As previously documented in these missives, after my second child was born, I fell apart. I didn’t want to be around family or friends. All the joy had been sucked out of my life. It took me months to call it what it was: depression. When I looked for answers, I found none.

Because no one was asking how dads were doing.

I didn’t know then what I know now: my life wasn’t just going through a fundamental shift—my body was, too. My hormones were changing. My brain was reshaping itself around my son. And nobody told me this because, back in the hazy days of 2019, no one was asking those questions.

Thankfully, things are changing. Researchers are finally putting dads under the microscope and into the MRI machine. What they’re finding would have helped me make sense of those early months, and could help the millions of men who become dads every year.

Earlier this month, I spoke with one of the researchers leading that charge. Darby Saxbe is a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and the author of Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. Darby has spent years studying dads’ brains and the changes that happen when we begin caring for the tiny humans we’ve invited into our lives. We’ll get into why that shrinking brain is really a renovation, why the research says that dad bod is for the best, and why you and your partner sink or swim together.

This season of The New Fatherhood is presented by Matic. Matic was founded by two fathers who love technology and wanted to spend less time cleaning the house and more time playing with their kids. That’s about as on-brand for this newsletter as it gets. It’s a floor-cleaning robot that vacuums and mops on its own, builds a 3D map of your house using onboard cameras, and keeps all that data on the device rather than in the cloud. WIRED gave it a 10/10, the only perfect score their reviewer had given in over a decade. Readers of The New Fatherhood get a free annual bag pass; go to maticrobots.com/fatherhood and take vacuuming and mopping off your chore list.

Subscribe to the Podcast

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Where to Find Darby Saxbe

Darby’s website

Darby’s book Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives

Episode References

The New Fatherhood Therapy Fund

The New Fatherhood Mental Health Checkpoint—everything I’ve written about dads’ mental health can be found here

Olly Murs’ before-and-after photos—the viral moment that proved the dad bod has fans

The 7 Up series—the British longitudinal documentary that’s just wrapped at 70, and the inspiration for Darby’s seven-year follow-up study

Boyhood—Richard Linklater’s twelve-years-in-the-making film

The Aka and Kipsigis tribes—how fatherhood varies by culture

Timestamps

0:00 — Intro
2:38 — The daughter of a divorced dad
8:32 — A shrinking, more efficient brain
10:05 — Animal dads
14:06 — Culture shapes fatherhood
20:32 — Dad bods
23:43 — Myth: Testosterone equals masculinity
33:11 — Diaper changes across the generations
36:36 — GenZ dads, neo-trad dads
41:39 — Maternal gatekeeping and weaponized incompetence
47:00 — Adolescence is dad’s time to shine
47:45 — Depression and anxiety, mental health, is real for dads

Credits

Host: Kevin Maguire

Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Sound Editor: Sam Williams

Theme Music: SOHN

This week, I’m handing over the reins to Sam Hendrix. Sam is one of the most outdoorsy dads I know, and so many of us dream of spending more time outside with the family. But, as you’ll see, it’s another of life’s pleasures that shift dramatically when your children are involved.

“Is this fun?”

This question had been rattling around in my brain the last few days of our week-long road trip across Vancouver Island with two kids, one and three years old.

In some of my social circles, the idea of The Fun Scale is frequently discussed. Type 1 fun is fun while it’s happening, and fun to reflect on after—think a day at the park or seeing your favorite movie on the big screen for the fifth time. Type 2 fun is miserable while it is happening, but once the pain and suffering is over, you look back on it fondly. For Type 2 fun, the parts that you hated in the moment become the most indelible memories; this is what keeps runners coming back, marathon after marathon, even when they’ve sworn this would be their last. Type 3 you wish didn’t happen: not fun at the time and not fun in retrospect; a broken bone, food poisoning from that new Thai spot, let it never be discussed again.

I had been quietly pondering (or perhaps silently seething) “Is this fun?” for a while before verbalizing it to my wife, sitting in the dark around a locked, unlit fire pit, wildfires and climate change stealing one of the seemingly few joys of a family camping trip.

I honestly don’t remember her response. It was rhetorical, anyway—indicative of my own self-loathing state, more concerned with venting my frustrations than hearing hers. She tends to be the positive one. I didn’t need her ruining my downward spiral.

Over the course of four days, we had made our way west across Vancouver Island. By my recollection, the current count stood at:

• 1 public meltdown at a brewery

• 2 bike wipeouts at the first campground

• 2 sleepless nights in an unbearably hot tent

• 1 potential case of the measles (false alarm)

• 1265 Spotify replays of “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana

• 1 impending storm that would force us inside a hostel for the next 2 days

This wasn’t our first family vacation—or even our first camping trip—as a quartet. We thought we were prepared. Between campsites, we strategically planned a couple of motel stays so everyone could shower, sleep comfortably, and recharge before the next stop. But the constant change in scenery every day or two threw off any sense of regulation for the kids. Naps became irregular, often skipped or cut short. Meals were traded for an endless stream of snacks during car rides so we didn’t have to stop. We thought we could cram in more and more to keep them engaged. Unfortunately, all sense of normalcy and stability went right out the window, as did my generally well-behaved children.

Now, sitting in the dark campground outside Tofino, I questioned why we were doing any of this. Whether I still enjoyed the same things I used to. Before kids, this was the best of Type 1 fun: summers in the Pacific Northwest spent sleeping under the stars, ferry-hopping island to island on our bikes, afternoons at a sunny brewery. But with kids, these now feel like monumental feats. Fitzcarraldo never tried getting a toddler to sleep in a tent when the sun wouldn’t set for another four hours.

As a new father, I was so worried about whether or not my kids would like what I like that I never stopped to consider how my relationship to those activities might change. If you’re really looking to kickstart an identity crisis, ask yourself what happens when you no longer enjoy the things that have come to define you. Will I still want to go camping when I know it’ll take a week to emotionally recover? How much fun is a bike ride with an extra 40 pounds in the trailer behind you? Is skiing still fun when you spend more time passing out snacks than skiing? Each time the planning cycle for a new trip starts, these calculations begin spinning in my head and I assess whether the effort is worth the outcome. Is the time spent planning, packing, traveling, crying, fighting, seething, worth it in the end?

Given everything I’ve just said (and this may come as a surprise), I have found the answer is almost always yes. As time passes after these trips, the tantrums fade, and I remember my three-year-old singing Moana on an old-growth stump in a national park. Classic Type 2 fun.

I didn’t arrive at this answer until months after Kevin asked me to write something for the newsletter. When I first put these thoughts down, it was a therapeutic rant, fresh off our return home. This essay would have looked very different had I left it there: harsh and untrue. I began questioning the source of my guilt. What’s wrong with me? Is it just me? Are the other dads actually having as much fun as they seem? We’ve all met the dads whose identity is complaining about their kids. I didn’t want to be one of those, and I’m NOT one of those. I know how fortunate we are to have this short time with them at this age, but still struggle to adjust to a new pace so different than before. I spent decades optimizing my world to minimize friction as much as possible. But nothing creates more friction than adding a couple of kids into the mix.

When planning these trips, I dwell, I seethe, and I dig in my heels because I know the effort and the outcome are different than what they used to be. Expectations are tricky: my expectations for time off still lag behind the reality of vacations with two small children. Inside of me, there is still a battle of “doing this for me” vs “doing this for them,” and I sometimes feel I am losing at both, but the truth is, I am slowly learning that I win either way.

As we’ve gotten further from this trip (and taken several more to greater success), we continue to learn what works and what doesn’t. There’s a common saying that “tragedy plus time equals comedy.” I’m not considering my family vacation anything close to a tragedy—but distance has allowed me to view the trip in a gentler light and even laugh a little bit about the experience.

So, I ask myself again, “Is this fun?”

Sometimes, it just depends on which type you mean.

3 things to read this week

1. “Have We Destroyed Childhood?” by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker. Imagine your other half constantly tracking your location, having regular meetings with your boss and demanding a full debrief of your day over the dinner table. That’s the thought experiment psychologist Peter Gray opens his new book, Restoring Childhood, with—and it sets him on a collision course with Jonathan Haidt. The Anxious Generation blamed the phone; Gray blames the decades of shrinking freedom that came before it: in one example, 86% of English primary schoolchildren walked home alone in 1971; by 2010, it was 25%.

