I’m sharing a few of their emails and comments, with permission, here, to let you know that if you are feeling this way, you are not alone.

My 2nd born were identical twins and everyone kept telling me what a gift I received. About 3 months in I remember telling my wife that they took everything from us and I wish they were never born. Playing FIFA until 4am, sleeping forever and still being tired. Calling myself a wimp and a loser because I can’t process this on my own. We just celebrated their 3rd birthday last weekend. I woke up crying and hugged my wife. Everything has been clicking for about 8 months now after I got help. I don’t know if I could have done it without your essay. Nick

Today was the first time when I had the courage to research what the hell happened to me in the last two years. I cried reading your article and it was somehow relieving. Maybe I will find the courage to also share my story and seek help because I am in a really dark place now. I really thought I was alone in this. Charles

My daughter is now 13 months and I have recently had to take some leave from work, as my depression and anxiety became unbearable. I carry immense guilt to not be the partner and parent that I had thought I would be right now. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for helping me not feel alone and so ashamed. Nate

When my daughter was born, I was struggling with what I didn’t realize at the time was postpartum depression, a phenomenon I associated with new mothers but didn’t know could affect fathers, too. It was largely through Kevin’s writing that I was able to put a name to the intense shame I felt about my early relationship to both my daughter and parenthood. Daniel

I was diagnosed with paternal postnatal depression about 6 months after my son was born. Up until reading this I have struggled to find anyone dealing with the same thing. All the Dads I met through NCT seemed fine and loving fatherhood. It just pulls you further and further into the hole. It’s so good to know that others go through the same thing as it’s so easy to fall into the mindset that there is something fundamentally wrong with me. Alex

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Every annual subscription (just about) covers the cost of one therapy session for a dad in need. If you’d like to support the fund whilst avoiding Substack (and I get it), you can cover the cost of one hour, or five sessions for one dad.

If you, or a dad that you know, wants to speak to a therapist but feels constrained by cost, waiting lists or healthcare plans, find out how to access the Therapy Fund here. And if you have a friend who you think might be struggling, please send him this essay.

I’m delighted to share it with you all. If this floats your boat, there’s plenty more in the book, which is available now on Amazon, Bookshop.org, and in your favourite local indie bookstore.

Their room was bright when Chris woke, light filled, and the window’s warmth reached him on the couch. Mitzi cradled Amos on her hospital bed. Some color had returned to her face.

“How are you feeling?” Chris squinted. Waking up again to see Amos, their son, only two days old, was miraculous.

“I feel reborn,” she said. “God—I was tired.” She rotated Amos to face Chris and gently held him up. “Can you believe this little creature?”

Chris rose and came over to kiss the top of Mitzi’s head. A single gray strand of hair sparkled beneath his lip. Despite her having slept only a few hours, her eyes were lively. Just days before, Chris had taken a picture of Mitzi, standing at the open window of their apartment. Her belly appeared to have the power to bend whatever was around it, including the window’s protective bars.

“Your dad texted,” she said.

“Texted you?”

Mitzi nodded. “He was just checking in.”

Mitzi had a soft spot for his dad, but Chris and Mitzi had agreed to get through the birth alone. No friends, no family. Meaning with as much ease and calm as possible. (Due to several large fibroids near her uterus, Mitzi had a cesarean, which made the process more manageable; it removed many of the unknowns and made her feel in control.) They both considered themselves mildly estranged from their immediate families, and the last time they’d seen Chris’s dad, at the baby shower two months before, it had been something of a disaster. He’d had a little too much to drink, was a little too adamantly pressing to pay the remainder of the tab at the beer garden, trying to prove himself. A shouting match had ensued, and Chris’s dad had stormed off. Leaving Chris mortified.

“He’s here,” Chris said. “I didn’t tell you before. I thought I could hold him off.”

“In the city?” She looked down at Amos, who burbled.

Chris nodded. Despite Chris having told his dad that they’d see him in a few days, he’d come to the city anyway. I’m around, he’d texted, which always gave Chris the impression that his dad was somehow everywhere, hovering.

“Maybe he should give us a ride home?”

Chris pictured himself hunched over and weeping in the empty hospital cafeteria the night before. He’d been in such a state that he’d almost called his dad.

“I know it’s not what we decided,” she continued, “but, Chris—I’m tired. I’d rather ride home in the car with someone we know.”

Her eyes were wide, sincere. In the later months of Mitzi’s pregnancy, Chris had imagined himself behind the wheel of the car en route to the hospital—maybe he’d always had this thought—but they lived in Brooklyn and had never needed a car. Chris had called the Lyft at 5:00 a.m. to leave enough time to practice installing the new car seat before they left.

“Is he really that different than a Lyft driver?” she joked.

How many times had Chris waited for his dad to pick him up over the years? At practices, from after-school care. Chris’s mom, may she rest in peace, never drove. More times than he could count, a teammate’s mother would take him home, or he’d wait at school with the security guard, watching the cafeteria lights turn off, which always felt somehow illicit. Chris grabbed his phone. After several rings, his dad answered.

“Dad,” Chris said.

“Chris.” He cleared his throat, his voice hoarse. “How are you? How’s the babe?”

“We’re doing well. Last night was rough.” He wondered how much he should say. “But we’re doing better today.” Chris switched the phone to speaker.

“Hey,” Mitzi said.

“Mitz, how are you, beautiful?”

“I’m great. And Amos is great,” she said.

“Wait a beat before calling me Grandpa, will you? I’m fragile.”

Mitzi laughed.

Chris rolled his eyes. “We were thinking it’d be good to get home with some relative ease,” he said. “Would you be able to give us a ride back to Brooklyn?”

“What happened to all the going-it-alone stuff?”

Mitzi pursed her lips.

“It’s fine, never mind,” Chris said. “We’ll just—”

“Of course,” his dad said. “I’d be happy to, just let me know what time and I’ll be there.”

Later that morning, as they started to pack, Chris placed Amos in the car seat for practice and fastened the belt, taking care not to snag his son in the buckle. He seesawed the seat with his toes. Amos raised an arm and curled his fingers. He was so small—five pounds, nine ounces—that the sleeves of his onesie covered his hands. The first thing that Chris had learned about his son was that he didn’t like to be still. Only movement kept him calm. Chris’s hips and quads felt sore from endless bouncing.

“It would be cute if he called you Papa,” Mitzi said. She wore a gray sweatshirt and flannel pajama pants. She moved tentatively.

“You’ve been giving me papa vibes these last few days.” She flicked her eyebrows.

Papa, he repeated in his mind several times.

“I can’t wait to nest with you two,” she said. “I’m so happy we’re going home.”

The lobby was bustling as they left. People smiled and cooed at Amos. The car seat hardly felt heavier with him in it. Mitzi walked slowly but ably, grateful to be out of their room. Outside, cabs were backed up approaching the entrance, and for a moment Chris was relieved not to be riding in one.

“Can we wait outside?” Mitzi rose up on her toes. “I’m dying for fresh air.”

When they walked through the revolving door, the outside world seemed to rush at them. New York was a merciless grid. Amos rested beneath the canopy of his blanket. On the pavement, Chris flattened the duffel bag and made a cushion for the car seat so Amos wouldn’t be on the ground. Chris kneeled beside him, gazing at the street from his line of sight.

“Will you wrap the extra blanket around him?” Mitzi asked. “I can’t believe he’s outside, finally in the world.”

Chris got Amos snug and checked his phone: 10:12. His dad was late, of course. He wondered how long a grace period he should afford him before hailing one of the many waiting cabs. Amos started to fuss; Chris rocked the seat back and forth. Mitzi stepped closer to them, and Chris carefully rubbed her back.

He scanned the street. Idling at the light was his dad’s prized old Audi A4. The exhaust rose above the car’s roof. He remembered when he was eleven and they’d come to Manhattan for an auto show, his dad commenting obsessively on the Audi’s mileage. Chris’s car sickness had built steadily. His dad told him to make like a dog and stick his head out the window to get some fresh air.

The light changed and Chris felt tense. His arms were tired from the rocking. The car’s fumes were strong when his dad pulled up. Chris lifted Amos and turned him away to shield him. Chris’s dad hopped out of the car in a beaten suede jacket, tortoiseshell sunglasses propped on his head. Apart from his cameo at the baby shower, it had been nine months since Chris had seen him. He and Chris didn’t hug, but his dad squeezed the top of his shoulder before giving Mitzi a kiss on the cheek.

“Where’s my little grandbaby-boy?” He searched Amos’s face.

Chris opened the back door, and the clicking sound and the leather’s roasted smell triggered more nostalgia. Weekends searching dealerships for vintage parts—radio knobs and console covers—Genesis blaring from the speakers. Chris’s boredom never seemed to register. His dad still didn’t get that Chris didn’t give a shit about cars.

Chris realized then that someone needed to hold Amos while the seat was installed. Mitzi wasn’t strong enough yet to hold him while standing.

“I’ve got it,” his dad said.

“No, I’ll do it,” Chris said.

His dad peeked around the back of the car seat. “I wouldn’t know where to begin with this new age gadget. Let me hold him while you do your thing, Pops.”

Chris looked at Amos.

His dad noticed his hesitation and smirked. “I’ve done this all before, you know?” he said. “That’s the only reason you’re able to do it.”

Chris handed Amos over, lowering him into the cradle of his father’s arms. He was nervous to pull away. Chris’s dad started whispering something to Amos, and Chris watched them for a minute before belting in the car seat.

By the time they reached the FDR Drive, Amos had fallen asleep. Chris and Mitzi sat together with Amos in the back. They held hands across the car seat, its sloped edges plump with foam. Mitzi’s palm grew warm in Chris’s as he stared from the car window at the river. He thought of the operation the day before last—when he pushed through the door to see Mitzi lying still on the table, halved by a gray curtain. Her eyes searched him as he pulled his chair in close. He told her it would all be OK, that she was doing great. The doctor came over to their side of the table with her large vintage glasses and deadpan demeanor (she was their least favorite among the trio) and asked whether or not they wanted to drop the curtain to see the operation. Mitzi had said she’d make a game-time decision, and Chris was ultimately relieved not to witness the gore. When the doctor said they were about to pull the baby free, Mitzi renewed her grip on Chris’s hand; he tensed his body as if it might anchor her. He could feel the doctor pulling, and Mitzi seemed almost like an extension of him, the densest garment that had snagged on some corner and was being tugged free. Tears slid down Mitzi’s cheeks. He told her she was almost there, though he didn’t know if it was true until he did. Until they both did. The baby, their son, was only his screams. A wailing sound filled the room and poured deep down into their chests.

When they passed their exit on the Prospect Expressway, Chris’s stomach dropped. “Dad, that was us. I told you twenty-six.”

He smiled in the rearview. “I know. I’m just making a quick pit stop.”

It seemed like a joke. Chris’s heart beat steadily, a slow, mocking laugh. Mitzi squeezed his hand.

“You’re kidding,” Chris said. “We just want to get home.”

“I figured I had time to sneak it in before I drop you off.”

“Jesus, Dad. Make things simple for once.”

“It’s not far out of the way, I swear,” he said. “I found this Audi parts dealer on eBay. He has the shifter knob and fog lights. Both!”

“Car parts? You’re not fucking serious.”

“I set this up before I knew I’d be driving you home. It will only take a sec.”

Traffic began to slow. Chris watched his dad’s hand resting casually on the gearshift. Trembling. Chris wanted to scream. He remembered the hot parking lot where he’d learned to drive stick shift the summer after junior year of high school. His mom had come with them, whooping from the grass as Chris, haltingly, got the hang of it. His dad had been proud of him. Chris knew his dad had been lonely—despite his dad not letting on—in the five years since his mom passed, but he’d just gotten more insufferable. He was only interested in his car, slowly rebuilding its engine after work and on the weekends and sending Chris pictures of pipes and wires he couldn’t fully differentiate.

“How long before you get back in the ring?” Chris’s dad asked Mitzi.

“Ooof,” she said. “I haven’t even thought about it.” Mitzi had started boxing the year before she’d gotten pregnant, working with a trainer in the park and at a boxing gym in Bay Ridge. Chris had a video of her on his phone, sparring with her eight-month-round belly, her punches still swift and sharp.

“You ever get out there and spar with her, Chris?”

“She’d whoop me,” Chris said. “I’m smarter than that.”

“Yeah—my money’s on Mitz,” his dad said.

The traffic built steadily. Despite this, Chris’s dad switched lanes several times, as if he might thread his way through it. Chris rested his head against the window. He worried that Amos would start crying if they came to a stop.

A second later Chris’s window began rolling down. Chris startled, jerking his head away. The air whipped in. He pressed the button, but the child lock was on. “Roll it up,” he said to his father, frustrated. “The noise.”

“Thought you might need some air, sheesh.”

Chris’s dad eyed him in the rearview.

“Mitz, you know how he gets.”

Mitzi reached over to Chris and palmed his forearm. It’s OK, she mouthed.

“Your mom used to send me out for drives to get you to sleep,” he said. “You were so stubborn.”

Mitzi lifted the blanket up to check on Amos, who was still asleep. The blanket’s gossamer quality betrayed the heavy frustration it had already caused Chris. Failing to properly swaddle Amos had nearly broken him the first night. He’d been trying to let Mitzi sleep, but Amos kept fussing, crying. The younger nurse, with a streak of blue in her hair, had brought Chris a swaddle blanket with a Velcro strap that changed everything. Chris had looked haggard enough that she offered to take Amos to the nursery so he could sleep. He wasn’t ready to go back in the room, though, so he took the elevator downstairs to the lobby, followed signs for the cafeteria. The kitchen was closed, but coffee and a few packaged snacks were available. He didn’t want to face a choice then. To be so unsure of his abilities in a situation of such permanence—he wanted to be told what to do. He sat at a long empty table and pulled out his phone. Instead of dialing, he looked down at the floor, the speckled linoleum blurring and coming into focus.

Chris’s dad parked outside of a small white house. He grabbed his wallet from the glove compartment. “Hang tight,” he said. “I won’t be long.”

When he got to the door, a man with a maroon baseball hat answered and they disappeared inside.

“I’m sorry I suggested this,” Mitzi said.

“It’s not your fault—he’s completely oblivious. He couldn’t have done this later?”

“I know,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

“He’s so fucking selfish—this is exactly why I didn’t want him involved.” Chris was almost yelling, and Amos started to cry. Chris peeled back the blanket, feeling foolish for allowing himself to get worked up, for letting it affect Amos. He tried to rock the seat, to get Amos back to sleep, but there wasn’t much give with the seat belt. He grabbed the edge and violently shook the car seat.

“Stop, Chris,” Mitzi said.

He didn’t listen.

“Please, just calm down.”