2. “America’s Biggest Dating Company Is Betting on Trad Values” by Faith Hill in The Atlantic. In 2013, 34% of singles surveyed said women should be their children’s primary caregiver. This year, more than half did, and among Gen Z men it was 70%. Match Group (the company behind Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid) is betting on that shift with Upward, a relaunched dating app—formerly targeted at Christian users—that includes a “chivalry mode” and a “marriage timeline” setting. I’m regularly reporting on the men who are pushing fatherhood forward, but it seems that some folks are yearning for a return to what Upward’s marketing calls “chivalrymaxxing.”

3. “The unsettling rise of grandmAIslop” by Amanda Hoover in Business Insider. Boomers may be slower to adopt AI than younger generations, but they’ve finally found one use for it: turning photos of their grandkids into AI caricatures, ’80s photo parodies and personalised children’s books. Hoover talks to the parents quietly panicking about where their children’s faces end up. One media professor argues the generational split isn’t about tech skills—it’s about how different generations grew up thinking about privacy. “We’re losing the tenuous grasp over our own images. And for some, their families are the first ones to give that control away.”

Good Dadvice

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One of the best decisions I ever made was inviting my friend Aaron to punch me in the face.

It was almost four years ago. My daughter had recently started boxing: a kids’ class at a local gym, one evening a week with other kids her age. I told Aaron how great it had been for her: improving her confidence, meeting new friends, and learning how to throw a punch, should she ever need to.

So he started sending his daughter. And while our offspring spent an hour running, jumping, and punching (at an age-appropriate level, in a controlled environment), we’d sit in a local plaza, talk over beers, and whatever tapa del día was on the board. We’d wander back, pick the kids up, and they’d show us what they’d been practising: the hooks and uppercuts they threw, the bobs and weaves to get out of the way.

Yup, it helped their confidence. Maybe a little too much? Soon after came the smack talk: “HEY OLD MEN … now we could beat you in a fight.” Those are fighting words, girls. They’re probably the most direct fighting words you can use. Our weak egos could only take so much, so we bit the bullet and signed up—twice a week, roping in two other friends who also wanted to start.

Four friends, with very distinct second places: restaurant-runner, journalist, author, whatever-the-hell I am. Workplaces that range from the quiet desks of public libraries to the fiery kitchens of Michelin restaurants. We’d never have met each other through work. In a field, with music blaring, sure. But the boxing gym became our new third place.

We signed up to meet every Tuesday and Thursday morning. Sessions alternated unpredictably between cardio and technique. You’d never know which would be waiting for you as you walked in, bleary-eyed. On some cardio days, I’d leave the gym half-expecting to throw up on the way home, my attempt to plank until failure looking like a Full Metal Jacket outtake.

We worked through trainers: Guillem, a particularly sadistic teacher who was considering quitting to join the local police force; Richy, a former boxer who retired in his mid-20s to avoid getting thumped in the face and protect his exemplary jawline for casting directors. We ended up with two regulars: Yomer, a semi-professional (and fellow dad) from the Dominican Republic, and Mounir, a young man who’d recently celebrated his 20th birthday after arriving in Barcelona. The owner, Frank—a professional boxer who has gone the distance with many of Europe’s best—baptised us “Team Daddy.” (Half of us didn’t have kids, but why should the facts get in the way of a great moniker?) Frank would watch instructors put us through our paces, constantly delighted by our laughable levels of fitness, our abysmal attempts to punch in a manner that might be mistaken for “technique.” Watching us spar must have felt to them like watching my son’s judo practice: “Bless, they’re all trying so hard, isn’t this adorable?”

Sparring a friend is a particularly singular experience. When was the last time you were in a fight, throwing and dodging punches, with anyone, let alone someone you know? You don the headgear, tap in the mouthguard, and watch from your corner of the ring a man who, every other minute of the week, was one of your boys, wondering how hard he would try to hit you today. Now in my forties, my body isn’t quite what it once was—and it wasn’t all that much to boast about back then—so it wasn’t long until the injuries arrived. I fractured my collarbone and was in pain for a month. I bruised a rib, which proved worse, disrupting my sleep for weeks. “I’m not in pain all the time,” I told the offending friend when he offered his condolences in our group chat. “It only hurts when I breathe in, so only half the time.”

Mum passed away a few months after we started, and I took time off from the classes. When I returned, I had a stark realisation: it was impossible to cry and punch at the same time. I was emotionally wrung out; being physically wrung out felt like a relief. The camaraderie of the group spilt out of the sessions, on the walk to work afterwards, arguing with one of the quartet because he’d been busted watching a classic boxing match on YouTube; in the group chat as we’d laugh at just how laughable the instructors found us that week.

What’s great about becoming a regular at a third place—whether it’s a gym, bar, coffee shop or barbershop—is that you slowly become part of the community, the beating heart of the place. We were invited to travel to casinos and gymnasiums up and down the Catalan coast to watch our trainers hammer seven shades of shit out of other boxers, opponents who were presumably working in other gyms, with other dads. Team Daddy’s family (and restaurant) commitments meant a Saturday night in a casino two hours outside the city wouldn’t work. Then a fight in the city was announced, with both Yomer and Mounir on the card, so Aaron and I decided to show up in their corner.

General tickets were €18. Front row was €42. We decided to push the boat out. Yomer would be up against a fella named Kevin; Mounir, much further down the card, would be fighting who-the-hell-knows: “All I know is that I’ll be on around 8pm,” he told us. We took the metro to the outskirts of the city, unsure what would lie at the end of the dotted blue line I was following. It was a school gymnasium, eerily quiet at the entrance. Were we in the right place? We needn’t have worried—the hall was packed, with rows of plastic chairs folded out around the ring and wooden bleachers on one side giving the crowd an elevated perspective. We were ushered to our seats and watched two fights before the MC announced Mounir was next. Looking towards Aaron, I saw his face reflecting exactly what I felt in the pit of my stomach: butterflies. “I’m a mess … this strange combination of nerves and pride,” I offered. “This is how I feel when my daughter is walking up for her end-of-year drum recital.”

Aaron felt the same. Whatever was happening here was firing all our dad neurons. Mounir made light work of his opponent. He was fast; the other guy wasn’t, and struggled to land a single solid punch on him.

Yomer came an hour later, a fight that felt more visceral: a different weight class, more muscle and power, crunching hits that made my rib and collarbone echo in despair. On the edge of our seats, we cheered as Yomer pummelled my namesake—the other Kevin pushed deep on the ropes next to us, a right hook connecting with Kevin’s left cheekbone, beads of sweat flying through the air, glistening as the floodlights passed through them, falling to the floor mere feet from our seats. In the third round, Yomer ducked under a wild right hook, shifted his centre of gravity, put power into his hips and wound up a left body shot. It came fast, hit hard, and Kevin crumpled to the floor.

Heading back to the metro, heads still buzzing from the evening, we vowed to do it again. It was the best night out we’d had all year—a completely new experience, and how often do you get to do those these days? I started boxing because my daughter learned to throw a hook and threatened to use it. I carried on because it was good for my physical health. But the mental health benefits came smuggled in the back, under the guise of fists and friends.

As Aaron and I got onto the train, we noticed Mounir and a friend across the carriage.

“You look worse than me, and I just fought three rounds,” he jabbed.

“You may have fought three rounds,” I hooked back. “But you don’t have two kids.”

3 things to read this week

A lot of good parenting fodder in the paper of record recently.

1. “I Once Celebrated Marriage. Things Have Changed.” by Curtis Sittenfeld in The New York Times. What would you say to the about-to-be-married version of yourself? Sittenfeld gets to find out, annotating her 2015 essay eleven years and one divorce later. The certainty is gone; in its place is the painful admission that she and her ex hurt each other badly. Come for the story, stay for the excellent web design and UX work.

2. “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?” by Nikole Hannah-Jones in The New York Times Magazine. Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones put her kindergartner on the cover of the Times Magazine to explain why she’d chosen a poor, segregated school for her. She still gets emails from parents saying it changed their minds. Now her daughter, Najya, is 16 and has been on both sides of New York’s divide: years of low expectations, then a selective high school where she was suddenly behind and casually insulted. Hannah-Jones doesn’t let herself, or anyone else, off the hook: “There is no absolution here. Not for me. Not for you. Not for any of us.”

3. “Her Brand Was Tradwife. Now She’s Divorced.” by Amanda Hess in The New York Times. I’ve long harboured a theory that the tradwife movement is being puppeteered by conservative men behind the scenes. Amanda Hess’s profile of Bernadine Bluntly, a former trad influencer and mother of six, doesn’t prove it, but it does give a look inside one marriage: she made the content and the money, and her husband signed off on it as the boss. She left in 2025 and now warns other women off the life she promoted. She says of the years before: “I felt like I was being erased.”

Tell Me About You

It’s been years since I last ran a survey here. Back then, I learned some interesting things, like 1 in 8 of you were women, and you really didn’t want more emails in your inbox. It’s been a while, so I’d love to hear from you again. Please fill out this survey; it’ll take 5 minutes, and I’ll send four dads (or maybe even three dads and one mum, if the ratio has shifted) $25 vouchers for bookshop.org or your local equivalent.

Take the 2026 TNF Survey Now!

Great, Now I’m Crying Again

@corybookerHere’s to breaking cycles - to proving our past is not our destiny. Here’s to healing. To growth. To redemption. To turning wounds into wisdom and trials into triumph. And here’s to giving our children what we all deserved: roots to ground them, and wings to let them soar.

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If you haven’t picked it up yet, or you thought, “oh yeah I’ll get that” before your kid’s latest chaotic event pushed it out of your brain, here’s a nudge. And if you bought it, only to leave it atop one of your home’s perilous tsundoku piles, this is your reminder to get stuck in (and then maybe tell a friend or two about it afterwards).

Enough about my book. Let’s talk about an even better one.

All By My Lonesome

Vacation this summer meant attempting a mental break from the internal chatter around my own book. After three years of work, and the first six months of the year spent waking up, going to sleep, and waking again at 4 a.m. to think about it, I decreed I’d spend August doing literally anything else.

So I got lost in the words of others. I took ’s advice to tackle a long read for a long hot season, and saddled up with Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. Austin had recommended it when I interviewed him for the podcast; his endorsement echoed via others with similarly unimpeachable tastes: Colin Nagy at Why Is This Interesting, Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker, Kevin Kelly at Recommendo, Michael Williams at A Continuous Lean. In 2022, Stephen King declared it “probably my favourite book of all time.” Netflix just announced that they’ve ordered a new adaptation of the book, from the showrunners of the just-dropped-yesterday East of Eden miniseries.

For a piece of literature to be spoken of in such reverent tones, almost forty years after it was released, suggests it is more than a mere Western and has particular relevance to the moment we find ourselves in. But tackling an 836-page doorstopper is daunting. I tried—and you might say failed, but I’ll optimistically say paused—with The Power Broker in 2024, when 99% Invisible ran a companion podcast, and folks shared how-to guides for dissecting it into smaller, public transport-friendly chunks.

Lonesome Dove accompanied me on an adventure of its own, as we set out for the great plains of the United Kingdom. As I was belting up for the journey, another dad walked through the aisle, toddler under one arm, book under the other. I gave him a nod as he walked past—one part acknowledgement of the long narrative journey we’d set out on, the second in solidarity with a dad flying solo with a young ‘un.

I came in expecting a Western. I hadn’t quite prepared myself for a visceral dissection of the American Dream, set half a century before that phrase was thrust into popular culture. McMurtry—who would win the Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, before later winning the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for Brokeback Mountain—told The New York Times that his goal with the book was to de-romanticise the legend of the cowboy. “I don’t feel that it’s a myth that pertains, and since it’s a part of my heritage I feel it’s a legitimate task to criticize it.”

I am far from the first writer to pick up this book, feel it resonate strongly, and question “why this book, and why now?” Last year, Michael Sebastian wrote in Esquire Magazine, asking Why Is Everyone Reading Lonesome Dove? He suggested it could be down to how it brings forward the indomitable spirit of persistence that resides within:

“There are moments in which we fail to act in the manner we expect of ourselves—we’re cowards when we should be brave, liars when we should be truthful, weak when we should be stalwart. Then this notion enters our heads: we will never again be the man we wanted to be […] When the time comes to test our mettle, and we fail, the best possible scenario is that we recognize it, learn from the experience, and push ahead. We have to keep trying.”

Could be. But my read was a little different. I am, forevermore, guilty of seeing things through the New Balance-tinted sneakers of fatherhood. And paternity runs deep through the book, with dads presented in a harsh light that might have been the norm in the Old West, was still prevalent when the book was published in 1985, but is a much harder pill to swallow today. These characters may embody elements of the rugged, loyal, outdoorsy man you aspire to. But they are not the fathers we lionise. That shaped much of my experience with the book, because sometimes anti-role models—vividly painted pictures of the dads we don’t want to be—can be just as powerful as positive role models.

[A few mild spoilers here. Skip ahead to the embedded YouTube video if you’d rather go in blind.]

The book tells the tale of two former Texas Rangers: Woodrow F. Call and Augustus McCrae, known as “Call” and “Gus” to their merry band of men, cowboys and cattle herders who took up the role as the Texas-Indian Wars began to wind down. When I tell you that the 1989 miniseries perfectly cast Tommy Lee Jones as Call, and Robert Duvall as Gus, you should get them fairly quickly. Gus is a man who enjoys life’s simple pleasures, unencumbered by the heavy weight of ambition and expectation. He tells a paramour that “If you want one thing too much, it’s likely to be a disappointment. The healthy way is to learn to like the everyday things.” And those everyday things he enjoys? Sitting on his porch, getting drunk, and flirting with women.

Call is the yin to Gus’s yang—a man deeply unhappy with his lot, who “never seemed to need any of the things other humans needed, like sleep or women. Life for Call was work, and he seemed to think everyone else ought to see it the same way.” As a Texas Ranger, he had purpose, fulfilment, a sense of meaning. And then the war ended, the work dried up, and all he was left with was himself. So what’s a man to do?

If Blaise Pascal was right, and “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” then Lonesome Dove is that writ large. You spend the early chapters settling into life in a small border town in Texas—lazy days, long sunsets, the comings and goings of regulars shuttling into the Dry Bean Saloon, drunks at the bar, ladies of the night in the rooms above. What seems like a good old life is interrupted as an old friend appears, a cowboy bringing news of pastures way up North, a place called Montana: perfect for raising and selling cattle.

Call immediately decides this is what he needs. A bigger opportunity, a final paycheck. Unfulfilled with his life in Texas, his pioneer heart masks an escape from responsibility as a desire for adventure, a dissatisfaction with life as it is. If it is true that “wherever you go, there you are,” Call is about to find that out for himself—but not before he rallies a posse to travel with him, promising them that the grass is literally greener on the other side of the United States.

As you might imagine, things don’t go to plan. That’s something you should experience for yourself (seriously, go read this book), but I want to call out the fathers in this book, notable mostly for their absence. Attempting to take his place among literature’s all-time deadbeat dads, Call walks out on a prostitute he fell in love with—and maybe the only woman he ever loved—leaving her with a child: a boy she names Newt. Newt grows up, joins Call’s posse, and is generally understood by the rest of the group as Call’s son, but Call never tells Newt this and passes up every opportunity to acknowledge him as his heir. The words just won’t come. He gives Newt his favourite rifle, his prized mare, but not his name.

Unlike Gus, who is happy with his lot, Call suffers throughout the book from what Buddhists call dukkha: the innate dissatisfaction we are all born with, the one we can only make peace with by actively battling it every day. [A more major spoiler ahead—skip this paragraph if you’d rather go in blind.] This discontent is laid bare towards the end of the book, when Gus, on his deathbed, asks Call to carry his body all the way back to Texas, to the small outcropping where Gus once sat watching sunsets with a woman he loved. Call, out of loyalty to a dying friend, does it—turning his back on the new life he trailed through rain and snow to reach, and on the living son who, on the cusp of adulthood, still needs his father so desperately. When a reporter later calls him a man of vision, Call’s reply is the bleakest line in the book: “Yes, a hell of a vision.” Gus had seen it coming: “You should have died in the line of duty, Woodrow,” his friend tells him early in the ride. “You’d know how to do that fine. The problem is you don’t know how to live.”