He couldn’t take the sound of saliva quivering in Amos’s throat, the rattle. He undid the buckle and scooped Amos out. Mitzi looked away, out the window toward the house, as he opened the door and got out. Chris cradled Amos’s head on his shoulder, the timbre of the little cries tickling the wax in Chris’s ears. He wrapped his son in the blanket and tucked the long stray corner into the front, only to see it come undone as he lifted Amos. The blanket fell to the sidewalk. Amos cried louder. Chris bounced, bounced more deeply still, and dipped to snatch the blanket from the ground with the tips of his fingers. He squeezed Amos hard against his body in frustration. He realized suddenly the danger of what he’d just done. They’d been warned repeatedly in class about curtailing these spontaneous bursts of aggression. His heart pounded and his eyes watered. Amos cried anew, the reverberations from his cries like different sorts of cries that might amount to an infinite sound. Chris walked further up the block. Sweat pricked the crown of his head. His calves strained. The wind blew across them. Above him, a cloud quickly made way for the sun. He started to sway. Amos was calming, he could feel it. He’d be OK once they were back on the road. Chris continued up the sidewalk, away from the car, his dad. The sun’s warmth soothed his neck and shoulders. He turned away to shield his son from it. Once they reached the corner, Chris closed his eyes to try to settle his heart rate. For a moment all was calm.

After several minutes, he took a deep breath and walked back to the car. His dad was leaving the house. He was carrying a white plastic bag and sporting a grin.

“I got something for you,” he said.

“Oh?” Chris said wryly.

Mitzi got out of the car and took Amos.

“For you three, actually.” His dad held up a single key hanging from a leather key chain. It twisted slowly in the air. Chris and Mitzi looked at each other, bewildered. “She’s right over here.” He walked several cars away to a small white Audi that Chris knew was an A2. “Not quite vintage yet, but there’s only fifty thousand miles on it. I hope you’ll add some coming to visit me.”

Chris was stunned. He’d never expected to own a car in New York—never expected to own a car at all. The parking was brutal near their building. It didn’t feel like a gift. “Dad—you didn’t have to do this.”

Mitzi walked over and hugged Chris’s dad. “I can’t believe it.” She spoke softly to Amos then. “What do you think, bud? Our family car.”

Chris rubbed his face, shocked that he’d be driving a car home. As his dad popped the trunk, Amos turned and stared at Chris. His tiny eyes looked shifty. Chris felt like he saw a flash of personality, of attitude, and almost laughed. He stepped in close, looking at the deep, unspeakable blue of Amos’s pupils. The dark eddies of his hair and the creases in his delicate little face as if all freshly scored. Chris’s son. Many years later, Amos would sit in the passenger seat, his hair mussed by the highway wind.

Say Hello

Something entirely different this week. Thanks, Oliver.

How was it for you?

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Fatherhood can be unexpectedly lonely: your world shrinks, your friendships go dark, and somehow you convince yourself that this is just … normal.

But what if it wasn’t?

I’m delighted to be bringing The New Fatherhood podcast back to your ears—and, for the first time, you can also watch it on YouTube. In the first episode of this new season, I’m talking with novelist and journalist Sam Graham-Felsen about what happens to male friendship after we become dads. Sam’s essay on male loneliness in The New York Times Magazine struck a chord with thousands of men around the world, and he’s written extensively about fatherhood, friendship, and masculinity, including a recent piece about a father-son road trip to the Badlands inspired by Teddy Roosevelt’s “Strenuous Life.”

In this conversation, we dig into why so many fathers lose touch with their friends after having kids, how childhood experiences shape the fathers we become, and the surprisingly simple ways we can rebuild connection with each other.

Subscribe to the Podcast

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Pocket Casts

Where to Find Sam Graham-Felsen

Sam’s website

Sam’s novel Green

Episode References

Sam’s Badlands essay: “I Tried to Toughen Up My Son. Things Didn’t Go as Planned.”

Sam’s essay on male loneliness: “Where Have All My Deep Male Friendships Gone?”

Kevin’s essay, “Where’s My Jenny?”

Brooklyn Stroll Club

Man of the Year podcast episode on the “TCS method” (Text/Call/See)

Theodore Roosevelt and the Strenuous Life

Dadurdays: IRL meetups in a city near you

Men calling to wish each other goodnight

Ray Charles — “America the Beautiful”

Bruce Springsteen — “Badlands”

Woody Guthrie — “This Land Is Your Land”

Timestamps

0:00 — welcome to the show!
01:13 — fatherhood is like the kitchen junk drawer
04:04 — why it's nice to show your kids leaves
07:25 — roadtripping to the Badlands, Teddy Roosevelt, and the myth of “toughening up your son”
11:59 — being bullied as a kid
14:07 — raising confident kids, not jerks
15:00 — it's human to think a flower is beautiful
20:24 — why Sam wrote publicly about his own loneliness
21:20 — it's ok to be lonely
22:02 — friendship as the most underrated mental health strategy
27:18 — sam regrets not reaching out to friends as a new dad
29:47 — why are dads (sometimes) so bad at friends?
32:49 — TCM method: text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly
35:00 — why phone calls are weirdly hard (and how to make them work)

Credits

Host: Kevin Maguire

Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Sound Editor: Sam Williams

Theme Music: Sohn

At this time, every year, I find myself drinking from the cinema firehose—my personal annual challenge to catch all Best Picture movies before Oscar night. How many have you seen? If your number is low, don’t worry—I get it. If you are hoping to go see a movie with your beloved, it can be an especially tough sell. There’s the sitter, which will cost you anywhere between €6.60 in the Netherlands (Europe’s cheapest) or $27.79 in San Francisco (before tip). Add in a taxi there and back, some kind of sugary or sweet snack (diner’s choice), and maybe a quick drink afterwards and it feels extravagant to go and watch a screen in a dark room—pretty much how most nights end, without the perks of being able to pause for the bathroom, or to roll off to bed halfway through and leave the rest for tomorrow.

But for any dad with even a passing interest in cinema, it’s clear that there’s something in the water right now, and fatherhood is front and centre across the majority of nominees. Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, Hamnet, Frankenstein: all of these movies grapple with the tension between the father our children need us to be, and the external validation our egos chase away from home. It’s a wild turn of affairs when only One Battle After Another offers an aspirational version of fatherhood, with a pot-smoking, gun-toting Leonardo DiCaprio doing everything in his power to protect his daughter.

As parents, we’re all operating in the slipstream of popular culture, so you’re forgiven if you haven’t caught up. You have a few more weeks before I come back to talk about the rest of these movies in depth and what cinema is telling us about fatherhood in 2026. Instead, today, please enjoy this amuse-bouche: a relatively spoiler-free reflection on a movie you can watch at home this weekend—and, with a sub-two-hour runtime, you’ve actually got a chance to watch it in one sitting.

Train Dreams is an adaptation of a Denis Johnson novella, and is a slow, stunning, meditative exploration of fatherhood and our search for meaning. It stars Joel Edgerton, an Australian actor who is most famous—in this house, at least—for playing a young Uncle Owen in Star Wars Episodes II and III. Edgerton plays the part of Robert Grainier, an unassuming lumberjack living in Idaho around the time of World War I. Vast swathes of the movie are set far from home, as Grainier boards a train to follow where the work is, with the distant redwoods of the Pacific Northwest providing the most fertile territory for a logging crew.

Grainier goes hell for leather working to build the dreams of the railroad barons, chopping trees to become railway ties, building the infrastructure that will usher in a new era of economic growth across the United States. He is a father who provides: he returns home after months away with a wad of notes in his pocket and hands them to his wife as he walks through the door. She has been learning to provide in his absence: weaving wicker baskets to catch fish in the river near their home and becoming adept with a rifle to hunt local deer.

Logging is dangerous work—whilst the spectre of death is ever present, the greatest threats come not from falling trunks and branches, but from the people he encounters. The stakes are raised when Grainier becomes a father: every time he leaves, he worries he won’t return, and comes back to a daughter who is “like a different person every time I see her. I feel like I’m missing her life.” For a brief period, he finds local work; the pay isn’t great, but the movie’s narrator informs us, in dialogue lifted directly from the pages of the book, “Though he didn’t know it then, he would always look back on this time of his life as his happiest.”

And this is where I have to stop talking about the plot. Because anything more will ruin it for you. And I implore you to carve out one hundred and three minutes this weekend to immerse yourself in this world that director Clint Bentley has crafted. Not because of its staggering beauty, and his uncanny ability to channel Terrence Malick on the regular. Or the immaculate sad dad vibes that run throughout, intentionally dialled up by inviting Bryce Dessner, guitarist from The National, to compose the score. This is a movie that begs to be watched by fathers in 2026 because it connects us to a core pressure point in this narrative for generations: how we provide for our families and how that work pulls us away from our homes. How should dads show up for their families? And what happens when our ability to protect is in direct conflict with the need to provide?

Although set over a hundred years ago, the vision of fatherhood in Train Dreams isn’t a relic of a bygone era. How do I know this? Because it’s the same version of fatherhood I grew up with. My dad worked as a roadman—no, not that kind, UK-slang aficionados—but a man who literally built roads. He’d leave home early on a Monday morning, before I woke up, and would return on a Friday night, the smell of tarmac (or what you’d call asphalt over the other side of the Atlantic) permeating the house. Huge chunks of my childhood were spent driving around the motorways of England and Scotland, and my dad would regularly point out the junctions and bridges he had helped build. Like the movie’s protagonist, my father spent his working years pouring blood, sweat and tears into the infrastructure of a growing country. Later, he’d dig more holes as he worked to install fibre optic cable underneath the streets of the UK, the very same piping that many dads will be using to read this today.

Today’s world is different. We no longer carry the burden of bringing home the bacon alone: a third of US heterosexual marriages see wives paid as much as the husbands, and 1 in 7 marriages see the wife as the primary earner. Our physical strength is no longer the driving force behind how we protect our children, who are increasingly looking for our emotional intelligence. A father who does not earn still carries a stigma, but what does it mean to provide in 2026, when more men choose to be stay-at-home dads, or are trying their hardest to find (or intentionally create) careers that will allow them to be in the lives of their children as much as they want to be?

For fathers of a bygone era, this wasn’t a choice. You were the breadwinner, and you went wherever bread could be made. But for many fathers today—not all, but I’d wager a fair few reading this—we have agency in the matter. You can decide to take a job that allows you to work from home two days a week, even though it may mean your boss will pass you over for that promotion. Or you can remain in a role that will allow you to cruise at 50 mph for 80% of the time, but have enough left in the tank for a good evening with your family, and not a short, snappy one whilst you’re keeping an eye on late-night Slack pings.

Those choices weren’t available to Robert Grainier. They weren’t available to my dad either. But they are for me. And maybe for you, too.

Choosing a Different Narrative

This year’s Best Picture slate offers different flavours of failing fathers: dads running away from expected arrivals, others consumed by chasing ego-fuelled ambitions, or abandoning children they once promised to love dearly. Honestly, there was another entire essay here, chock-full of spoilers, that I ripped out and will share next month. Dads on the big screen are going through it right now. But so often—as is true in art and life—the drama is of their own making. This essay felt apt to share today because a) you can—nay, you MUST—watch it at home this weekend and b) because it’s going to form part of the curriculum for the second REBOOT cohort.

I’ve droned on for years that the content you consume—the books you read, the movies you watch, the podcasts you listen to—will colour your worldview like very little else. When I first started putting together a group coaching program, it felt right to include a suggested media diet: one movie to watch and three books to choose from. Last time round, those movies included two I’ve written about in the newsletter: Perfect Days, Wim Wenders’ magnificent meditation on work, purpose and contentment and Another Round, a radical rethinking of how we build and maintain adult male friendships. This year, I’ll be putting Train Dreams into the mix, as it rocked me and has left me contemplating the role of a father ever since.

The core thread running throughout REBOOT is the cold, hard fact that identity, career, and attention are part of a single interconnected system and cannot be examined in isolation. It provides a space to question the role that work plays in our sense of self, and the danger of it becoming all-consuming, leaving fatherhood feeling like an obstacle rather than an opportunity.

This program is everything I wanted when I was transitioning away from Google. Weekly group sessions where we hold each other accountable, one-on-one coaching to work through personal challenges, and a tight-knit community of fathers who get it. This isn’t traditional executive coaching—though, of course, we talk about goals, values, and purpose. It’s not therapy either—though healing always happens when dads can open up to each other. It’s something different—a radical reimagining of the relationships in our lives: with work, technology, family, friends, and ourselves.

I’ve come to think of it as business school in reverse. Traditional business schools teach us how to scale, optimise, and maximise: more money, increased growth, improved efficiency. They don’t teach us to question the machine—only how to keep it running, to sacrifice everything at the altar of shareholder value. REBOOT is for unlearning the toxic patterns, beliefs, and behaviours that got us here, and for building new monuments in their place. This isn’t about stepping back—it’s about stepping up and designing a life that feels intentional, sustainable, and deeply fulfilling.

Because what unites the dads I’m talking to aren’t job titles or LinkedIn histories—it’s that nagging feeling that something’s gotta give. That the way we’re working isn’t working. That somewhere between that terrifying Teams notification sound and the school run, between quarterly reviews and the hundredth reading of The Gruffalo, we’ve lost something essential about who we are and what matters most.

REBOOT is for you if you’re …

• … done being told the hamster wheel is a career ladder

• … questioning whether the tension between home and work is unsolvable

• … tired of working to others’ definitions of success

• … ready to stop delaying that leap towards what’s next

• … finished with performative success and primed for real change

Over six months, a carefully selected group of dads will work together to write a different story. To move beyond surface-level change into genuine transformation. The group will be intimate—just 6 dads per cohort—because this work requires trust, vulnerability and the kind of conversations you can only have in small circles. The chasm between the man you are and the one you want to be can be vast—and it isn’t something you should have to cross alone.

Next Wednesday, I’ll be running a one-hour taster workshop, where I’ll talk through the REBOOT framework, the media diet, give you some tools you can use, and speak with a few of the dads who ran the gauntlet last time. We’ve got 15 dads signed up already.

I’ve saved you a seat.

RSVP Here

Good Dadvice

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Newsflash: A 35-year-old millennial father living in the United States spends more time caring for his children than his baby-boomer mother did at the same age. It sounds unbelievable, and I’d question it too if I hadn’t read it in The Economist earlier this month. But it’s right there in the data: the shift is real. It’s happening.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for five years. And the thread running through it all is the overwhelming work that dads face as they wrestle with existential questions at the heart of modern fatherhood. To question our beliefs. Doubt the stories we inherited. Imagine new futures. Create spaces where we can be vulnerable, freed from the pressure to perform to societal norms around ambition and success.

And, most importantly, to do all of this together.

Last year, I did something I’ve never done before. Every Wednesday, rain or shine, I joined a call with six other dads to go deep on what fatherhood means today: as we stand at a historical inflection point, when more is expected of us than the fathers that came before, more than we were ever taught to handle; when the pressure to provide is now shared often, but the pressure to parent is present always, in a way that it once wasn’t—for my dad, at the very least.

This was the first time I had coached a group of dads together. I called it REBOOT, a name that staked its intention to rethink the biggest relationships in our lives: with our partners, our children, our friends, our jobs, and ourselves. Dads joined from across the United States and Europe. You didn’t have to work in marketing to take part, but hilariously, most of them did. But no matter where they came from, or where they worked, they were all wrestling with versions of the same question:

Now I’m a dad, who am I supposed to be?