The Good Old Days

This summer wasn’t just for books. I took on an essential fatherhood project: the first watch-through of the American version of The Office with my daughter. We wrapped on the ninth season around the same time I was finishing the book. In the finale, Andy Bernard—a character I am middling on at best, sitting in my C-tier somewhere behind Bob Vance—drops this stone-cold bomb:

“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

It is a line as much about making that show as the stories in it—you just know they had a blast making it. This might be my fourth rewatch, which is still way behind Billie Eilish’s 30, but I’m fairly sure Billie didn’t spend most of 1993 wearing down a VHS recording of Marge vs the Monorail. Bob Odenkirk would certainly agree with Andy’s sentiment. Comedian Mike Birbiglia interviewed the Better Call Saul star last year and asked him, “Who are you jealous of?” Bob’s reply is worth watching in full, if you haven’t seen it:

“Anybody who’s still got little kids at home growing up. There’s no question: I knew what I was doing when I had kids growing up. I was being a dad. I mean, that was my job, and I didn’t have to ask myself ‘What am I doing here? How can I be a part of this world? How can I be meaningful today?’ I didn’t have to ask that question because the fucking answer is ‘Pick up everything between here and the door and make sure they get to school and have a laugh with them.’ I understood my purpose.”

And this is where the conversation swings to Gary Vee. Wow, didn’t think this day would ever come.

Earlier this week, Anton, a dad from Ireland, dropped this image into the Dadscord. And a thought entered my head, a collection of neurons that I’m fairly sure hasn’t fired in that unique combination before, that said: “Huh, Gary Vaynerchuk might be onto something there.”

Actual dollar amount notwithstanding, and acknowledging that $57,000 means something entirely different in a dense metropolis than a small town, I can say I have known both kinds of people in this picture. My circle of 8 million dollar dads is infinitesimally smaller than Gary Vee’s, but I’ve witnessed a similar pattern. I’ve worked for managers making 8 times my salary (which, for the record, is not and has never been remotely close to a milli) who were taking home pay packages that would make Manchester City directors blush, and were deeply unhappy people, especially outside of the large windows and bountiful beanbags of the office. I’ve known dads whose cost of living grew as rapidly as their salary, who painted themselves into a picture-perfect life—behind the wheel of a large automobile (on a monthly lease), in a beautiful house (with an eye-melting mortgage)—and who now wonder: well, how can I ever earn less than this?

Does money buy you happiness? A landmark 2010 study from Daniel Kahneman (yes, that one) and Angus Deaton (no, not that one) found that it does, up to a point, before flatlining at around $75,000 a year—$115,000 in today’s money. These findings were revised in 2023 when Kahneman discovered that happiness only plateaus for the unhappiest fifth of people, people named in the study as “financially well-off but unhappy.” Gary Vee’s millionaire mates, in other words. (I am reminded, as I often am in these moments, of Irish comedian Spike Milligan, who pleaded, “All I ask is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.”) The rest of us are running to stand still: in the year to August, US pay rose 3.7% while prices rose 3.4%—a real-terms raise of around $4 a week—while fuel across the EU is up 23.8%, and in the US is topping $4.40 a gallon.

The post, to our #tweets-and-memes channel, kicked off a conversation deeper than our dad meme thread has ever seen. Some dads agreed: “there are all types of wealth and some are far greater than others,” offered one, “I never feel richer than after a fun family day,” suggested another; others questioned the premise: “alright Gary, wire me a million dollars then” or “A little rich [no pun intended, from this dad, or maybe, given the vibe in the Dadscord, pun absolutely intended] that one of the big pushers of hustle culture is like ‘bro chill out.’”

The reality of the weight we carry as dads is omnipresent. Dads on the same salary for five years, waiting for a promised promotion while everything around them gets more expensive. Others holding tightly to jobs amid the ever-present threat of redundancy. These are not men chasing Montana; there is a world of difference between the dads who are seeking enough and the dads who can’t stop wanting more—and the trap Gary is describing, the one Call rides straight into, only opens once you have enough. So let’s not shed a tear for those millionaire dads! [woody-harrelson-wipes-eyes-with-bills.gif]. But let’s use their tales as warning signs. Ambition has driven them to where they are. But it keeps driving them forward, like Call, beyond a life that seems pretty idyllic to any onlooker.

In 2025, I wrote about the corruption of ambition, an early draft of what would later form a huge chunk of the book’s chapter on career, a piece that could have as easily been about Woodrow Call as any other antihero dad in the piece, dads who:

“Jump back on the hedonic treadmill, point another marker onto the horizon, and take a new definition of success that is just like the old one—everything will be fixed once we arrive here—a road that extends off into infinity, or until you die—whichever happens first.”

I spent years on that treadmill. It’s now been nearly a decade since I stepped off it, weaning myself off Big Tech’s sweet, juicy teat. In a good year, I earn a third of what I once did. In a bad year, it’s somewhere between a quarter and a fifth. (And let’s not talk about 2020, OK? We all agreed on that.) There are days when I wonder about the path not taken—the one where I decided to stay in the US, continuing to chase the version of the American Dream I’ve inherited, gulping down the Kool Aid—from both Google and capitalism-at-large—on that perilous journey for more.

But in the space of a few weeks, I got Lonesome Dove, an earnest Saul Goodman, a moment in the finale of The Office, and a Gary Vaynerchuk post shared in the Dadscord. That these four sources arrived in my life at roughly the same time was something I chose to notice and acknowledge here. They encouraged me to remember that—even on the toughest days—life is good: my kids are healthy, I live with a person I love, I have friends I like to hang out with, I do work I find fulfilling. I get to write for a group of great dads figuring these things out. (Sometimes, I get to work with them too.) I could have easily spent the last three thousand words, and twelve-and-change hours, making a list of all I am lacking and all the ways I feel hard done by. But I’d rather do this: a meditation on gratitude, and a love letter to a great book.

Buddhists believe that dukkha is not a permanent punishment, but a condition that can be understood and overcome. We must choose, every day, to move beyond our cravings for something better: gazing towards the horizon at the impossible prospect of a perfect life, whilst ignoring how pretty fucking great the one that sits before us is. If you take anything from this, accept it as an invitation for your brain to luxuriate in the always fleeting, possibly illusory, warm bath of an idea that we just might be living in the good old days we seek, and that one day we’ll look back on these moments as the best we ever had.

Signing off.

This email should be considered a personal recommendation of two of the following three things: Lonesome Dove, The Office and Gary Vee. I’ll let you decide which two.

This week’s essay was brought to you by the pressure of a self-imposed weekly deadline. How was it for you?

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Welcome back to season three of The New Fatherhood podcast.

Life with children can often feel overwhelming. And, in a way, that’s what this episode is all about.

But before you hit play, I have to confess something.

This interview was recorded three years ago. Not last month. Not over the summer. Three years ago, I sat down with a writer and father of three Jesse J Anderson, also known as ADHD Jesse. I asked him everything I could think of about ADHD and came away from that conversation promising myself that I was going to book myself an assessment to find out if I had ADHD too.

And then I did nothing. For three years. Why? Because nothing was on fire. There was no deadline. Nobody was waiting on it. Jesse was generous with his time and his experience, and I repaid him by leaving our conversation in edit purgatory for years.

I’ve always struggled to understand my relationship with effort and output. I’ve been writing the newsletter, almost weekly, for five years. I wrote a book. I’ve read every productivity book there is. I built systems for everything. But somewhere in my thirties it started to dawn on me that they weren’t systems at all—they were coping mechanisms. Scaffolding I’d built around something I couldn’t see and had never named.

Here’s what my life actually looks like behind the curtain: I can’t start anything without a deadline thundering towards me. The newsletter goes out once a week, and that’s the only reason it goes out at all. I’m terrified of being told no in a way that is completely out of proportion. There’s a name for this, you’ll hear Jesse explain it, and when I first came across it I had to close my laptop to go for a walk. It’s why I can spend years writing a book and then find it almost physically impossible to send an email that tells anyone it exists.

There’s a gap I think about a lot. And it isn’t the gap between being a good dad and a bad one. But the gap between the dad you are, in your worst moment, and the one you aspire to be. We treat that gap as a character flaw. But what if it isn’t? What if something has always been there, invisible, pulling the strings—and you’ve spent forty years blaming yourself?

Jesse knows all about that gap. In this episode, you’ll hear us talking about t-shirt tags and lunchtime detention. About the four things that actually motivate the ADHD brain, and why “because it’s important” isn’t one of them. And we talk about watching your own kid struggle with the same things you struggle with, and how it feels to know precisely what’s coming.

Make sure to listen to the end, because when this is over, I’ll tell you what happened when I finally did the thing I promised all those years ago.

This season of The New Fatherhood is presented by Matic. Matic was founded by two fathers who love technology and wanted to spend less time cleaning the house and more time playing with their kids. That’s about as on-brand for this newsletter as it gets. It’s a floor-cleaning robot that vacuums and mops on its own, builds a 3D map of your house using cameras on board, and keeps all that data on the device rather than in the cloud. WIRED gave it a 10/10, the only perfect score their reviewer had given in over a decade. Readers of The New Fatherhood get a free annual bag pass; go to maticrobots.com/fatherhood and take vacuuming and mopping off your chore list.

Subscribe to the Podcast

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

YouTube

Pocket Casts

Where to Find Jesse

• Extra Focus newsletter at extrafocus.com

• Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD at extrafocusbook.com

Episode References

• Oliver Burkeman TNF episode on productivity

• Dr William Dodson’s interest-based nervous system (NICU framework)

• Jesse’s Four Cs of Motivation

• An introduction to rejection sensitive dysphoria

• Edward Hallowell’s theory on recognition euphoria

• Superparenting for ADD by Edward M. Hallowell and Peter S. Jensen

Timecodes

0:00 — intro: why this episode is three years late

5:04 — getting diagnosed at 36

8:00 — rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD)

11:39 — parenting kids with ADHD

19:29 — the Four C’s of motivation

26:34 — positive reinforcement as superfuel

28:13 — presented by Matic

33:46 — advice for parents: assume the best intentions

36:41 — experimenting with medication

43:54 — Kevin’s own ADHD assessment

Credits

Host: Kevin Maguire

Managing Producer/Editor: Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Sound Editor: Sam Williams

Theme Music: SOHN

As we entered the dog days of the summer holidays—marking off the eleven weeks and four days since my kids last crossed the threshold of their school gate, but hey, who’s counting—I was browsing through five years’ worth of “back to school” essays, finding the same guilt running through almost all of them:

Here’s the thing. We all know we shouldn’t wish away the last days of summer—calculating the remaining time until they’re finally standing awkwardly on the front doorstep, forcing out a smile, for that quintessential “first day back” photo. But you can’t help calendar-watch. In the last few days, I’ve had countless friends message to share their delight in being back on the school run, and having a clean, quiet home to return to. I feel guilty thinking about it, and wrong writing about it. Because the number of summers we’ll spend with our kids is finite, and one day they won’t want to spend them with us.

That essay was four years ago. Each summer that passes brings that thought experiment closer to reality. This summer my daughter, now twelve, was fairly independent: woke up in the morning, binged a few episodes of whatever sitcom she was currently streaming, made herself breakfast, spent some time on a craft project or seeing a friend. My son, at seven, still required some “management oversight” but, with a nudge in the right direction, could often keep himself occupied.

We were mere hours away from the start of the school year—bags being packed, pencil cases being filled—when I started to feel ropey. Sore throat, constant headache, complete exhaustion. I initially assumed man flu, or that my body was preparing itself for the inevitable back-to-school crash. But after two days of worsening symptoms, and on a gentle recommendation from my wife, I dug deep into the bathroom drawer and busted out the old COVID tests, preparing the self-lobotomisation ritual of sticking that dreaded swab up my nostrils.

And, lo and behold, the second-most-terrifying two blue lines on a plastic stick told me I was positive. Cue a week of isolation in a bedroom on my own, and the endless cycle between needing to rest and subsequently feeling guilty about resting when there’s so much to do. As of today, I’m eleven days on from the positive test, feeling about 70% better, with the classic list of lingering symptoms: brain fog, muscle pain, exhaustion after minor exertion.

Longtime readers may recall my ongoing battle with Long COVID, or as they call it here in Spain, COVID persistente. I’m hopeful it won’t come back this time, but right now I am feeling, as I did on the eve of turning 40, “like a battered iPhone from generations past; overused, scuffed, but still loved; desperately calling out for an upgrade; a battery that only charges halfway no matter how long it’s been plugged in, easily exhausted after just a few hours of activity.”

But I’m getting there. I’m back in the chair, writing this newsletter, for one. I’m back on the school run, for another. During this forced downtime, I’ve been reflecting on the responsibility of care all parents sign up to the moment their kids arrive. For decades, it flows one way. Then somewhere in adulthood, it reverses—we watch our own parents get older, and begin to care for them as they lose the ability to care for themselves. Last week showed me this crossover can arrive in glimpses, earlier than expected.

Being sick and being a parent is a shitty combination, like drinking orange juice right after brushing your teeth: what do you mean I have to care for them and myself in the state that I’m in? But as they get older and fend for themselves, it turns out they’ll look out for you too. My daughter came in regularly to ask if I needed anything: water, paracetamol, food. Last Sunday was rough—I ended up collapsing in bed around 6 pm, exhausted after an intense day of parenting, and my son came in to see if I was OK.

“Would you like it if I read you a book?”

I couldn’t think of anything better. He went back into his room, pulled out a few favourites, and sat next to me on the bed, reading children’s stories until I dozed off.

And I have to admit, it felt pretty nice to be looked after by them for a change.

3 things to read this week

1. “My Son’s Math Homework is Essentially Just Pokémon” by Will Oremus in The Atlantic. On the danger of “edutainment” apps, where the author watches his son playing a school-sanctioned maths app called Prodigy and observes that “in about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions.”

2. “Advice for Artists Whose Parents Want Them to Be Engineers” by Viet Thanh Nguyen in The New York Times. Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, wonders “What happens when our parents’ definition of happiness makes our happiness impossible?”

3. “Help! My Kindergarten is All In on AI” by Matt Stieb in Intelligencer. This piece was published in May, before Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on AI in NYC schools up to eighth grade, but it highlights some of the worries parents are raising as educational institutions integrate LLMs into various aspects of learning.

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

It ain’t great being sick again. But at least I got to re-use one of my favourite Tony Johnson illustrations. How did you like this week’s issue? Any typos are COVID’s fault.

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Italia 90 was the first real football tournament I remember. I was seven years old.

I grew up in Manchester, England. But I was, and will always remain, the son of Irish immigrants. Twice a year, every year, we’d head home—it was always home, in a way England would never be—to visit our grandparents, to see the many uncles and aunts my parents once shared a home with, to spend time with as many of my 47 first cousins as we could. At three years old, I was dropped off at nursery with an Irish accent, having learned to talk by imitating my parents and extended family.

In a bout of synchronicity, my first World Cup would also be the first for the Irish football team, finally qualifying after 56 years of unsuccessful attempts. It was a moment of national pride. The team came together under the watchful gaze of “Big Jack Charlton,” who had previously been part of 1966’s World Cup-winning England team. Ireland had a fantastic run, in what would still, thirty-six years later, be their finest ever World Cup finish: one of the last eight teams in the tournament, quarter-finalists, gallantly losing 1-0 to the hosts on a Saturday night in Rome.

The team were greeted as heroes on their return to Ireland, with half a million Dubliners lining the streets and waving the tricolour flag. Jack Charlton became a national hero—a rare Englishman who was celebrated without an Irish ancestry; who stayed English throughout, and was celebrated nonetheless. For those unfamiliar with the history of Irish-English diplomatic relations, this was far from the norm: Ireland was the country where the English learned to cut their colonial teeth, perfecting their tools of conquest—plantation, dispossession, martial law—before exporting them across the Empire. For a family who grew up in the northern counties, garrisoned by British troops well within living memory, an Englishman becoming a national hero was no small thing.

But in those balmy Italian evenings, a new generation of Irish heroes was born, with an Englishman among them. And a lifelong love of football was embedded in a young boy that continues to this day.

2.

Jack Charlton’s younger brother Bobby also won a medal in 1966. But, for my money, his greatest achievement would come two years later, as he was part of the first English club to lift the European Cup (what we know now as the Champions League) with Manchester United. He did it playing alongside George Best, a player who had done the opposite of what Jack Charlton would do years later: born in Belfast, heading to England, a key part of the team I’d eventually be born into adoration of.