We are stepping into a new definition of fatherhood whilst entrenched in its past—chains that run thousands of metres deep, barnacle-encrusted links resting on the seabed. Those norms drive our internal narratives: they tell us that fathers need to keep quiet and carry on, that it’s our duty to do as our fathers did before us, as generations did before them, no matter how misjudged those decisions and actions might have been.

The traditional fatherhood tropes have begun to shift: whilst Homer was still strangling Bart until a few years ago, the father who hits his son today is held in the same light as the one who once hit his wife. Dad is no longer the sole provider, the disciplinarian, the boss of the house. There was once a time when, if dad said jump, your response better be “How high?” But those old commandments no longer hold: they are stone relics carved for a different era, for a world we no longer live in.

Today, we search for new models, beliefs and behaviours we hope will transport us towards the hallowed promised lands, where life will be different, where parenting might suddenly be easier. Maybe change is the answer: a new job in a fresh country, a leap into the unknown, choosing to bet on yourself after cashing a monthly paycheck for most of your career. These transformations feel terrifying, as they should: internal voices ward us off making a change, the mind’s desire for mental homeostasis setting off alarm bells. As a father, those voices scream louder: the archetype of provider pulls us back towards its dark, murky depths. Move forward, or sink into the deep, dark blue—which do you choose? Because if you want to get there, you can’t take everything with you.

@_aholliday#holliday

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These conversations came up regularly in weekly group sessions. We’d talk about seismic shifts in our sense of self, how to find work aligned with our values, and how to untangle our identities from job titles and salary bands. Those discussions were to be expected. But a surprise for me was the regularity with which we came together around smaller shifts. The ones that take nothing more than a few words to stop us in our tracks—an instant moment of clarity that allows you to see the world from an entirely new perspective. If you’ve been reading the newsletter for a while, you’ll know where I’m going here. Back in 2021, I wrote about William B. Irvine’s “Last Time Meditation,” which I’d picked up from a Waking Up session:

“When you’re doing something, you should reflect on the possibility that this might be the last time you do it. Again, you don’t dwell on this possibility, it’s just a flickering thought. Doing this can dramatically change your perspective on the events of your daily life. Mowing my lawn can be a burden, particularly on a hot day, but I can lighten that burden by remembering that there will be a last time that I am physically able to mow a lawn, and that after that time has passed, I will likely look back on these as the good old days.”

One of the dads in the first cohort told me he thought about the Last Time Meditation “almost every day” since he first read about it in this newsletter all those years ago. These little hacks provide a circuit breaker, allowing us to find necessary milliseconds between action and reaction; to take a breath, for just a moment, before we lose our shit and drop into a negative spiral that can last anywhere from a few minutes to the best part of a week. My friend Justin and I work for ourselves; we lean on each other through the good times and the bad. One mantra we have found essential is “This is the struggle I choose.” When the shit is hitting the fan. When work begins to dry up. When, like during the pandemic, I’d have chewed someone’s arm off for a monthly paycheck. With any choice, there will always be a battle. This is the struggle I choose.

Here’s another I’ve found myself coming back to. Last April, I went to Manchester to be with my family on the one-year anniversary of Mum’s death. It was a lot, in the middle of a month that was a huge challenge for myriad reasons: a perfect storm of life, career and family. I could have done without going back there; at the airport, as I was leaving Barcelona, I caught myself thinking it. But I remembered another great reframe: rather than thinking “I have to do this,” I entertained a more abundant thread: “I get to do this.” I get to see my dad, who has been through the toughest year of his life. I get to see my sisters, who I’ve grown ever closer to over the last 12 months. I get to be with my nephew on the weekend of his birthday. I get to have breakfast with my niece, halfway through her GCSE exams in the final year of high school. What a privilege it was to be with them all.

I offered the same reflection to my dad when he shared how much work it took to keep the garden looking good. I told him he gets to spend this time outside, in a garden he and his wife both adored, that continues to provide joy to him and so many, offering moments of solace and staggering beauty every day—even on the days where the sun doesn’t come out, which in Manchester are many.

These reframes came up regularly with the REBOOT dads—a group who were all regular readers of the newsletter, which created an instant shorthand and shared set of values and beliefs. During our six months together, we witnessed regular, powerful, and plentiful shifts. Several dads arrived measuring success by salary and title. By the end, they’d shifted to different metrics entirely—control over their calendar, presence at the school gates, emotional well-being. One dad put it simply: his goal was no longer to be wealthier, but happier. Forty years of inherited scripts, actively being dismantled.

Shared realisations became inspiration for others: one dad committed to being “the friend who doesn’t talk about work” at social gatherings. Another realised that when friends wrote letters for his 40th birthday, not one mentioned his job: they wrote about his humour, his loyalty, and how he shows up when things get hard. We traced how the conflict styles we grew up with were still running as background processes in our own marriages. So many dads—myself amongst them—were raised witnessing a very typical relationship of the time: explosive fathers, avoidant mothers, no attempt at repair; destructive cycles that, without action, we are doomed to repeat, patterns echoed through generations. This time around, we get to end it.

I’m not offering a silver bullet. Those same questions you’re asking, I’m asking them too. I’m asking them here, through a few thousand words every week, thinking out loud in your inbox in the hope that it might illuminate a path for others. I’d be lying if I said I had all the answers. But I’ve finally stopped searching for them on my own.

Join the REBOOT Taster Session

The second REBOOT cohort starts on March 4th. Before then, I’m running a free taster workshop on Wednesday, February 11th at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 7 pm CET. I’ll walk through the program's core themes, share some tools you can use, and you can hear firsthand from dads who went through it last time.

I’ll leave the last words to one of them:

I am really benefiting from the meaningful thinking you encouraged me to do as part of the process. I’m able to connect what I’m doing to a sense of purpose and my core values. Most importantly, my work situation is allowing me to be fully active as a parent and husband. I think a big thing I’ve learned is that being engaged in making a meaningful life means nothing is ever solved, but I am enjoying that process a great deal now. Taking action, reflecting, refining. I look back on our work together as one of the more important and impactful things I’ve done.

RSVP Now

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

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My graduation day is fading into memory (big up Class of 2011). I know a fair few of you are expecting to graduate in the Class of 2026, so here’s author Simone Stolzoff with your commencement speech. Simone became a dad in 2025, a year in which he also managed to write his second book, How To Not Know. Talk about overachieving.

One of the most popular commencement speeches of all time was never actually spoken. In 1997, a Chicago Tribune journalist named Mary Schmich wrote a hypothetical commencement speech titled “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young.” It’s commonly referred to as the “Wear Sunscreen” speech, thanks, in part, to Baz Luhrmann, who turned it into a hit song.

What makes the speech memorable is the way Schmich combines practical advice—wear sunscreen, floss—with more philosophical advice—don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts; don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

I’m now nearly a year into the parenthood journey, and this is my attempt to write the Schmich-ian advice column that no one asked for. Here are my tips for new dads in the year 2026.

1. Keep mom’s water bottle full

This may seem like a strange note with which to start. Certainly, my role as a new father amounts to more than being a glorified water boy. And yet, keeping mom’s water bottle full has both practical and spiritual value. Practically, mom needs to stay hydrated, and when mom has 5 kilos of milk-guzzling flesh weighing her down, she doesn’t always have the capacity to fill her own proverbial cup.

The spiritual value is that, as a new dad, it’s not always easy to know what to do. As much as we progressive, modern men may aspire to some ideal of splitting the work 50/50, there are biological limitations to what we can contribute–especially in the early days. Looking for purpose, Padre? Keep that water bottle full.

2. Default to the opinion of whoever cares more

One of the tricky parts of becoming a new parent is that there are so many decisions. If you think the circumcision decision will be the last one worthy of a parliamentary-style debate, buckle up, Barrister! Every day and every phase of parenting is littered with dozens of choices to be made—some innocuous, like what your infant should wear, some with the potential for civil war (hellooooo sleep training).

One rule of thumb that was helpful for my wife and me (which I’m sure we plagiarized from an Instagram reel) was to default to the more risk-averse person’s preferences. If dad is worried about the baby being cold, just grab another jumper. If mom is worried about the little man riding on the back of dad’s e-bike before he turns one, give it a few more months. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be exceptions to this rule, but defaulting to the more risk-averse person, who also likely cares more, is a good rule of thumb.

3. Don’t try to make a happy kid happier

I love this rule. It’s the one I pass down most often to new dads. There’s a tendency to take a maximalist approach to parenting—when it comes to stuff, activities, developmental milestones, etc. But the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a cliché for a reason. I can’t tell you the number of times I tried to shove a new toy into the face of my smiley son, who was perfectly content playing with the wooden spatula, only to disrupt the chi of the moment and send him into DEFCON 1.

Parenting is filled with so many shoulds (the irony of writing this in an advice column is not lost on me), but I urge you, Pop, to let good things be good. Sure, there will be times when you’ll need to switch from three naps to two, or remove the dummy from her vice grip, but as a default, recognize when your kid is thriving. There’s no need to rock the boat.

4. Get backup(s)

I forgot which wise elder told me to get two copies of your kid’s favorite stuffy, but they’re a freakin’ genius. The “get a backup” logic extends to so many aspects of parenting. For months, my wife and I bemoaned the Sisyphean task of washing pump parts, but in a stroke of divine inspiration, we decided to order an additional two sets!

Perhaps there is no place where this logic is better served than on the changing table. Sure, there are changing pad covers, but if you put down a disposable mat (affectionally called a puppy pee mat) on top of your sheet, your future self will thank you. There are no trophies for doing parenting on hard mode.

5. If you never get out of shape, you never have to get back into shape

Ah, the dad bod—the stuff of legends and lore. The cold truth is that you’re probably not going to have time for your hour-and-a-half gym sessions, or your luxurious games of golf and padel once the kiddo arrives, but that doesn’t mean you have to resign to the beer-belly lifestyle. James Clear, the godfather of good habits, says when life gets crazy, “reduce the scope but stick to the schedule.”

Exercise is going to be harder to come by, but whether it’s a long walk while your daughter sleeps in the stroller or ten minutes of calisthenics before dinner, maintaining a movement practice will do wonders for your physical and mental health. I think it was Sir Isaac Newton who said, “A dad out of motion, stays out of motion.” Remember: if you never get (too badly) out of shape, you never have to get back into shape.

6. Magnets over buttons

Before you become a dad, there’s no way of knowing how many hours you’ll waste trying to fasten a small metal stud into a .5-centimeter button socket. In your lowest moments, you’ll spend the wee hours of the morning cursing the clothing designer who decided a 3-month-old’s pajamas require 12 buttons between the ankle and the inseam. Then, some all-knowing aunt will gift you a magnetic onesie that seems to magically fasten itself, and your life will never be the same.

The mantra of magnets over buttons extends to any hack, tool, or garment you and your partner discover that makes your life easier. Velcro swaddles? Shoelace-free shoes? Baby wipe warmers? There’s no shame in this game. Find what works for your family, and let the good things be good. No one is judging if your kid rotates between the same three outfits for months on end.

7. Do something each week for you and your relationship

The moment your kid arrives, you and your partner go from being lovers to startup cofounders. It’s very easy to start treating the person you vowed to love as long as you both shall live like classmates on a high school group project. Make sure you carve out some time in your week to relate to your spouse as a partner rather than as a colleague.

Sure, you’ll get the advice to schedule a weekly date night or to hire a sitter so you can go on a Saturday morning walk. Nice work if you can get it. The more important thing is that you have facets of your life where you can relate to the world as more than just a dad. Perhaps it’s taking 15 minutes to play a game of backgammon while your kid is napping or an hour on Sunday when you can go back to your favorite boxing gym. It’s important not to let “dad” subsume your entire identity.

8. Don’t confuse uncertainty with incompetence

There was a moment I’ll never forget from when my son was nearly five and a half months old. I had just convinced my wife to give sleep training a try. It was 9:37 p.m., a mere two hours into our first night, and my son started screaming bloody murder. In that moment, all the logical arguments I had made a few hours earlier about the value of holding a firm boundary and allowing him to self-soothe melted away. My boy was wailing, and I had no idea what the hell to do.

The first year of parenting was filled with many moments like these. You can feel doubt, terror, awe, grief for your old life, and fierce love all in the same hour. Not knowing what to do doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re in a role where the feedback is ambiguous and there is no user manual. Feeling uncertain and persisting nonetheless is perhaps thedefining characteristic of fatherhood. It’s also part of what makes the journey so meaningful, transformative, and fun.

Wander on, Daddio. I’m right there with you.

You can pre-order Simone’s new book, How To Not Know and get an invitation to an exclusive Q&A with Michael Lewis(!). And go sign up for his excellent newsletter, The Article Book Club.

3 things to read this week

1. “It’s Not Normal to Raise Children Like This” by Louise Perry in The New York Times. We had the in-laws stay with us for 10 days over Christmas, and it was lovely. My father-in-law constantly played football with my son, and my mother-in-law cooked delicious Gujarati food. With so many of us living in different cities, countries, and even continents from our families, we’re parenting without the support networks that have existed for generations. This piece examines the paradox at the heart of modern parenthood: we long for a village-style community, but have no idea how to build it.

2. “Grandparenting on Eggshells” by Rheana Murray in The Atlantic. The other side of the coin: when grandparents are around, navigating the generational divide in parenting approaches can be its own minefield. This article dives into parents who are teaching kids that they “don’t owe anyone physical affection, and that they have the right to say no”, and how this is causing friction with grandparents who grew up with different norms.

3. “Parents Are Going Broke From Their Kids’ Sushi Obsession” by Chavie Lieber in The Wall Street Journal. Hard-hitting journalism as a mother of two goes deep undercover, listening to parents rue the day they introduced their kids to sushi. Parenting pro tip: I blew almost two whole euros on a plastic onigiri maker at the end of last year, and the kids have been going crazy for them. Stuff them full of tinned tuna and Kewpie mayo—simple to make and fun to eat.

Good Dadvice

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It’s normally around December 29th when my brain starts putting what must be the coldest line in the Christmas canon on repeat: “And mum and dad can hardly wait for school to start again.” I started writing this essay on Thursday, 8th January, the first day my kids were back in school. The night before, the feeling of butterflies in my belly felt familiar to how I felt on Christmas Eve decades earlier. Friends in the UK and Amsterdam were patiently waiting for this day to arrive, only to be hit with the rare first day back is a snow day: schools closed, children stubbornly stuck at home; unexpected afternoons hurtling down hills on makeshift sledges, flashes of colour flying through the white, an L.S. Lowry painting brought to life.

It’s not that Christmas is the problem. It’s the fact that it keeps going. The closing of the calendar is an intense period when we are expected—politely, relentlessly—to put in a double-duty parenting shift. It takes its toll; some make it to the other side in better shape than others. A cautionary Christmas tale: on a dark and snowy School Eve, the day before children across the United States were due to return to school, we see a father sitting with his smartphone in hand. This man, feeling destroyed, dejected and despondent—as so many of us did on that final day—decides not to ponder on the best way to navigate it next year, or to send a message to a group of small friends and say “we’re almost there,” or to take it as a chance to practice gratitude and look back on sweet memories and milestones during those cold days and nights. Instead, this man decides to tweet to the world, asking, “Am I a monster?” because “[when] I have to watch [my kids] for more than about 10 minutes, my blood starts to boil. I just want to be working, or accomplishing something.”

Fallen at the final hurdle, a missed tap-in from five yards, a goal-line fumble—whatever sport metaphor you want to reach for will work. The kids’ backpacks are packed, their uniforms laid out—you’re so close, and then you become today’s main character. As you’d expect, the pile-on was instantaneous. Folks told him, “Your wife and children deserve better,” “You blame society while your four-year-old goes unloved,” or “Evolution was supposed to get rid of losers like you.” One account posted a quote from a 19th-century Portuguese poet, informing him, “There’s something vile in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.” Others dug up red flags from his timeline. And the obligatory memes came thick and fast. A reminder, yet again, to never tweet.

To answer his question: Is he a monster? For what it’s worth, I don’t think so. He was being honest and genuinely curious about why he didn’t feel the way he’d witnessed other dads did about their kids. However, his articulation—and the telltale sign that his children are an impediment to “accomplishing something”—feels like a clear indication that his values and priorities are misaligned with those of today’s father.

It was easier to be a dad back then: required by your family and society-at-large to work first and parent second (or, given his lengthy reply, much lower in the list of priorities). But those dads who continue to play by the old rules end up hating the modern game. When we view time with our children and their “insatiable desire to play” (his words, again) as a messy distraction that pulls us away from achieving other, seemingly more important goals, you will always see your kids as a side quest rather than a key thrust of the main narrative. It’s not that your life story needs to be completely two-dimensional—I’m thinking of a branching CD Projekt RED game here, rather than the more singular, revenge-focused Ghost of Yotei—but we should work to ensure the strands of our life carry equal weight, even if they can’t get equal airtime.

Popular opinion might differ, but I do believe there are still places to be vulnerable online. I hope this newsletter and the comments are among them. And I know our community Dadscord is a place to come together with other dads asking big, hairy, existential questions, to share their greatest dreams and darkest fears. These places exist. But the website formerly known as Twitter, in the year two thousand and twenty-six, is certainly not one of them.

Time Carries On, Never-Ending

Christmas is a time—as William DeVaughn once smoothly sang, and Massive Attack echoed—to be thankful for what you got. This year, two stone-cold Christmas classics confirmed it. I watched The Muppet Christmas Carol with my son for the first time, and marvelled as it blew his mind just as it had my own decades earlier. Time hasn’t hurt this movie, especially in a world where AI slop feels to be pouring in from every open crevice: there was a sweet relief to be in the hands of actual craftspeople—puppeteers, singers, set builders—doing the real thing.

Later, without the kids, I watched It’s A Wonderful Life (itself another spin on Dickens’ foundational festive text). My mum always told me this was her favourite Christmas movie, but as a kid, it felt like a three-hour black-and-white endurance test. But as an adult, it feels like a corrective lens. George Bailey can’t see the shape of his life while he’s living it. The movie’s message is as powerful today as it ever was: if you have everything you once wanted, and it still feels like you’re failing, maybe the scoreboard you’re using is the wrong one.

If you’ve had a relatively successful career, you might have seen your salary jump to a level as a 40-year-old that would have left the 20-year-old-you dumbstruck. You may have the life you once wanted—in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife—but the modern world will do everything in its power to keep you on the hedonic treadmill. Thanks to hopefully accurate statistics—based on all those cookies your phone keeps eating and regurgitating to my dashboard—I can assume two-thirds of you are reading this on a smartphone. I like to think the screen time you choose to spend here, and not doomscrolling through social media feeds designed to give you FOMO, or broadcasting to the world how much you hate playing with your kids, feels well spent.

The device in your hand is more than a machine for inhaling the world and exhaling yourself into it. If you’re a new-ish dad, here’s something I’ve learned: your phone is a piece of witchcraft, a spell of unfathomable power. It is a time machine. But there’s just one catch. You must abandon your twee Marty McFly dreams—and that interminable wait for a Marvel hoverboard that should have arrived 3,740 days ago—because this device can only go backwards. It provides, just like Don Draper’s infamous Kodak pitch, “a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone … that takes us to a place that we ache to go again … to a place where we know we were loved.”

My kids are now back at school. I can finally think again—sufficient windows of time when their attention is focused elsewhere, and I can write, think and do once more. They’ve brought home their first projects for 2026: my son, at six, almost managed to get the class to agree on “chocolate” as their focus, but was pipped at the post by a very strong “Egypt” voting block. He came home devastated, until I started to share stories I knew about the ancient Egyptians, their pyramids, hieroglyphics and their love of cats. My daughter came back and informed me that her first project is on the reproductive system, and her homework is to prepare a presentation about her birth. My wife and I rattled through what we could offer: our memories of the day, a birthing plan that sits in Google Docs with an inception date of 2014. But the killer blow came when I opened Google Photos, typed in the month of her birth, handed it over to her, and we all piled into the digital DeLorean for a trip back in time: to the days before, during, and after she was born.

Her project, combined with limitless cloud storage (available for a small monthly fee), offered me the chance to talk to her about the day I became a father. As we scrolled through the first minutes, hours and days of her life—the midwife that helped deliver her, visits from friends and family, a kitchen renovation nowhere near completed, the first time my mother held her—I was filled with an overwhelming sense of bliss. In a moment like this, the idea that my daughter has robbed me of a life of productivity, success and achievement is the furthest thing from my mind.

Has fatherhood made my life easier? Absolutely not. But has it introduced me to a breadth and depth in worldview and emotional capacity that would have been nigh-on impossible to achieve otherwise? Based on a tweet that kicked all of this off—a feeling I suspect this man didn’t experience solely, even if he was reckless enough to share it online—this isn’t the case for every dad.

But I can safely state that it is 100% true for me.

Do I Really Look Like A Guy With A Plan?

A few days ago, I celebrated my 43rd rotation around the sun. My body aches. The lines on my forehead signal to anyone with a passing interest that I’m well into my fifth decade on this earth. (At a Christmas party, an eight-year-old son of a friend asked me about the “cool scar” on my forehead and after a beat, I realised he was talking about one of the two diagonal frown lines that seem to have taken root on my forehead over the last few years.)

The goal this year is clear. The book is done. This year won’t be easy, but I hope I can spend it reaping what I spent last year sowing. Instead of entering the year with goals, I’m trying to come into it thinking about mindset. Last year, between writing a book and managing a nightmare client, there were times I can clearly point to when I dropped the ball as a dad. Many times, I lost my shit with my kids in order to be left alone; ironically, to focus on writing a book about being a better dad, whilst my kids were on the other side of the door, feeling like I wasn’t doing a great job. For 2026, I’m abandoning former annual traditions of end-of-year wrap-ups, goal-setting, or setting an intention for the year—resisting the very male urge to view the changing of the year with the same energy that drove the performative perf cycles in my former life. The immovable date of May 12th approaches. Soon, you will be able to hold in your hands (or listen with your ears) to the 80,000 words that almost destroyed me last year. I can hardly wait.

Whilst I’m taking a swerve around the performance review mentality of January, there’s one thing that is harder to shake: the feeling that once again, in what will be my eighth year working for myself outside of the security of a a regular monthly paycheck, I am embarking on Operation Pull Rabbit Out of Hat—attempting to provide for my family via the means of strangers on the internet. So, if you enjoy this newsletter, please consider investing in the following products and services:

• Pre-order the book. I’m still sitting on some pre-order badges, so if you’re planning on buying the book and would like a gorgeous heart-shaped badge, now’s your time. Order on Amazon, or support your local bookseller on Bookshop.org, fill out this form, and I’ll send your badge near the launch date.

• One-to-one coaching. If you’ve decided 2026 is the year that you want to make big changes in your life—at home, at work, anywhere and everywhere in between—or to find more joy and fulfilment in the life you have, this could be the year we work together. Find out more here.

• REBOOT, a group coaching program for dads. This March, we’ll be kicking off the next cohort of REBOOT. Last year, six dads came together for six months to radically rethink the most important relationships in their lives: with their work, friends, families, and themselves. Applications are now open for the second cohort. Here’s what Sam, a dad from the first group, said about the experience:

I was hesitant to join REBOOT because I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to get out of it. I felt like I needed to go into it with defined goals and an expectation for what I would achieve by the end. I’m glad I didn’t wait. At the beginning of REBOOT, we set goals for the program and over the next 6 months, I worked one-on-one with Kevin—and with the other dads—digging into the “why” behind each of my goals. Through that journey, I ended up somewhere I hadn’t expected, with more clarity in how I define a successful life and where to seek fulfilment. Kevin’s thoughtful, probing questions during our weekly meetings forced me to think more deeply about work, life, and family, and how to seek balance across each.

There are also other ways you can help keep the lights on in my house and baked beans on my childrens’ toast:

• Sponsor the podcast: Next month, The New Fatherhood podcast returns. This time around, I’m delighted to be working with Elizabeth Van Brocklin, an Emmy-nominated journalist and award-winning long-form audio producer, and we can’t wait to unwrap what we’ve been working on. A niche ask, but surely relevant to some of you: founders, PR agencies or marketing teams interested in the very first advertising placements TNF has offered. Interested? Read our partnership pack here.

• TedOS: a Notion playbook for dads-to-be. If a new baby is on the cards in 2026, whether the first or your nth, and you’re looking for a way to take on your fair share in getting ready, or a tool to manage everything you need to buy, know and do before the imminent arrival, then can I interest you in The Expectant Dad Operating System? TedOS is a Notion-based dashboard to help dads-to-be with everything they need to prepare to welcome a tiny human into their lives.

• Get involved in a dad community. If one thing on your 2026 to-do list is getting more dads in your life, I can suggest two options. The first is free: join a local Dadurdays community. I can’t guarantee you’ll be in one of the 27 locations covered, but if you live in a fairly big US city, then there’s a decent chance. Secondly, consider becoming a paid subscriber and hanging out in the Dadscord. Example chats this week have included heady highs as which tea bag is best (insider trading-level knowledge for US dads), how to keep yourself accountable for health and fitness goals, and the trials of buying a better vacuum (that one was from #dull-club, fast becoming my favourite channel). Join the Dadscord today.

Multi-pronged sales pitch over. Thanks for sticking through it.

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

That was a rather long one. Kicking off the writing cobwebs. How was it for you?

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It’s December, and it’s not just the presents that are getting wrapped.

Companies desperate for their own “Spotify moment” are undertaking the great wrapping. I’ve already had my YouTube Recap, which accurately captured how much my kids and I adored the 19th series of Taskmaster, but in no way reflected the many hours I’ve spent watching Stardew Valley videos with my daughter, as building a profitable farm became our new obsession this year. Soundcloud’s 2025 Playback told me just how many writing sessions were soundtracked with five hours in paradise with Floating Points. SNL cracked a joke on the overwhelming shame of seeing your Uber Eats wrapped; it turned out Uber had already built it, and revealed it two days later.

Even the business apps are at it. Raycast, a Mac productivity app, provided me with earth-shattering insights like the fact that I opened my clipboard history 973 times this year. If I get my head down, I might hit 1000 before the end of this essay. Granola, a note-taking app I use (and adore), sits in the background of my computer, turning itself on whenever it detects I’ve joined a meeting, and using AI to merge my notes with what it hears. For those like me who find themselves “memory challenged,” it’s a game-changer, and their end-of-year wrap-up claimed my most used phrase of 2025 was “Jump out of the plane and assemble the parachute on the way down,” which I’m sad to report is painfully accurate.

Rather than weaponising the terabytes of data these companies are amassing, we are witnessing the algorithms toying with us: scrapbooking what we watch, listen to, and talk about; sugarcoating surveillance into bite-sized snacks and packaging them up in aesthetically pleasing formats, perfect for sharing with your nearest and dearest. Roll the clock back a few years, and folks were apoplectic about the swarms of data that Google and Facebook were collecting. Now, we share these proof points with pride, markers of our unique and enviable taste.

Another end-of-year trend spreading faster than an influenza outbreak is the humble gift guide, an essential cog in the capitalist Christmas machine. The gift guide holds together an industry too big to fail; when publishers ruled the earth, it was a non-negotiable notch on the calendar, a chance to drive serious traffic and a hefty festive sack of affiliate money. With the arse having almost entirely fallen out of the advertising market for anyone whose name isn’t Google or Meta, publishers large and small have come to depend on the single-digit share that Amazon offers for sales referrals. Buzzfeed’s 2024 10-K (their annual report to the SEC, think of it as a Spotify Wrapped for how much money they no longer make) showed affiliate revenue bringing in $59.6m for the year, with approximately 30% of their entire earnings coming directly from Amazon’s deep affiliate pockets.

If my inbox is anything to go by, these economic headwinds have been trickling down to newsletter writers, who are looking to the gift guide as a potential revenue stream to offset declining reader income amid subscription fatigue. Some are genuinely helpful: The Kids Should See This has been publishing its guide longer than I’ve been writing this newsletter, and the 2025 edition is as good as ever. But it’s hard to vibe with some that have been rolling in over the last few weeks. Do I need yet another recommendation for a pair of Apple AirPod Pros?1 But what guide writer can resist recommending it, knowing that each sale will net them $7.47 in the new year, when Bezos’ bean-counting elves get back from their Christmas holidays. (Who are we kidding, as if they get time off.)

2025 has been a tough year for so many. Politics, war, and inflation that drove the price of everything up—apart from salaries. Another list with more ways to spend money felt a little off, so I jumped into the Dadscord and asked if folks had any good ideas for presents that cost nothing.

So, without further ado, and to wrap up the year, here’s our anti-gift guide.

9 presents for your kids that cost absolutely nothing but your time

1. Visit a Fire Station

There are very few ways my early years could be perceived as privileged, but as the son of a construction worker, I had constant access to a steady stream of heavy trucks and excavators. When my son was a toddler, his obsession was fire engines, and we’d regularly stop on the street to marvel at them when they were parked. We discovered a local fire station that offered “open days” on the weekends, where kids can come along, sit in the truck, and live their wildest fantasy. There’s probably one near you that does the same. Get a trip on the cards for January.

2. Create an Annual Pass to a Home Cinema Club

Earlier this year, I was explaining to the kids what life was like before Netflix. Every Friday night, a man used to come around in a black van with no windows and invite us to come inside. We’d walk up the stairs and be presented with a hundred-or-so VHS cassettes, with my mum telling me we could pick one for the week. It was to a six-year-old what the Criterion Closet is to a fully functioning adult.

Today, your kids don’t need to climb into a stranger’s van to watch a movie: thousands of them are a click away. Movie night has become a cherished Friday night ritual in our home—phones are placed far away, as we curl up on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn. If you wanted to take this to the next level, consider giving your kids an annual pass to your home cinema: one film a week, a hand-drawn poster, and a house rule that once the tickets are printed, there are no last-minute negotiations. Full disclosure: I stole this one wholesale from TikTok, from a lovely Irish lady called Kelly, who says, “It’s cheaper than going to a real cinema, and we don’t have to sneak around snacks in. To be totally honest, this is because I can’t bear us arguing over what film we’re going to watch every week.”