Pelé called Best the greatest player in the world. His performance on the pitch, his ability to hold the ball close, waltz past defenders, and drive his team to trophies would later be echoed in Maradona, Messi, and the myriad players who would wear the term GOAT at some point in their careers. But, in a behaviour that would become oft-imitated in years to come, he was as famous off the pitch as he was on it. He’d regularly be photographed by British paparazzi leaving clubs in the morning, with a beautiful model (or two) hanging off his arm. He claimed to have slept with four Miss Worlds, although I can only find details of two: Mary Stävin, a Swedish blonde who would later appear as a Bond girl in both Octopussy and A View to a Kill; and American Marjorie Wallace, who would be stripped of her title 103 days after winning it, having been scandalised in the press for having an affair with both Best and Welsh heartthrob Tom Jones (one would have to assume not at the same time).

Best scored spectacular goals against Portuguese teams with such regularity that the local media gave him a nickname of their own: O Quinto Beatle (”The Fifth Beatle”). Like John Lennon, he’d eventually come to have an airport named after him—something that was, until very recently, a badge to be worn with pride. He lived a life defined by excess, once telling a journalist, “I spent most of my money on booze, birds, and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.” Best spent Christmas 1984 in prison after receiving a three-month sentence for drunk driving and assaulting a police officer. He dealt with alcoholism his entire life, eventually dying from complications because of it. Despite that, he was a hero to so many in my family. But he was only ever a hero I inherited. It would be many years later when a Frenchman, wearing the same crest on his chest, would capture my heart the way Best did for so many of my Irish uncles and father.

Eric Cantona was the ultimate antihero: collar up, defiant, raw brilliance, dripping with what today’s kids would call aura. “Eric the King,” as the flags flying across the Stretford End would proclaim. “1966 was a great year for English football,” recalled a memorable Nike billboard outside Old Trafford. “Eric was born.”

But, once again, we were offered an imperfect hero, with blemishes of his own. On the pitch, his moments of genius would regularly be interrupted by bouts of rage—stamping on players as they came in for tackles, throwing punches at defenders who’d pushed him far enough to let the red mist descend. In January 1995, weeks after I turned 12, Cantona was sent off in a game against Crystal Palace. An opposing fan ran to the side of the pitch and screamed that Cantona should “fuck off back to France you French motherfucker.” Cantona, in seconds, launched himself over the advertising hoardings and placed the sole of his right football boot, and the studs attached to it, squarely into the fan’s chest. He’d earn himself a £30,000 fine (shattering the record for the most severe sanction ever handed down to a player in the English league), an eight-month ban, and my admiration forever.

Years later, reflecting on his career, Cantona shared, “I have a lot of good moments. But my favourite is when I kicked the hooligan.” Any regrets? Rather than offering the classic French Non, je ne regrette rien, Cantona only wished “I’d have loved to kick him even harder.” These were the heroes I was handed: majestic but broken, adulterers, alcoholics and brawlers. I held them close. Because what else was on offer? But if modern fatherhood sees us reckoning with what we’ve inherited, and actively deciding what to hand on to our children, we must ask: are these the heroes our children deserve?

3.

I’ve watched every World Cup since that first one, back in 1990.

But this year, it hit different.

It wasn’t just that we live in Spain now. It’s that I live with a boy who is more obsessed with twenty-two men kicking a synthetic leather ball than I ever was. My son’s passion for football kicked into another gear over the last 18 months. All he wants to do is play it, talk about it, collect cards, trade them with friends, and total strangers, at the weekly swap meetup here in Barcelona.

The crass commercialisation of the World Cup succumbed to new depths this year, both on the pitch and off it: hydration breaks so US broadcasters could squeeze more ads into the game, the gauche Louis Vuitton trophy case they awkwardly unveiled at the final, two pages of the Panini sticker album that could only be filled with the stickers found on the inside of Coca-Cola labels, leading fans to start peeling them off in-store, grabbing the stickers and leaving the sugar-laden drink behind.

We picked up a sticker book of our own—now officially designated an endangered species after FIFA announced their 60-year partnership will end after the 2030 World Cup—and got to work getting it filled. When the tournament started, I printed out the BBC wall chart, enlarged it in Pixelmator so it would cover four A4 sheets, and carefully trimmed and glued them together. Every morning, we’d wake up, watch highlights from the overnight games, have our breakfast, fill in the chart, before falling down YouTube rabbit holes of great goals from World Cups past.

We watched every Spain game that wasn’t broadcast at stupid o’clock. The red carpet wasn’t rolled out, but the temporary mattress was—it took pride of place in the living room. Every night, he took a bathshower (our house term for “standing in the bath and getting scrubbed and sprayed whilst the handheld shower was pointing his way”), got into his pyjamas, or much more likely, the counterfeit Spanish away shirt that we bought for twenty euros en la playa, and settled in for the game.

We watched them ease through the group stages, and into cagey knockout games where super-substitute Merino broke the deadlock. They dominated in their semi-final win over Portugal, in what will almost certainly be Ronaldo’s last game—closing the door on his storied career, filled with almost every glorious moment he could have wished for, but with a gap in his cabinet, and in his heart, where he believes a World Cup medal should be.

It was all over my son’s face, and written in sweat in the Pedri shirt he asked us to wash the moment he took it off: he had fallen hopelessly in love with the Spanish team and their propulsive progress through the tournament. He had become the embodiment of a young Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch, who “fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”

On Sunday, his nerves were palpable. At a picnic with friends earlier in the afternoon, Kiko, a Spanish friend and fellow dad, asked how he was feeling.

“I think Argentina are going to win it,” Kiko suggested.

“Me too,” my son replied, a grave look painted across his face.

I went straight for the same line I use every time he expresses fear or doubt during a Marvel movie: “Don’t worry, the good guys will win.” Although this time, I wasn’t sure if I believed it myself. Argentina have long had a reputation as the villains of the tournament. They play their game channelling viveza criolla, a philosophy embodied across the team—and home country—that reflects individualism, blaming problems on others, a lack of respect for the rules and an indifference to the common good. This encourages them to play the game all the way up to, and often beyond, the accepted rules.

It was this belief that drove Diego Maradona to launch his fist—what he later proclaimed was the hand of God—into the air and score the first goal against England in 1986. This was the moment the game will always be remembered for, alongside what happened four minutes later: an individual spark of pure brilliance as he picked the ball up in his own half, spun around, ran past five players and the goalkeeper, scoring what many—myself among them—believe to be the best goal ever scored at the World Cup. In the MCU, the goodies always end the movie as victors, apart from one fateful time: when Thanos clicks his fingers and destroys half of humanity. Was the 2026 final to become Spain’s Infinity War moment?

Carles, another friend, invited us to join him to watch the game at his restaurant, along with his squad of chefs, sommeliers, waiters and washers. I arrived early, tech support on hand to set up the projector and sound system. As the rest of the family arrived, Carles handed my son something he’d been collecting for the last few weeks: a stack of Panini stickers, at least a hundred and fifty of them. They were dutifully offloaded onto the table and sorted into teams and groups as the notes of The Star-Spangled Banner reverberated around the stadium and restaurant alike, the broad stars and stripes as resonant in the shirts on the players’ backs as the flag that was hoisted above them.

90 tense minutes. Spain dominant, passing the ball around in the same tiki-taka style I watch children play in local parks and playgrounds every day, effortlessly turning defence into attack. Argentina were pressed, unable to manage even a solitary shot in normal time. Into extra time, and a goal felt imminent—and was heralded outside our window a few seconds before, the curse of watching a so-called livestream on the internet, delayed from the terrestrial broadcast arriving earlier via the airwaves. But it wasn’t to be—one of two goals disallowed during extra time.

But solace was to come. The ball came into the box and was headed back across the goal by Nico Williams, falling towards the left foot of Ferran Torres, who launched it past the goalkeeper.

The restaurant, and the rest of Spain, was sent into absolute rapture.

4.