3. Make A Big Fat Christmas Quiz

Bring a bit of light entertainment to Christmas Day with an end-of-year quiz: Make it big, make it silly, and make sure there’s a round where the kids finally get to watch the adults panic. Five minutes of prep, maximum: a “guess the baby photo” round, a “guess the song intro” round, a “who said it this year” round, and one round that is purely you showing them a zoomed-in picture of something in your house and asking them what it is.

4. Plant An Acorn

What could be more poignant than watching a giant tree grow in the shadow of your own offspring? This likely only works if you own your house and plan to be there for a while (so it might stealthily be the most expensive item on the list). A lovely idea from Keith, who shared: “Pick an acorn, plant it together. Nurture it and watch it grow with them.”

5. Kick Off a Lifetime Love of Tabletop RPGs

Raise your kids right, and get them into tabletop gaming this Christmas. Eric shared, “This year I’m giving the kids a zine of a ttrpg I cobbled together called ‘Ninjas of Brooklyn’ based on a bedtime story we’ve been telling together for a few months. I kinda used the concepts behind Archipelago, then I introduced a game called Colour My Quest, which has served us well.”

Jon concurred, and had done something similar with his son: a free, printable RPG called RPage, which “worked really well with him playing and me guiding. For a very light alternative, we will often play with his knights and castles using dice-based turns—essentially, say what you want to happen, and if you roll more than 10 on a D20, you succeed.”

5. Start a Gratitude Jar

We started this practice last year: every week or so, when we sit down for dinner, we take small strips of paper and write what we were grateful for that week. It’s a deceptively simple practice that makes time feel visible and couldn’t be easier: keep a jar and a pen where everyone can reach them. On New Year’s Eve (or the first gloomy week of January when you need a serotonin hit), you empty the jar onto the table and read them out loud. It’s a homemade highlight reel.

6. Give Them Vouchers for a “Dad Date”

Your kids don’t need more stuff. Money is great, but they want the two resources even harder to come by: your time and undivided attention. So give it to them, with a monthly “dad date” voucher. Either pick out activities that you know they’d enjoy, or make it an open offer: “One morning together, once a month, and we do whatever you want.”

7. Plan an Urban Fruit Picking Trip

Falling Fruit is an excellent open-source mapping site for finding fruit trees near you. This site will tell you the type of fruit and tree, the yield, and what seasons are best to go picking. Dadscord dad Tom said he was mulling over “making a map of publicly accessible fruit trees in my local area … and styling it up to look like a treasure map and a quest to find the most types of fruit—I already know we have a kiwi tree, fig tree and passion fruit bush in our otherwise nondescript area.”

8. Check Your Rewards Cards

From Pete: “Check your REI co-op or other rewards balances. I had $18 in rewards that were about to expire. Free stocking stuffers ftw.” Also worth checking out are grocery store cards and any credit card schemes that might have a few thousand points stashed away, which could mean getting all kinds of perks for free. The digital equivalent of finding coins down the back of the sofa.

9. Get Free Museum and Gallery Tickets from the Library

Another one from Pete: “Our public library has free passes to local attractions like the science museum and nature centre. You reserve them in advance, and you’re good to go.” This sounded too good to be true, but after a bit of digging, it turns out to be a widespread practice across the US. In some locations, this is branded: New York residents can use their library cards to access a Culture Pass with free access to more than 100 locations in the city, and similar schemes exist in Seattle, Boston, and across California.

To find similar schemes near you, Google: your town/city + public library + museum pass and see what comes up. If that doesn’t work, go retro and call your local library. These programmes aren’t well-promoted, but your friendly neighbourhood librarian will be able to tell you what kinds of goodies your card can unlock.

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An annual festive bumper pack.

That’s All Folks!

Thanks for reading The New Fatherhood this year. Your 2025 TNF Wrapped: this year, you received 31 issues of a so-called weekly newsletter, and if you’re reading this, you’re in the 1% of my favourite readers (don’t tell the rest of them).

Thank you to paid subscribers, who keep the lights on here and ensure the newsletter stays free and unpaywalled for everyone else, and to all the dads who have written a guest essay this year, keeping things rolling whilst I got the book over the line. And a very special thank you to the Dadscord crew, who continue to show up for each other in all kinds of wonderful ways, and make essays like this one possible: papa-powered, sleep-deprived and AI-free.

How did you like the newsletter today? How was TNF this year? Feel free to leave me a year-end review! I read all the notes you send, and they’re 100% anonymous, so be as brutally honest as you like.

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Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals. Have a good one. See you in 2026.

Have had my hands full the last few weeks, with little exciting to report from it: on the frontline of the flu epidemic that is tearing its way across Europe, with around half of both kids’ classes off sick at the moment, and a particularly challenging work project that has swallowed up all the time and headspace normally reserved for the newsletter. Happy to hand over this week to Shihab S Joi, writer of the Fallen Muslim newsletter, who you may remember from an essay on battling bad dad blues last year. We met up recently and ended up talking about fatherhood in Stephen King’s work—a writer I am familiar with from many movie adaptations, but a stranger to on the printed page. He professed his status as a King superfan, so I asked if he’d be interested in writing an essay for the newsletter. I was delighted when he said yes.

“Get the first flight out to London if you want to say goodbye to your father.”

The doctor unreliably informed me that my father had suffered a stroke that led to a haematoma, with brain damage and paralysis now inevitable (spoiler: he’s now back on his feet, calling me fat and bemoaning my failure to live out his weirdly specific desire for me to become a BBC newsreader). As I sat in that hospital room reading to him from the Qur’an (feeling quite the miracle worker like John Coffey in The Green Mile when Dad snapped out of his stupor with the word “ameen” as I finished reciting a verse), my mind kept harking back to the only other time in my life I’d read to him.

It’s not a sweet memory. But as is the nature of recollections regarding someone at death’s door, I romanticised it. Had I been plonked into an episode of Desert Island Discs at that point, I’d have cued up “Father and Son” by Cat Stevens while saying something like, “I remember when I was 10 years old, sat on the veranda of our home in Rampura, Bangladesh, and my father asked me to read to him from my favourite Stephen King book.” What really happened, as with all good King novels, came layered with issues.

A visiting uncle from England had left behind his copy of Salem’s Lot, and my father was most amused to find me behind it. “I thought you only read comics,” he scoffed. He wasn’t wrong. My wishlist from my travelling cousins in England comprised entirely of Spider-Man, Beano and Tintin. My older brother had volumes of Tolstoy and Poe on the shelf, but I could barely hold those giant hardback anthologies in my feeble grasp, let alone hope to understand a word. But this book I loved. The blood and gore. Life after death. The spiritual rot and crisis of faith. I’m glamorising in hindsight, of course—at the time I mostly thought it was brilliant because our family name is Salim and well, this was my lot.

There followed a reading and comprehension test. To correct my pronunciation. To verify I understood the words I was reading—I still don’t know the Bengali word for ‘haphazard’. We even bonded for a second in our mutual failure to comprehend King’s description of a grasshopper “jumping in erratic parabolas.” But then I went and spoiled it all by saying something stupid like, “What’s cool is there are three types of vampires in this book. It’s kind of like the three types of Jinns in the Qur’an, don’t you think?”

Jinns, being practically demons, hold a strange reverence for Muslims. But my father couldn’t abide by the idea that some two-bit horror writer he’d never heard of could be comparable in any way to the words of the Qur’an, so that paid rest to any further theological discussion. He flicked through the book, the word goddamn jumped out at him—I swear by some evil sorcery—whereupon he decided I could only continue once my older brother deemed it appropriate reading. I hated both of them for that.

But in that hospital chair, nursing the memory from decades earlier, I could only focus on how proud he’d looked as I read it out loud. If I could frame all the moments my father displayed pride towards me, it’d be a pretty bare gallery.

King’s dads are never simple caricatures of evil men. Take arguably the baddest daddy of them all—Jack Torrance in The Shining. King famously loathed Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation because it stripped Torrance of all his humanity. We meet Jack Nicholson’s version as a cold, already-unhinged man predestined to go axe-mad, revealing almost no inner conflict, remorse, or love for his family. In the book, Torrance is an alcoholic desperately clawing his way toward recovery, who genuinely loves his son, Danny. He’s haunted by shame and by the fear of becoming his own violent father. We’re meant to feel sorry for him.

In all the many heart-to-hearts I’ve had with friends and exes about their fathers—be they abusive, absent or straightforward neglectful—there’s always space in their narrative to explain his actions. “He had a bad childhood himself.” “He was from a generation where parents didn’t know how to talk to kids.” “There’s good in him.” “He loved me in his own way.” Or the classic, “He did the best he could.” It doesn’t forgive them, but it does garner pity. One necessary for those of us who’ve been through it to realise we weren’t unloved through any fault of our own, but due to his fragile masculinity.

Bad dads in King’s books range from drunken losers to sadistic bastards (and quite often both). Their children live in terror or resentment, the desperation to gain their father’s validation, if not love, forever bubbling beneath the surface. Take poor Teddy in The Body (most will know it as its movie adaptation, Stand By Me). His father, a WWII veteran suffering PTSD, once held Teddy’s ear to a hot stove to leave it “pretty much melted”, yet Teddy’s loyalty to his dad remains painfully deep —he insists his father is a hero, even though everyone else in town sees him as a dangerous headcase. Or Donald Elbert, aka Trashcan Man in The Stand, whose father lays out a selection of implements and forces him to choose what he’ll be beaten with. Trashcan Man picks the ball-peen hammer, his internal logic as a child believing that choosing the hardest weapon will somehow earn him his old man’s respect. And that’s before King delves into the disturbing arena of controlling sexual abuse, experienced by Jessie Burlingame in Gerald’s Game, Selena St George in Dolores Claiborne and, for those who know King better through the movies, Beverly Marsh in IT.

All of which does leave one thinking: well, my dad wasn’t as bad as that! I suffer from an affliction that’s a version of imposter syndrome, but given that term has a very definite meaning, I’ve updated mine to “tragic upbringing syndrome,” whereby I feel my tales of fatherhood neglect are tame, affected even, especially compared to the stories of abuse I heard in my junkie years from heroin addicts coping with childhood trauma. The only time Dad laid a finger on me—a foot to the arse, to be precise—was one time I was being a prick to my mother. What’s difficult to comprehend is how this made me act out against my mother even more. I can only assume in the hope he’d strike me again so I could enact whatever revenge fantasy I had brewing, but he never bothered with me after that. All I achieved there was to make my mother sad.

When I think of my father’s neglect, the scene that replays on a loop is the empty chair in the front row I’d reserve during my many stage performances. Even though there weren’t any ball-peen hammers involved, it still lands hard. My father was never a King villain—more a side character who wandered in every few chapters, said something hurtful, then disappeared without noticing the scar he left behind. His programming came from his own father: if you praise children, you will spoil them. Instead, tell them how their best effort could always do with being better (never, of course, realising that’s read as: “you’re not good enough, son”). Many King kids aren’t afraid of ghosts as much as they are afraid of their dads’ disappointment, rage, or indifference.

At the risk of looking back through prose-tinted spectacles, I daresay as a child I preferred being shouted at than being ignored. Those instances gave me a connection I craved, regardless of how poorly they were conducted. Silence is a huge King theme. It’s not only what you hoped your father said—“I’m proud of you,” “I’m sorry”—or what you wish you could say to him—“I need you,” “I’m scared”—but what’s left unsaid in the name of secrecy that speaks volumes. In Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game, the secrets the kids hold onto grow into the demons that consume them in adulthood. There are many instances in The Shining where you wish Torrance would just let Danny know what he went through with his own father, to share the truth behind why he broke his son’s arm, which only makes Danny withdraw, keeping his powers a secret from his dad—not out of disrespect, the way Torrance reads it, but out of instinct: silence as self-protection.

But King also gives us fathers who want to do the right thing and fall short anyway. Louis Creed in Pet Sematary, trying to undo grief through sinister voodoo. Eddie Kaspbrak’s stepfather in IT, over-controlling him in the name of protection. Others are cast as father figures, as we see with Ted Brautigan slipping into the role so tenderly to fill the absence of Bobby’s dad in Hearts in Atlantis. For those of us who needed a Ted in our lives, it echoed those times we saw fathers of friends or movie dads like Steve Martin and wished, “Why can’t mine be as easy-going, understanding and fun as him?” King helped me recognise my father’s emotional incapacity without turning it into a moral failure. That not all bad dads are malevolent, merely that they are under-resourced and unevolved. Our fathers didn’t know better. We do.

There came a point, without me realising until much later, when I no longer needed my father. To show me affection. Look after me. Ask me how I am. Much like King’s kids, I got by thanks to my chosen family—not my biological one. King repeatedly shows how children can stay strong when someone stands by them—The Body and IT being the obvious examples, but as you can also see in the recent adaptation of The Long Walk. For all Jack Torrance’s torturous struggles in trying to be a good dad, Danny’s real father figure was Dick Halloran, the humble cook who helped the young boy (literally) shine. In my teenage rage years, where I regularly fought with my father in the mistaken belief I could change his mind, older relatives would tell me I ought to be grateful to the man. Had he not brought me to England, I wouldn’t be this spoilt posh school-educated upstart. Part of that was true: were it not for my private education, it’s unlikely that I, a boy who left Bangladesh at the age of 13, should have such a Victorian carriage-trade timbre to my accent, or slip on the technicolour western dreamcoat with such ease. For these things, I don’t credit my father, but my drama teacher. My English teacher. And much like God, ones I’d never met yet were always present. There for me. David Bowie. The Prodigy. Stephen King. They were my Hallorans.

Since his near-death experience, my father has become softer in a way. He no longer answers the question he asked me before I can open my mouth, only to vehemently disagree with the response of his own construct. Now he actually listens. Turns out there’s not much that matters that I need him to know anymore. It’s nice that we finally have a dialogue going, but we’ll always be on different ships, with navigation maps that don’t match.

If I had to put a date on when I began to forgive my father, it’d be around the time my third child was born. I suddenly saw him for what he was: an old man set in his ways. All those years I’d spent wanting him to change seemed pointless, unkind even. What good would it do me to make a man in his twilight years realise he’d got it wrong his whole life? It was around then I’d have read King’s Doctor Sleep. There’s no fitting way to wrap this up than with the book where Danny Torrance grows up to face his biggest demon—his father Jack. We meet Dan as much of an alcoholic as Jack, until he reconciles his issues with the ghost of his father, gets sober, breaks the cycle, and becomes the man Jack couldn’t be. That’s the forgiveness.

I’m ashamed to admit Doctor Sleep was the last King book I read through fully—perhaps, as a man ages, his need for role models lessens when he himself becomes one. This hit home during an exchange between me and my son, after I worried I might not be giving him his due attention, after a new child had entered the picture.

“Hey, how about I order a basketball glove and a ball so we can play catch in the back yard?” I suggested, channelling the trope of the Norman Rockwell father tossing a baseball to his grinning son that you’ll never find in a Stephen King book, only you just knew that’s the interaction those kids dreamed of.

“Sounds boring,” came the response. “Why do you want us to do that?”

“So we can, you know,” I said sheepishly. “Bond.”

“We’re doing that now, aren’t we?” he asked, blowing my brains out for the umpteenth time in Halo.

What can I say? Turns out “the best I could do” really was good enough.

3 things to read this week

1. “Get Your Kid A Watch” by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic. It’s that time of year when your older children might well be asking for their first phone. If I’m catching you on the cusp on making a decision (and one that you really won’t be able to go back on) I’d implore you to take a few minutes to read this take on why the smartwatch is a better path forward than the smartphone, with the writer sharing that “with devices on our daughters’ wrists, our children feel a part of the world of portable, personal technology, even as the devices offer them just modest access to that world. They’re connected, but also free of the social-media posting and scrolling that is the real cause of anxiety about kids and phones.”

2. “Pity the Eighth Grade Parents” by Kera Bolonik in New York Magazine. And I thought getting kids into a good kindergarten was tough. This is a brutally clear-eyed tour of New York City’s public high-school application maze—hundreds of schools, dozens of admissions pathways, lottery numbers, grade cut-offs, tours, essays, auditions—and how it quietly rewards parents who have the time, know-how, and money to navigate it. One mum describes it as “trying to explain what an anxiety attack feels like with someone who has never had one before,” and the piece is full of those stomach-dropping moments that make you grateful for any system that’s simpler, fairer, or at least more humane.

3. “Examining the Only Child Stereotype” by Amanda Ruggeri in New Scientist. A right-to-reply from the TNF mailbox, as journalist and newsletter subscriber Amanda Ruggeri shared a response to last month’s essay on having a second child. Amanda rightly pointed out that “while the idea that siblings will be friends forever is lovely, and while it certainly can work out that way, you just have to survey a small sample of families to find that this very often isn’t the case, that siblings can be one another’s first bullies [and] research-wise, there’s no good data that the existence of siblings makes children feel less lonely, either in childhood or as adults.” Grateful that this newsletter is being read by great writers who are much closer to the data than I am, and can take the time to reply to keep us all well-informed.

A fresh Good Dads Club drop

Just in time for Christmas: a new set of goodies for Good Dads Club, our clothing collaboration with Far Afield. These garments are now manufactured in Portugal and this time include a grey sweatshirt to get you through that long, cold winter, whilst proudly flying your dad flag. As ever, all profits go to The New Fatherhood Therapy Fund, helping dads across the world get on-tap access to mental health support.

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One more newsletter until Christmas. Time to get the Vince Guaraldi Trio on repeat!

Since my son was born, I can’t help but cry at a movie.

I don’t know if there was a tipping point. Maybe it came fast, a rock launched through my glass case of emotion. Perhaps it was that gradual opening of a valve that marked empathy. It’s not like I didn’t cry before. The Green Mile remains seared into my mind: a daytime DVD viewing when I was 19, the postman looking on, terrified, as I answered the door puffy-eyed, tears streaming down my face.

Fast-forward to fatherhood, and it’s no longer just the big tear-jerkers. Kids’ movies are my kryptonite. I’m destroyed every time I watch Moana crest across that wave formation with her stubborn determination—a young girl asserting her independence, leaving her family behind to forge her own path, my eyes glistening as Opetaia Foa’i’s Samoan voice glides alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda’s melodies. Or when I’m watching Inside Out’s Riley struggle with her Joy, Anger, Sadness, Fear and Disgust after her parents move her to San Francisco for a new job (that one hit a little too close to home). Don’t get me started on Coco. I really shouldn’t have watched that the same month my grandma moved into a retirement home with advanced dementia. “Remember Me” destroys me every time.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once observed that “A man cannot step into the same river twice; it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” I can say, with absolute certainty, that as your children get older, there will be cinematic worlds you step into again and experience with a new set of eyes. I’ll never forget that transatlantic flight—my newborn daughter a few months away from making her first appearance—when I watched Finding Nemo afresh, a new perspective provoked by the imminent arrival of a child:

I cried more during that 1 hour and 40 minutes (including credits) than in the 3 months previous. You could blame the high altitude, or the fact I was drinking for two, “taking one for the team” while my wife drank her sparkling water. But looking back, the tears were driven by the first complete perspective shift I experienced as a soon-to-be father. I thought about the first time I saw Finding Nemo: 20 years old, after falling out with my own father, having not been on speaking terms for a few months. Back then, I saw the movie from Nemo’s perspective: Why wouldn’t his dad just leave him alone? Let him live the life he wants to live? To go and experience the world outside of their tiny coral home? To see what adventures the great sea could bring?

Flash forward, Lost-style, 10 years later, and I experienced a different film. A man who was working through the trauma of losing his wife, just as their son was born. Navigating that grief by being overprotective of his only child—all he wanted to do was protect Nemo!—to keep him safe, knowing the danger that was clear and present out there.

You better believe I was in bits.

It’s been a slippery slope since those salty tears mixed with my sky-high gin and tonic. I’ll start welling up at almost anything now. It’s a running joke in the house: as soon as the strings begin to stir, my family will look around inquisitively, searching for the telltale glint of a moistened eye. It happens during those movies intentionally crafted to tug at the heartstrings. But it even comes from those that do not.

Take Sing 2. It’s good, wholesome fun for the whole family. The cast is top-tier, with stars like Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon and Scarlett Johansson lending their talents, alongside Adam Buxton, Nick Offerman and Pharrell Williams. The songs are catchy as hell—my son spent most of 2022 asking our smart speaker to play “Sky Full of Stars” on repeat—with enough hits peppered throughout to keep the grown-ups locked in. The sequel’s soundtrack includes, but isn’t limited to, covers of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Prince, The Steve Miller Band and Drake, and shockingly manages to feature The Weeknd’s “I Can’t Feel My Face,” the only ode to cocaine ever to hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100. (I’m sorry, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas does not count.)

The thrust of the movie centres on a touring group of performers who, in an attempt to strike it big in Redshore City (an ersatz Las Vegas), pitch a studio executive on a sci-fi musical. In the middle of an audition, they launch into a rendition of U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name” and convince the exec they’ve already locked down the rights to the band’s back catalogue for their show. The only problem? They haven’t done anything of the sort. So they set off to convince a grumpy old lion to come out of retirement and help them out—said lion voiced by Bono himself.

The first time I cried during the movie, I just put it down to a normal emotional response. But the second time, watching it intermittently while in and out of the kitchen making dinner, I noticed something else stirring within. It was The Joshua Tree. I was listening to my childhood. The album that transformed a popular Irish quartet into a worldwide tour de force, a stadium-filling rock band that filled the diaspora of the Emerald Isle with pride, and a not-insignificant amount of relief that their home country would not just be known for the fiddle, tin whistle and the bodhrán drum.

Is there a better opening trio of tracks, on any album, ever, than “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”, and “With or Without You”? You could argue they’re three of the greatest rock songs committed to tape. The album opens drenched in religious light, Brian Eno’s production shimmering throughout. It came together as the band were coming down from the highs of 1985’s Live Aid, written whilst touring across the US, Bono reading Raymond Carver novels and experiencing the American Dream through the eyes of an Irish immigrant. He spent time hanging out with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Bob Dylan, having his eyes opened to the potential of marrying traditional Celtic folk with American blues. The Edge took a while to be convinced of this new direction, but after the tour bus tuned into local public radio stations, he was introduced to guitarists like Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, and Lefty Frizzell, and soon came on board.

Whatever you might say about Bono—and I’ve certainly heard worse than whatever you’re thinking— you’ve got to respect a movie that hinges its plot on convincing a washed-up rock star to come out of retirement for one last hurrah and getting him to license his back catalogue for a piece of family entertainment. I wasn’t expecting a dose of post-modernism on family movie night, but it was served piping hot. U2’s greatest hits are featured throughout, including a perfectly pitched rendition of “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” (originally written when Bono was grieving the death of his close friend Michael Hutchence), ensuring I was emotionally wobbly throughout, and was entirely done by the time—incoming spoiler alert for a kids’ movie that came out five years ago—he slowly walks onto the stage to one of The Edge’s many iconic arpeggios, and begins to belt out the opening bars to “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” to a crowd of fans.

My kids now roll their eyes when they see mine dampen. And that can only be a good thing, because the archaic archetype of the emotionally unavailable dad still looms large over popular culture. The impact that U2 had in my Irish household was reflected in America’s obsession with its own homegrown troubadour, Bruce Springsteen. Born in the USA was another album that played regularly in the Maguire household, but with so-so reviews of the biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, I was prepared to give it a pass. It was my dad who suggested I watch it, and it received further confirmation from our resident Dadscord movie buff, Carlos, who noted, “[although] it bombed critically and commercially, it is well-made and handles depression and the sins of our fathers.”

Pretty much the sweet spot of The New Fatherhood. Consider my interest piqued. So last week I bought my ticket and sat down for The Tale of Two Jeremys—Allen White and Strong. Unbeknownst to me, Adolescence’s Stephen Graham takes up the mantle of troubled dad for the second time this year, inhabiting the role of Springsteen Senior: Bruce’s violent, alcoholic father, a man whose feelings were numbed with a bottle, whose love was only permitted to be displayed in two ways: silence or rage. Through regular flashbacks, the movie depicts the quiet chaos of growing up in a violent household with eerie accuracy: a place where the sanctuary of home was nothing but; where a gathering in the kitchen could turn, in a heartbeat, from a place of nourishment into a world of pain.

In the foreword for Terry Real’s Us, Springsteen writes of the realisation he “was subject to a legacy that had been passed down from generation to generation in my Italian-Irish family. A long and stubborn stream of mental illness and dysfunction manifested itself in my life as a deep, recurring depression and emotional paralysis.” The film captures one year of his life, as he begins to come to terms with these emotions, transmuting his pain and trauma into art. He learns how to stop this cycle—to share his truth, to find others to help him talk through his pain, and, in his words, to “break the chain of trauma and illness whose price is compounded with each successive generation.”

As I left the theatre, I wondered what might have been different if the last generation of men had been able to communicate their emotions with words rather than their fists. What might our world look like if those dads had been able to sit down, look their kids in the eye and say, “I’m hurting, and I don’t know how to deal with it?” We could be living in a world with less conflict. Maybe we’d have fewer iconic cultural artefacts born from the processing of that pain. But we’d also have fewer adults who had to grow up learning to read the weather from their father’s mood swings, or the sound of their footsteps in the hallway. Today, I’m working to ensure my kids don’t need a movie, a book, or a record to understand what’s going on inside their dad—they can just look across the couch and see it all over my face.

3 things to read this week

1. “The Power of a Good Cry” by Wesley Morris in The New York Times. No context necessary as to why I’m sharing this one first. A beautifully written essay on how crying helps us connect—to ourselves, and each other. It also contains lines like “[feeling] was the ancient power of art to make a puddle of us.” Highly recommended if you want to carry on getting all up in your feelings.

2. ”Why Men’s Health Matters to Everyone” by Richard Reeves in Of Boys and Men. ’ newsletter has been essential reading for anyone attempting to make sense of what it means to be a man today, and to help guide the sons we are raising. This week, he hands his platform over to the Director of Men’s Health at Movember, who talks of impending fatherhood, and how he is feeling the need to deal with his depressive father’s death and the inheritance of “[not] just grief but a forensic understanding of how one man’s untreated pain detonates across a family system.”

3. “What Did Men Do To Deserve This?” by Jessica Winter in The New Yorker. A state of the nation on modern masculinity, an ongoing conversation that has been re-ignited with Scott Galloway’s recently released Notes on Being A Man. Winter covers Galloway, Gavin Newsom, Donald Trump, and the “increasingly despondent mood among young men” as they attempt to navigate this moment of crisis: “deaths of despair; dislocation and broken families; dependency.”

Previously on The New Fatherhood

This month’s essay on searching for collective effervescence on the dance floor really struck a chord with many, and I’m still getting notes two weeks later. One Dadscord dad shared he was going to a festival last weekend and that “[if] I don’t get home till the early hours, at least I can blame it on a newsletter.”

Here are a few of the best messages from you all:

Thought you might be advertising John Lewis at the start, and then you got so personal about your own music obsession, and then you broadened it out to talk about religious experience, meaning, and fatherhood-- citing all different kinds of experts, but managing to bring it back to your own quasi-spiritual practice of inviting dads out to the club, and I felt so connected to your mission.

You really know how to tug at the emotional heartstrings. This stirred a lot of memories of clubbing back in the 90s, and also that search for male connection in current times, as I endlessly work from home.

Dancing of yesteryear wasn’t to house music but hardcore. Over the last couple of months, I’ve found myself out at Deftones, Idles, and Turnstile shows, not quite stage diving myself, but getting close enough for these old bones - and thinking how much I’ve missed the “collective efferfuckitall” of getting kicked in the head while screaming my face off.

The loss is self is a real problem for dads, and it made me feel not so alone. It’s only this year that I’ve been back to many live music shows after an eight-year hiatus. I would go to one or two shows a year when my son was little, but I’ve logged 12 during this calendar year. It’s good to feel alive AND be a dad.

This helped me see the “something” that I’ve felt was missing the past few years but haven’t quite been able to pinpoint. I see now that it’s not just release, not just “me time,” not just the carefreeness that comes with seeing a show or having a few drinks — but the feeling of experiencing something as part of a COLLECTIVE, something bigger than yourself. Thank you so much for sharing this. I need to think hard about how I can bring more collective joy back into my life.

Lovely blend of academic research, personal experience and not-quite-advice-but-thought-provokers. You found the words for a so-familiar feeling.

It is genuinely a privilege to have space to write a few thousand words a week, knowing it will go out to this audience of thoughtful, receptive dads. Thanks also to the one reader who emailed to tell me, “The AI slop you are turning out is of a much lower quality and it is noticeable,” to which I have to say: if an AI pumped out an essay as meandering and borderline unhinged as that one, you’d have to assume the model was busted.

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

This essay is somewhat Frankenstein-esque—part taken from an old essay written in 2022, the rest filled with what’s been spinning around my head in the week since I saw the Springsteen movie. When I first published the old version, my friend (and our illustrator) Tony Johnson told me, “I think writing nicely about Bono will be your most controversial/problematic essay yet.” Was he right? What did you think?

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Have a great weekend. I’ll be taking my daughter to see the Wicked sequel. Will pack tissues.

To which my reply has been, “Who in their right mind would willingly put themselves through that again?” Which is similar to what you think to yourself when a well-meaning relative asks, “So, when is baby number two coming?” whilst you’re still learning how to change your baby with one hand whilst attempting to get a dirty onesie into the dirty laundry basket without covering your fingers in excrement.

The decision to have a second kid isn’t one you take lightly. In the years since I first published the essay below, it has become one of the top Google results related to questions like “Should I have a second kid” or “One child versus two children.” Thought it was a good time to bring it back—if you were already reading back in 2022 with a newborn, you may have skimmed over it, mentally bookmarking it for another day. Or you may be new here and navigating these same thoughts right now.