Outside of the universes provided by Marvel and DC, heroes are in short supply for our boys. A 2025 YouGov study of 4,000 18-to-34-year-olds showed half of British and American young men were actively searching for influencers who embodied the qualities they admire—namely kindness, empathy, and compassion. The boys we are raising are looking for heroes of their own. The appetite is there. But the supply chain is broken, and when their search comes up fruitless, they end up in the manipulative arms of the worst people in the world. A 2023 study by British anti-fascism charity Hope Not Hate found that 52% of 16–17-year-old boys held a positive view of Andrew Tate. Last year, the BBC reported an increase in sexism and misogyny in British classrooms, driving teenage boys to question the authority of female teachers and harass the girls in their class.

In that world, it’s only natural that footballers would rise in stature to become the modern men of myth. They’re successful, they’re talented, they’re rich. What’s not to admire? But they are far from flawless gods. And football is a sport that, however adored, must never be beyond criticism. Fans in the 1980s used its tribalism as a mask to indulge the violent behaviour they desired. In Among the Thugs—the best book ever written about football, bar none—writer Bill Buford worked his way into the “football firms” across England that orchestrated the scenes of hooliganism that drove young men to destruction of people and property during that dark spell of football. Some of the beliefs from these years still pervade the modern game, a place where racist incitements both on and off the pitch are still painfully commonplace: take this depressingly long Wikipedia list of racism in football, which spawns far too many racism in [country x] subpages, and runs right up to the present day—a tournament that saw black footballers abused by opposing fans, former players, and even sitting Senators.

Allegations (and cold hard evidence) of racist abuse, sexual violence, and financial corruption mar the modern game. But in a world where heroes are in short supply, and with daily front pages filled with the world’s villains distributing pain and suffering with seeming impunity, where can we look when we want to look up? Is this Spanish team, playing the so-called beautiful game, worthy of my son’s adoration? Is the pitch filled with men I’m happy to see him idolise?

There are moments stacked in the column against. Alongside the racism comes the latent sexism in the game: women’s football as the butt of the joke, not a cause for celebration. After Spain won the Women’s World Cup in 2023, outrage erupted after the President of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, Luis Rubiales, grabbed player Jenni Hermoso by the face and kissed her forcibly. In the ensuing media storm and global furore, Rubiales was defiant, adamant he had done nothing wrong, shouting “I WILL NOT RESIGN” five times at a press conference. It was only after all 23 World Cup-winning players, joined by dozens of others, collectively refused to play for the Spanish team, that Rubiales’ hand was forced.

The Spanish striker Borja Iglesias joined their picket line, announcing he’d be resigning from the Spanish men’s side immediately—a male player sacrificing his international career in allyship with the women’s team in a showing of solidarity. Interviewed after Sunday’s game, he said this win was “a continuation of what [the women’s team] did” in 2023. Rodri, given this year’s coveted Ballon d’Or and crowned player of the tournament, was interviewed by Aitana Bonmatí, herself the winner of the same title three years earlier. Rodri said what had driven him was “admiration for Aitana, and what she achieved. I was trying to copy her, to see if I could get to her level.”

Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams embody the next generation of players: children of immigrants, playing football at the highest level. Yamal has made mistakes of his own—he was investigated for hiring performers with dwarfism as entertainment for his 18th birthday—the kind of blind spot that comes from being handed the world at such a young age. On the eve of the quarter-final game against Belgium, the Spanish press asked him how he dealt with the pressure of playing football in front of millions, the hopes of a nation riding on his shoulders. He questioned the premise: “My mum had me when she was 16. That’s real pressure. My dad had to do whatever he could and pick things up off the streets just to bring food home. That’s real pressure. All I have to do is play football and make the Spanish people proud.”

And how could a newsletter about fatherhood neglect to share the story of Marc Cucurella, whose voluminous hair has become a familiar sight as he has spent the last two months whipping up and down the left side of the pitch. It can’t be easy playing football with hair like that. But he lets it run wild, so that his autistic son Mateo can always spot and recognise him when he’s on the pitch. Cucurella has spoken openly about the difficulties of raising a neurodivergent child, and how becoming a father changed everything—his patience, his priorities, his sense of what winning even means—putting the noise of elite football into sharp perspective.

My son and I embraced as the final whistle blew: overwhelmed after five weeks, eight matches, and a final 120 minutes, following his beloved España (and Lamine) all the way to becoming world champions. We walked out onto the streets to cheers, motorbikes flying the Spanish flag, and car horns going until the early hours of the morning.

Sunday was a night I’ll never forget, and one that I’m sure will linger long in his memory too. One of the greatest gifts of fatherhood is seeing the world with fresh eyes, and watching their first time become yours all over again. The joy on his face—and tears in both of our eyes—as we watched the Spanish team embrace after the full-time whistle is a memory I’ll hold onto for years.

It had gone 2 am as I tucked him into bed, a cacophony of noise seeping in from the streets. “I’ve never enjoyed a World Cup as much as this one,” I told him. “And it’s because we watched it together.”

“I’ll be 11 at the next World Cup,” he told me.

“You will. And it’ll be here in Spain. If Ireland qualify, maybe we’ll go see them play.”

“What about España? Can we get tickets to watch them?”

“Probably not. But we can try.”

Say Hello

Hope you enjoyed reading this one as much as I enjoyed living it.

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A regular newsletter takes one day a week to write. This one, close to double. It came about as I wondered if I could turn a 300-word LinkedIn post into a 1,000-word essay. 3,300 words later, here we are.

If you’d like to support my writing (and our attempt to buy World Cup tickets in four years), you know what to do.

We all carry around an idea of success—the job promotion we crave, the car that’ll make strangers on the street crane their necks in jealousy, the beautiful house that turns visitors quiet as they walk through the front door. Fewer ask where these ideas come from. Mostly, they’re absorbed from our parents, from culture, and from the other dads we compare ourselves to without meaning to.

We spend our lives chasing these ghosts. But nobody warns you what’s on the other side—what might happen if you get everything you wanted and end up feeling hollow. For this month’s podcast, I sat down with my good friend Toph—known to the rest of the world as SOHN, the British artist and producer behind the albums Tremors and Trust. SOHN signed a record deal with 4AD, played Coachella and the late-night US TV circuit, and has spent well over a decade living the “artist dream” while raising three boys. Six years ago, we met in the lift of a Barcelona hotel, and eventually bonded over something neither of us saw coming: an episode of depression after the birth of our second child.

We pulled each other through that dark time, with long walks and honest conversations. Just before the launch of his fourth album Albadas (Dawn Songs), we sat down in his studio to talk about all of it. This is the most honest conversation about success, money and creative identity I’ve ever heard from a dad in the public eye. We talk about his five-year creative block, the album that only arrived when he stopped writing as SOHN and started writing as a dad, what it does to your head when your creative output is tied to the food you put on your kids’ plates—and why, when what he was chasing turned out to be a trap, he sold the dream house, killed the ego he’d spent so long protecting, and started again.

Listen and Subscribe On …

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

YouTube

Pocket Casts

Where to Find SOHN

• SOHN’s website

• His new ambient album Albadas (Dawn Songs)—stream it everywhere or grab the limited vinyl/CD on Bandcamp

• Trust—the album we discuss throughout, drenched in themes of fatherhood

• Follow him on Instagram

Episode References

• Trust (2022)—SOHN’s third album, written after a five-year block

• Tremors (2014) and “The Wheel”—where the world first heard SOHN

• The Streets—the Mike Skinner problem: what do you write about when the drama’s gone?

• Oasis, Be Here Now—the Rolls-Royce in the swimming pool

• Elliott Smith and Nick Drake—and the myth of great art made in depression

• Kevin’s essay: “How to Raise Tiny Humans Without Losing Your Mind”—The Tunnel, and coming out of it at five years

Timestamps

0:00 — a new definition of success

0:46 — a conversation between good friends

2:01 — the fantasy of the artistic dream

4:14 — neck pain and stress

7:09 — what shocked SOHN about fatherhood: patience, autonomy, silence

8:50 — from one kid to two kids

12:58 — paternal postnatal depression

14:51 — great artist vs. stable force: the identity collision

18:44 — the five-year creative block

20:42 — having nothing to say

22:26 — Tundra, the record nobody heard

24:20 — early struggling musician days

25:06 — the buffet of success

27:57 — signing with the guy whose music he hated

31:52 — losing the compass

33:42 — depression as a weather system

35:13 — the myth of making great art while depressed

36:51 — at peace with the kids, at war with yourself

39:28 — the head fuck of creative money: “we’re screwed” to “we’re rich” overnight

44:04 — selling the dream house

47:27 — imposter syndrome

49:25 — Trust: giving up as a creative strategy

53:39 — when the fears came true

55:39 — the ego death journey

58:33 — listen up, parents: it gets easier

1:00:34 — where are all my friends?