A final note: This essay touches on the decision to have a second child. But if only it were as easy as simply making a choice. It’s the first step on a long journey: some parents reading this may have wanted a second child, but decided against it due to health or financial reasons; others may currently be trying, but for various factors, it hasn’t happened yet. Thinking of any and all of you, and feel free to skip this one if you need to. — Kevin

Any couple heading towards marriage—and many others who aren’t—will discover that people love gettin’ up in ya damn business. “When are you going to have kids?” they’ll enquire, going straight for the jugular. Maybe they won’t be so direct, taking the scenic route instead: “You two will make such cute babies,” they’ll wistfully imagine, leaving a pregnant pause—pun absolutely intended—and wait for a response. Woe betide you if they know you’re trying already, as those questions become increasingly more awkward: wondering on bedroom shenanigans—how long? how often?—and what you’ll do if it doesn’t work out.

There’s another avalanche of questions (and judgments) for couples who decide not to have kids. And what about those who have tried, but it hasn’t worked out? With hundreds of reasons why a couple might end up childless—many of them leaving parents in ongoing anguish, and being the absolute last thing they want to talk about, stood waiting at the bar, in the middle of Dave’s 40th birthday party.

Some interrogated parents will end up having a child, and foolishly believe the inquisition will end there. But it’s only getting started. “So … when are you going to start trying for number two?” they’ll ask you both, a barely born baby hanging onto a nipple for dear life, your partner’s body only beginning to get over the herculean1effort of spending 9 months turning food into a baby, and then almost single-handedly—with the help of medical professionals, but she will do almost all of the work—bringing said baby into the world. “Are you just going to have one?” they’ll enquire at your child’s second birthday, examining your face for any hint of a clue, the meaning of “just” implicit: something is clearly missing from this family of three, and how dare you cruelly withhold a sibling from this clearly deprived child.

In many ways, the decision for a second is bigger than the first. Many couples discuss the number of children they want in the early years. But the realities of raising a child may make you question the decision you aligned on earlier. You’re returning to Mount Doom with open eyes, knowing exactly what it takes to overcome its challenges. But whilst one child changes your life significantly at the overall trajectory level, a second child transforms things on a daily basis.

You think one kid is hard? You know nothing. Two kids is beyond what you could imagine. It’s relentless. You need to switch from zonal defence to man-on-man. The logic behind the entire universe somehow stops making sense, and 1+1=5. You feel outnumbered, even though it’s 2 vs. 2. There’s always something to deal with. You finally manage to get the little one down for a nap, and you realise that constant hair scratching from the eldest is nits. You finally seem to get a second child onto a regular sleep pattern, and the dreaded sleep regression hits with the first. Or you manage to get them to play nicely together, leave the room for 30 seconds, and they’re somehow screaming and at each other’s throats.

You think the second will be easier. How can it not? But the transferable skills are limited, and the insights you uncovered the first time around are lost in the dark recesses of your brain, occasionally reappearing at the moments you least expect; echoes from the past, repeating themselves, a scratched record clicking back into an old groove.

All new parents of a second child will share that quintessential sibling photo: the eldest child holding the baby carefully, both of them blissfully unaware of the drama that will soon unfold. The dream of two kids is that they’ll play nicely together and love one another forever. The reality is dramatically different, at least for those initial years. The jealousy gets real, real fast, and the street runs both ways. The eldest has to learn how to live as second in command, and when your little bundle of joy and turd gets a bit older, the ever-changing dynamics are ground zero for a constant battle of wills.

Then, after a while, something starts to click. They start playing nicely together. Looking out for each other. The eldest will perform a random act of kindness that will fill you with pride—surely you did something right raising them? You start to see what one friend sobbingly referred to as “the joy of seeing two people—half me, half my partner—showing love to each other.”

A few years back, I was putting my two to bed. My son didn’t want to go into his cot, instead asking to lie on the top bunk with his sister. So they lay there together for a while, snuggled up like a pair of fox cubs in their den, while I read them a few books. There was a warmth, like the promise of siblings was finally coming to fruition. And they woke up the next morning and resumed the bickering.

A second child provides an experience to revisit your greatest hits of fatherhood. I remember pulling the classic “stealthily fast-forward the current TV episode to the end, and tell them we are turning it off after this one” trick with my son when he was three. My eldest saw me do it, and looked across, giving me what I can only describe as Jim Halpert Face style, incredulous—how dare I!—before I told her it had worked on her until she was at five. And if she wanted to stay up a little longer this evening, and maybe watch something herself, she should learn to KEEP HER DAMN MOUTH SHUT.

Another baby? In this economy?

When you’re deep in the debate on baby number two, there’s a mountain of interlocking aspects to consider. There’s obviously the cost: although a second child is less expensive than the first (due to the sunk costs on housing, transportation, baby things, and discounts in childcare and schooling), there’s still a serious financial impact. According to 2015 data from the USDA, American parents can expect to pay around $12,980 annually to feed, clothe and house each child they have. And a potential recession, increasing inflation and rising costs of living are leading many families to shelve their desire for a second. Your current setup might need to change—upsizing to a bigger house; the slow, inexorable march towards minivan ownership—which will come with a weighty impact on whatever is left in the bank. Your experience with your first will play heavily in your decision: if there were problems conceiving, during the birth, or complications afterwards, there will be an understandable reluctance to go through it again. For those going down the traditional conception route, the health of the mother will be a point of discussion, as will her willingness to give up her body to a small human for at least another year, if not more. There’s also the biological clock question—more pressing for women than men, clearly—that delivers an extra level of pressure, because “if we don’t do it now, we might miss the chance forever.”

You might find yourself wondering how your first child will feel about it—an issue that becomes increasingly complex as the age gap between potential siblings grows. And roll into all of this the pressure from family, friends, and society—I recall when we were contemplating this ourselves, it seemed our friends with two weren’t suggesting it for our own benefit, but rather were eager that we come join them in their collective misery. (When male and female friends with more than one kid heard I was writing this essay, the most common answer was to laugh and jokingly say, “Don’t do it!”) Proximity to family will also factor heavily—if doing it without easy access to help is tough with one, then doing the same with two is akin to finishing Dark Souls with a Guitar Hero controller. We’re only scratching the surface here, with dozens more factors that play a role—studies have shown that even changes in car seat laws can impact whether a family decides to have more children.

It’s not a decision to be taken lightly. Surely the reams of research out there that can help us make this decision? Oh, foolish reader, if only it were that simple. The findings are as inconsistent as whatever your child will eat for dinner this week.

Multiple studies have found that having even one child will reduce your quality of life but increase your sense of meaning. That much seems locked in. One study from 2005 found that having a second child had a negative effect on the well-being of mothers, but no effect on fathers. However, I’d wager that the changes in fatherhood norms over the preceding two decades would show a more significant impact on men if the same study were conducted today. A fascinating 2016 study confirms this hunch, placing participants into three family models: Traditional, where the parents endorse a male-breadwinner model; Modern, with a dual-earning system and a more equal division of responsibilities between genders; and Mixed, which comprises the majority of the population. This study again found that a second child has little positive impact on life satisfaction for mums, but a significant gain in life satisfaction for dads—although dads in the Modern family models don’t see as large an increase as those in the Traditional setups, due to the increased workload they share with the mother.

And the effect on the parents? Studies have shown that even one child reduces “marital satisfaction” and there is “a significant negative correlation between marital satisfaction and number of children”—a hit that only begins to recover once the children leave home. Dan Gilbert, Harvard professor and happiness expert, once said, “The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is nonstop smiling.” A rare pan-European study from 2014 found that having a second child increases the level of happiness for both parents, while having a third child causes it to decline. More children “will significantly increase the level of stress that parents face,” was the conclusion of this study from 1970, to which any parent reading this with more than one child will reply, “Well, duh.” And recent data reconfirm this, with additional insight that the majority of the stress is borne by the mother, to which any woman reading (with or without children) will reply, “Well, duh,” once again.

What about the happiness of the children themselves? The results are (once again) all over the place: whilst one UK-based study clearly states that the fewer siblings children have, the happier they are—and only children are the happiest, another piece of research found that having a sibling increases child happiness—especially if the sibling is a sister. A Swedish study found that satisfaction with sibling relationships was a key driver of health and happiness in later life—more so than friendships or adult children.

And if you decide to have more, where should you draw the line? My dad is one of fourteen, so I’d suggest significantly before then, perhaps? (Good old Irish Catholics.) When it comes to society’s overall attitude to larger families, the times they are a’changing. In 1976, 40% of women aged 40 and older in the US had four or more children. Today, that number has dropped to 15%. The giant family is becoming a thing of the past. However, the stigma of being an “only child” still runs deep—a 2015 Gallup survey found that 48% of Americans believe two is the ideal number of children in a family, with only 3% opting for one.

I’ve always believed that too many children means however many you have + 1. Families with one child see friends with two and wonder how they do it. Families with two kids say, “It’s tough, but at least we don’t have three”. Families with three kids look strangely at a family with four trying to squeeze into a car like they’re auditioning for the circus. Bryan Caplan, author of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids said the optimum number of kids is four, which is conveniently how many he has. I’d say the optimum number is two, although during the COVID-19 pandemic, I might have suggested a number closer to zero. For those who opt for more, there seems to be a moment where things get easier, if only mentally. Dr Janet Taylor, a psychiatrist in New York, with four kids herself, once said, “There’s just not enough space in your head for perfectionism when you get to four or more kids. It’s just about survival”

The research is inconsistent at best, and outright contradictory at worst. But whilst there’s precedent for stopping at one—Speed 2: Cruise Control and Teen Wolf Too spring to mind—sometimes the second can be even better. Deciding to go for another gave the world The Empire Strikes Back, The Dark Knight and The Bends. And where would we be if Mr and Mrs Hemsworth decided to stop having kids after just one?! Thor-less and sad. That’s where.

We spent a long time debating our second. We did what everyone seems to do—made a list of pros and cons, thought long and hard about the impact another child would have on our lives, and considered if we were ready to do it all again. In the end, the thing that clinched it for me was a simple insight: every reason to not do it felt selfish—having to do another round of sleepless nights, thousands more nappies, forgoing spare time to spend on my own hobbies; whilst the reasons to do it felt if not altruistic, then something close—a sibling for my daughter, someone she could grow up with. “The first one is for you; the second one is for them,” a close friend shared, just as I was putting the finishing touches on this essay. We talked about how siblings support each other—yesterday, today, and tomorrow. One of the biggest learnings from the last 18 months of my life is how important siblings are when you lose a parent. If life goes according to plan, and your parents die before you do, who better to help you carry the weight and work through the grief than someone who knew them just as well as you?

Having another kid is a huge decision. And it’s one that only you and your partner can make. My wife and I constantly looped back to the vast unknowns of having a second. Would we be able to get pregnant again, and would everything go OK with the birth? And beyond that, what would the second baby be like? We were very lucky with our first conception and birth, roughly according to plan; a happy, relatively chilled baby, with no major medical issues along the way. If we were to roll the dice again, what might happen? And would we be ready for it?

A second child is hard work, and the impact it will have on your life is momentous—dealing with the fallout of my second broke me, but I’m happier than ever with the person that I put back together. Nothing, especially not a 3,000-word essay in a weekly newsletter, will prepare you for the trials a second will throw at you. But through it all, I haven’t regretted it for a moment. My son is one of the funniest human beings I have ever met, and he brings unbridled joy to our lives (almost) every day.

Over to you …

Back in 2022, I was you: “How many kids do you have, and how many would you like?” Thank you for these insights and nuggets of wisdom that may help others in a deep decision-making mode.

Always a difficult subject for me, although I don’t know of many couples that survived a second kid. Hope you have a little word about us who wanted a few more (even just one more) but for various reasons (in my case: wife’s health and her lack of interest) had to give up on that idea. Foster or adoption are possible avenues to explore in some cases. Paul

Two for us. We both grew up as the odd one out of three (I have two sisters, my has two brothers) and while we’re close with our siblings, we’re not close like our friends with one sibling are. When I was younger I wanted three but actually parenting put paid to that. Matthew

As one of 3, my relationship with my older brother has been such a rollercoaster—at times dangerous and traumatic—that I automatically felt I’d never want to inflict a lifelong relationship on our daughter that wasn’t her parents. My wife is an only child, as are my parents… so I don’t think they are the sociopaths that society makes them seem. And my wife has had to witness her mother and auntie at their throats for 30 years. I don’t think another child is either affordable or more importantly desirable for us, but I’d love to move past the negative association I have about raising siblings … so really keen to hear from parents with 2+ kids who may have worked through similar issues. Ivor

Two and done (barring any surprises). We went into parenthood thinking 3–5 was the size we wanted as we both come from large(r) families. We joked we wanted enough kids so people don’t invite us places. But #2 came along with some health difficulties in her first year+. Also, somewhat surprisingly, my wife isn’t a fan of 37 weeks of nausea. Then COVID killed it for good, and more is no more. Andrew

We have two, and had always planned for four (I’d be happy with more, as a youngest of 7 myself, but 5 is a stretch for my wife). However, my wife got a diagnosis that means it’s dangerous for her to get pregnant, so we’re done making kids ourselves. We did get a minivan when #2 was on the way, so we’re hoping to foster/adopt some kids at some point to fill it up. Kids are the best, and I’m not intimidated by having more kids than parents - sounds like a blast! Michael

Have: two; want: one. I kid, I kid (pun intended)! Two feels like the perfect number for us, otherwise we’re playing zone/prevent defense and that never works out. We will never get a minivan, but we do have the equivalent for two kids: a “gently used” Subaru Outback. My wife, who doesn’t have a license, calls it “a safe, reliable family car” so I’ll take it. Jeremy

We’ve presently got just the one, but are eager to justify trying for a second. We don’t feel ‘settled’ enough as adults to justify having another; financial stability, life direction, etc. And haven’t done since we had our first almost nine years back.

But we both have valued our relationships to our siblings enough that we’d like to give our first someone else to have in their life decades from now. That said, the age gap would be effectively a decade, so there’s some concern about what their relationship would look like at various stages of life. Then there’s also the notion of doing the first ten years of parenting over again, when we’re both a decade older. JD

My wife put her foot down after one, which seemed sad at the time, but now I am deeply thankful for it. One seems perfect. Rick

We had five for the last nine months or so, but two just reunified with their biological family last weekend (always bittersweet). So we’re back down to three and definitely going to take a break for a little. It has been harder than I could have even imagined. So, right now everything is way future, but we’ve talked about one more biological kid and maybe reopening for foster care after our oldest graduates. Troy

Have: two; want: one. I kid I kid (pun intended)! Two feels like the perfect number for us, otherwise we’re playing zone/prevent defense and that never works out. We will never get a minivan, but we do have the equivalent for two kids: a “gently used” Subaru Outback. My wife, who doesn’t have a license, calls it “a safe, reliable family car” so I’ll take it. Jeremy

Three and at first it felt like we were non-swimmers who found themselves in the deepest part of the Ocean. With kids , I think 2+1 makes 10 really. Now we feel much better , it’s much better now she’s older and pure joy to watch with her siblings. Happy and hopeful they will be there for each other as I and my siblings. Lise

Just the one for us; and he came after a number of years of trying naturally before having to turn to IVF, mid-pandemic. The twists didn’t end there, he arrived 9 weeks premature and had to spend 4 weeks in the intensive care unit at the hospital. We’ve gone back and forth on the idea of having a second, but after the events with our first, it’s a daunting proposition. Dave

I went from one to three with the birth of twins (now 16 months old). My sister has four. We discussed the step changes in difficulty, and decided that it’s a power law.

• One child, difficulty level 1. Great job, you’re a parent!

• Two children, difficulty level 4. You’ve levelled up, but things just got a lot harder!

• Three children, difficulty level 9.

• Four children, difficulty 16 (hard mode!)

• Five children, difficulty 25; too many, get help!! Joseph

We have one, Violet, and that will be it. Sometimes it makes me so sad; when we are reading at bedtime, I tell her the other children in the books are cousins; I am not ready for her to ask and have to explain she won’t have brothers and sisters. I had four, and looking back, it was brilliant (if crowded). But it has been too hard: older parents, miscarriages, traumatic birth, pandemic and postnatal depression for 2 years, which means neither of us wants to have a second, we are just too bruised. Anyway, Violet has loads of cousins, which will have to be enough. It did make me almost cry when the clinic wrote to ask what we wanted them to do with the other embryo. I ignored the letter and hope I can deal with it next year (not very grown-up). Chris

4 things to read about second kids and siblings

1. “What Number of Kids Makes Parents Happiest?” by Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic [Gift Link]. In this essay, Pinsker talks to a variety of authors and experts (some of whom are included above) about how many kids are the right amount. “What’s optimal, then, depends on age, life stage, and family makeup—in other words, things that are subject to change. While being the parent of a young child may not seem to maximize happiness, parenthood may be more enjoyable years down the line.”

2. “What If I Just Don’t Want To Have A Second Baby Anymore?” by Carlo Ciccone in Romper. A look at things from mum’s point of view, 18 months into the pandemic, as Ciccone wonders if “stay-at-home orders, winter blues, isolation, languishing, depression, anxiety, a recent ADHD diagnosis, and having very little time or energy” have left her feeling “Fundamentally changed. I love my little family of three and I might not want to add to it.”

3. “Working Mums Reveal Their Struggles Over Having A Second Kid” by Elizabeth Segran in Fast Company. Returning to work has long played a role in the decision for women to have (or not have) a second child. But with modern fatherhood meaning more stay-at-home fathers and equal co-parents, we’re likely to see some of these themes reflected in a male audience too. “I ask myself how this is going to affect my life, my marriage, my son […] You need to think of it a little selfishly too, because you don’t want any resentment creeping in on you later on. That’s not fair to your child, either.”

4. “Only Children Are Not Doomed” by Emily Oster in The New York Times [Gift Link]. Emily Oster, founder of ParentData and a Time 100 recipient, debunks some myths surrounding only children. “It would seem that siblings do not have a large impact on most characteristics we can measure. In the end, neither the deprived younger sibling idea nor the awkward only child one hold much water. Parents argue about these ideas across the internet, saying that having or lacking siblings is key to making your child the best they can be. The evidence disagrees. Your decision about how many children to have should be just that: your decision about what works best for your family.”

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

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Branding by Selman Design. Illustration by Tony Johnson; this is one of my all-time favourites, and I'm delighted to put it in your inboxes again.

This week, rumours swirl of dads across the world running to office bathrooms to get “something out of my eyes” as the new John Lewis advert sits behind them in an open tab. The UK retailer has a habit of going for the emotional jugular, with 2022’s skateboarding spot putting dad front and centre, as he channelled his inner Tony Hawk to help their adopted daughter feel more at home on her arrival. But this year, they’ve turned the dial marked “feelings” up to eleven.

The two-minute commercial tells the story of a father struggling to connect with his teenage son. It’s Christmas Day. The family move through the house, together but separate, rooms apart, space between. Dinner is done. Our protagonist kneels under the tree, cleaning discarded wrapping paper into a bin bag—Dad’s signature move on December 25th—as his son watches from afar, headphones on, a scene familiar to so many. Dad reaches under the tree, picks up a still-wrapped gift with his name on it, a familiar-shaped package for anyone with a passing interest in music.

It’s a vinyl record. He opens it, smiles, places it onto the Technics SL-1500CEB turntable—available on the John Lewis website for only £799.00, in-store availability limited—and drops the needle into the groove. A piano riff begins, instantly recognisable to anyone who came of age during the halcyon era of house music: The Classic Club Mix of “Where Love Lives,” by Alison Limerick, produced by David Morales and Frankie Knuckles in 1990, two legendary artists operating at the height of their powers.

As the track builds, Dad closes his eyes and opens his ears. When the kick drum hits, he’s instantly transported back to the dance floors of his youth. The crowd dance around him, bucket hats and knock-off Adidas jackets, the style of the day. Then, in a moment that bears more than a passing resemblance to the final minutes of the movie Aftersun1, the father spots his teenage son from across the dance floor. The lights strobe in and out. But rather than the heartbreaking devastation of Aftersun’s denouement, instead our heartstrings are pulled gently as the son transforms into a young toddler, running towards his father, who hoists him up, and then appears as a newborn baby in his arms.

When the sharp talons of nostalgia begin to unhook themselves, Dad returns to the living room and sees his son—this no-longer-a-boy trapped in the no-man’s land between the adult he will become and the child he once was—and the walls that have hardened between father and son come crashing down. They hug. They dance. And why? In the words of a Saatchi and Saatchi copywriter, having gone through 26 rounds of client feedback, before finally being copied and pasted into the YouTube description box—the vinyl record “helps them find their way back to one another. Because, sometimes, a gift can say the things we can’t.”

Many viewers might hear “Where Love Lives” and be transported to a nightclub of their youth. My memory takes me somewhere else: the bedroom of Gary, a childhood friend who lived around the corner. Gary was sharing a room with his older brother Darren, who would soon move out to his own place. Ten years between them, Darren was a regular at Cream, the iconic nightclub that lit up a disused corner of Liverpool and, for a decade, became a weekly pilgrimage for thousands chasing transcendence through electronic music. In the days before Mixcloud, Soundcloud—before any kinds of cloud that weren’t white ones in the sky— the only way you could hear dance music outside of a nightclub was to buy a mixtape. And Cream were masters of the art: inviting big-name DJs to craft mixes that would take listeners on a journey from the comfort of their own home. Cream Anthems—the 1995 double CD that Gary and I would listen to on repeat—might have been the first place I’d hear the track, but it certainly was not the last.

Once I hit 18 (or maybe a little bit earlier, sshhhhhhhh), I started attending these clubs myself. I became a regular at a Manchester spot that hosted the world’s best DJs on a regular basis. I’d spent weekends in the club, and then weekdays frequenting the forum, where other punters would hang out and swap music recommendations, or talk about what DJs they were planning to see over the next few months. Around the same time, Livejournal and Blogger had shifted the landscape of online writing, offering writers simple tools to share their thoughts with others, and I suggested to the club owners they should add something else to their website on top of the forum where I was spending so much of my time: a blog featuring a weekly “update” that discussed everything (well, maybe not ”everything”) that had happened inside the old converted soap factory over the weekend, and building hype for whatever was coming up once we’d made it through the working week. “Great idea,” I was told by one of them. “Will you write it?” I had no idea what I was doing, but this kicked off a three-ish year stint (timeline is hazy, as you might imagine) where I had my name down on the guest list every night, and I’d attempt to file 800 words on “What Just Happened?” by the following Monday lunchtime.

That period marked a profound and fundamental transformation in who I was and how I saw the world. Every weekend, I’d spent at least two nights in the club—longer around public holidays, when they’d often open Thursday through Sunday—watching several hundred people come together to jack their bodies. In a real club—a dark basement, with a good sound system, a great crowd, and none of that VIP bottle service bollocks—the dance floor is the great leveller. People of all colours and creeds come together to dance, moving their bodies in unison as a DJ attempts to transmute feelings into music and energy through a perfectly sequenced set, guiding dancers to ecstasy. In the fantastic book Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Simon Reynolds writes about the unifying nature of the dancefloor, “[a] utopia in its original etymological sense: a nowhere/nowhen wonderland, where time is abolished, where the self evanesces through merging with an anonymous multitude and drowning in a bliss-blitz of light and noise … a kingdom of We where nobody is, but everybody belongs.”

This is not a hot new trend. As long as human beings have been able to hit two things together into a discernible rhythm, we’ve gotten together to dance. Archaeologists have found traces of ritual drumming dating back 70,000 years. Anthropologist Barbara Ehrenreich argues in her 2006 book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, that communal dance and rhythm were among humanity’s first tools for social cohesion —a way to remember, to belong, and to heal. She suggested that “ecstatic rituals are […] expressive of our artistic temperament and spiritual yearnings as well as our solidarity,” and that “the urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, and to embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.”

And, as artists, clubbers and even academics have noted over the years, these small rooms have become something else: places of worship. We are well into an era when church attendance is declining worldwide—in the UK, regular attendance has fallen from around 50% of adults in the 1960s to under 10% today, with the steepest drop among those under 35. Many still yearn for this search for connection—to themselves, to each other, and a higher power—with some finding their needs met within earshot of a Funktion One sound system. I’m far from the first person to make this observation. In a piece published in Harvard Divinity School, journalist Michelle Lhooq (who writes the excellent newsletter A Rave New World) talks about Berlin club Berghain as a quasi-religious experience:

“Sunday mornings tend to be the most rapturous climaxes of its all-weekend benders, with rituals reminiscent of Christianity: attendees willing to go through the torturous trial of waiting in line for hours to become one of the “chosen few” to get in, dressing in their “Sunday best,” and experiencing shaking, babbling pleasure evoking Pentecostal ecstasy.”

The history of clubland has seen the most direct application of this metaphor: traditional places of worship becoming clubs. The Sanctuary was just one—a New York disco that closed its doors five years before Studio 54 would open theirs, located in a former German Baptist church complete with a DJ booth on the altar. I’ve spent many occasions on a dance floor noticing the connections to the Catholic churches where I spent the Sunday mornings of my youth: a congregation gathers at a set time every weekend, to come together and raise their arms and voices. A charismatic leader stands at the front of the room, elevated, and preaches to the gathered group. A small circular sacrament is taken in an attempt to become closer to the divine.

So why is this important, and why the hell are you (hopefully) still reading about it in a fatherhood newsletter? Well, it’s no surprise that the same people who once found transcendence on the dance floor now search for meaning in parenting—another ritual that remakes who we are. Becoming a parent remains one of life’s biggest transitions, and an increasing amount of research is highlighting the difficulties caused by this period of dramatic identity shift.

Psychologists have a term for the psychic re-wiring that comes with parenthood: matrescence for mothers, and increasingly, patrescence for fathers. It’s a shedding of skin and self. When that transformation is unsupported and unexpected, it can harden into irritability, anxiety, and even depression. Studies link paternal postnatal depression not just to sleepless nights or finances, but to a loss of identity—the feeling of being a background extra in your own life.

Fathers now walk the same uncharted psychological ground that mothers have travelled for decades, and are fixating their problem-solving mindsets in the wrong direction. In a 2015 American Psychological Association paper on the transition to fatherhood, researchers found that men who struggled to integrate fatherhood into their new sense of identity “opt to enact the provider role and experience a sense of competence by increasing their time spent at work,” finding that “this imbalance results in decreased involvement with their babies, along with […] a decrease in the father’s sense of self-efficacy in caring for the child.” Some researchers have suggested we’re in a cultural “catch-up” moment: men now entering the same terrain of role conflict and identity diffusion that women have long navigated, but do so without the social scripts or support structures that mothers’ networks provide.

With such structures absent, something else takes their place: loneliness. The data tells a story we already feel in our bones: men’s social circles shrink as we age; fatherhood accelerates the collapse. A new baby becomes the gravitational centre of a family—and as mothers are folded into networks of WhatsApp groups, drop-offs and casual solidarity, dads are left spinning on the edge. Of course, we don’t call it what it is. We say we’re tired, or busy, or “just need a night off.” But what we’re really missing is the feeling of being in sync with others—the same pulse we once found on packed dance floors, in five-a-side matches, or late-night conversations in the cosy corner of a pub. That reminder that we still belong, and that, deep down, we’re still there.

In a 2021 interview with Ezra Klein, Bessel van der Kolk—author of The Body Keeps the Score—shared his view that “our systems are made to move in synchrony with the people around us. When you get traumatised, you get out of sync on every most elementary level.” Klein observed that “The same is actually true for adults, that you need space to play, to move, to be in synchronicity with others, to sing, to dance, to have what gets called collective effervescence.”

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence captured what he saw as “a sensation of sacredness, when we are part of something bigger than us.” It is the sense of connection you feel as part of a shared social experience. Durkheim primarily cited religion as the setting for this collective effervescence, but it’s visible today in live concerts, football terraces, protest marches—and, of course, the dance floors where strangers brush shoulders with one another, where boundaries begin to dissolve, where I becomes we. Altered states of consciousness, often—but not always!—induced by chemicals, foster a deeper sense of connection with others, a reappraisal of the self, and a sense of something bigger than us.

Parenting drives a dramatic shift in your worldview. In a life where the only constant is change, so much tension comes from holding onto what we should learn to let go of. But the opposite can be just as dangerous: to completely detach from the person you were before becoming a father, arms flailing as you look for something to keep you afloat. We strive to make work less central to who we are, meaning that the hobbies and passions of our youth offer an opportunity to braid together multiple strands of self, giving our identity more than one leg to stand on.

Dance music is a huge part of my life. It’s important that the tense I use here is present, and not past. It’s impossible that I could have left it behind: it played such a fundamental role in my twenties, and contributes heavily to my personal narrative. I still enjoy a good night out. I’m not out every weekend, far from it. But I do enjoy letting rip on a regular basis. I’ll check in on the Resident Advisor app and see who is coming through town. I’ll try to get at least a day or two at a music festival every summer. And I’ll always try to bring fellow parents along. The recent success of Annie Mac’s Before Midnight—billed as a “club night for people who like sleep,” with festivities starting early and everything wrapping up before the clock strikes 12 and your taxi home turns into a pumpkin—is an indicator of the demand for parents who know how important it is for their body and soul to get its regular dose of collective effervescence.

I’ve lost count of the number of friends, their first time in a club since becoming a parent, who have turned to me in the middle of a night and said some variation of “I didn’t know how much I needed this.” It’s a feeling I know all too well: I think back to a night in 2019, my first time on a dance floor since my son was born, as I was heading out the other side of my paternal postnatal depression episode. I walked out of the club with a huge grin across my face, and had tears streaming down my face within minutes: grateful, alive, and finally, starting to feel like myself again.

That’s All Folks

How did you like this week’s issue?

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This issue is dedicated to the kind soul who runs the Soundcloud account theclassicmixcdseries, which enabled me to listen to the Cream Anthems mixes of my youth whilst I wrote this essay. Go take a trip: CD One | CD Two

Are clubs now a relic of your past? Or are you still making it work? Curious to hear, hit the comment button below and let me know.

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