1:05:34 — alternative to climbing the social ladder

1:07:03 — three boys watch their dad on stage

Credits

Host: Kevin Maguire

Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Sound Editor: Sam Williams

Theme Music: SOHN

Manchester is a town primarily known for two things: 1) great music and 2) terrible weather.

Correlation isn’t causation, as every statistics nerd knows. But there’s a connection here: some believe cities like Seattle and Manchester punch above their musical weight because wet weather leads to more time indoors, searching for a hobby—playing the guitar, for example—to keep you occupied in a city where it rains more than half of the year. Others, including an incredibly biased local news outlet, say there’s nothing to worry about: there are much wetter places than Manchester—look at all those cities in Northern Ireland, for instance. At least Manchester gets a few weeks of sun during the summer holidays.

But for some (read: yours truly), that fleeting period of staring strangely at a glowing circle in the sky would be missed. My parents, who emigrated from Northern Ireland a few years before I was born, would both work during the summer. So they’d take the same steps as many of us still do today: lean on the grandparents. When summer commenced, we’d get on a plane: three small kids armed with a British Airways travel pack, colouring pages and wax crayons secured safely inside, grasping tightly onto the hand of a lovely flight attendant we’d just met, and take the 70-minute flight from Manchester to Belfast. We’d get collected by an uncle on the other side, and spend our summers in Northern Ireland—the only place wetter than the city I called home.

My mum and dad would come eventually, but vacation days were hard to come by back then. My mum recalls 10 days of paid vacation when we were kids, plus 8 public holidays. They’d head to Ireland for the last week of summer, using one precious week of their holidays, saving the second for a return trip at Christmas. Today, UK workers receive 28 days of leave, including public holidays. The increase can be attributed to the EU Working Time Directive, introduced in 1993, which cited working excessive hours as “a major cause of stress, depression, and illness.” The directive aimed to better protect the health and safety of European citizens, giving workers across the region the right to four full weeks of paid annual leave. It wasn’t enacted into law in the UK until 1998 (with no statutory entitlement before then), and some in the UK Government attempted to block its progress. 28 days is great, but it places the UK in a mid-table position—they’re not fighting relegation, but they’re unlikely to qualify for the Champions League. Spain ensures its citizens have 36 vacation days a year, while Estonians enjoy 28 days of paid holiday, supplemented by 12 public holidays, for a total of 40 glorious days off.

Counting holiday days was, for a while, supposed to be on the way out. There was a 178% increase in job positions offering “unlimited vacation” between 2015 and 2019, and The Wall Street Journal reported in 2025 that 7% of US companies now offer unlimited vacation time for employees. This so-called perk sounds great, in theory. “You like holidays? Well, HAVE ALL THE HOLIDAYS YOU WANT!” But while the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, his second greatest trick was unlimited time off. These policies are fraught with issues, a key one being that employees don’t accrue vacation days, meaning no end-of-year carryover and no payout of unused time at year-end or upon termination of employment. When living in SF, one HR worker informed me that the policy was established after a startup went bankrupt, couldn’t pay owed holidays to employees, and a legal precedent was set: Californian companies must have the cash on hand to pay all accrued holidays by year’s end. That unlimited time off policy that looked so juicy when you signed your contract? It might be nothing more than a creative accounting loophole.

Making matters more complicated is the fact that, in the US, vacation hits different. This is the only industrialised nation where workers are not legally entitled to a single day of paid holiday. Where 1 in 4 workers have zero paid time off. Where, in 2018, 55% of vacation days weren’t used, leading to 768 million days unused and 236 million forfeited. That’s a lot of loungers going empty. And research has shown employees with unlimited time off actually take 2 vacation days LESS each year than those with a “regular” vacation policy.

And then we get into the office politics of it all. It’s no accident that Netflix, the original “No Vacation Policy” company, is also the one with the famous “keeper test,” where a team can immediately decide if someone isn’t pulling their weight, leading to an instant firing. Recent “headcount optimisations” (read: mass layoffs) in tech have seen managers feeding office attendance data into performance reviews and redundancy decisions.

With these headwinds, how do you think unlimited time off policies play out? Taking more holidays than your boss? There’s no way any sane employee would do it. Not when it could affect your salary, bonus, potential promotion, and the likelihood of keeping your job. You’ll be seen as lacking commitment, not a team player. And if you’re thinking this, you can bet your manager is thinking it too. And their manager. And their manager. And so on. And so on. It’s fucked-up game theory, keeping you at your laptop, turtles all the way up.

Those grey summers in Ireland? I look back on them with love. 6 weeks with my Granny Mo, who would’ve turned 98 this week. As a god-fearing Catholic, she wouldn’t have let us get away with murder. But everything up to that line was fair game. (When I was 14, my parents were celebrating their wedding anniversary in Paris, and she came to the UK to look after us. That week, I got suspended from school for hitting a kid with a backpack in the playground. She signed all the forms and agreed to keep it quiet forever: a promise she took to her grave. Always grateful for that one.) In Ireland, she worked as a lunch lady in the local high school. Her summers were her own, so she provided childcare whilst my parents worked their jobs. And what kid wouldn’t want to spend 6 weeks under Grandma’s Law?! I see how much leeway my kids get with theirs, and the joy they all find amidst the chaos.

Imagine picking your kids up after 6 weeks with their grandparents. All that sugar. All that independence. One uncle would bring over his PC for a few weeks in the middle of summer, and I’d sit inside playing Tie Fighter and Sim City 2000. It might have been glorious outside, but I wouldn’t have noticed. Another uncle would pick the three of us up from the airport and drive us home, banging out some new dance compilation from the current club du jour. I still know every mix cue on the Back Room CD from 1995’s Cream Anthems, my ears enthralled by this new genre termed house music, sounds from another galaxy, audible colours my brain had yet to experience, basslines thumping through the best in-car subwoofer my uncle could’ve afforded at the time. Those trips in the front seat of his ride subtly, but irrevocably, nudged my life in a different direction.

By the time my parents arrived, we’d have spent a month and a half without them, running riot around a small village in Co. Tyrone, going “up Main St and down the same street” as the locals tell it. We’d then spend a week together as a family before turning the car around and returning on the Belfast-to-Stranraer ferry, the worst possible mode of transport for a family of five without a pair of sea legs between them. I’ve made it a personal policy to avoid boats today—having learned this the hard way, on too many holidays to count. My family will, one day, vacation in a place where they can watch whales; my feet will remain firmly on solid ground.

The primary downside of existing outside the net of salaried employment is a lack of stability, of not knowing when work might appear or dry up. In 2020, post-pandemic, we spent four months with zero income—the project pipeline dried up completely, we slipped through various hastily assembled government safety nets, and spent a significant chunk of the year wondering where work would come from. But the upside of being independent is there in the name: the freedom. The ability to run your own schedule, be your own boss, and make decisions you believe are best for you and your family. Being able to go on holiday without worrying how many days off you’ve accrued, needing to balance it with the fear of being replaced, or anxious that taking your dream vacation will somehow, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Mexico, lead to you being passed over for that promotion you’ve been chasing for years.

With that freedom comes a chance to think about vacations in a different way. The need for a regular income will be a key driver of how much holiday you take, but your own insecurities, your ego, and attitude to risk will also play a part, as you battle with what psychologist Lee McKay Doe termed “internalised capitalism.” Many friends who are independent have spoken about the discomfort that comes from turning down paid work to take a vacation with their family.

You might choose, like a child-free freelance friend, to work every hour that comes your way, but down tools for four weeks every four years to drag your TV into the back garden, put the beers on ice and watch every World Cup game possible. Others have been even more creative when experimenting with time off—you may recall the famous Stefan Sagmeister TED Talk from 2009, where he talked about closing his studio for a full year after being open for seven, a cadence that led Dan Pink to suggest we replace “going on sabbatical” with “taking a Sagmeister.”

“Right now we spend about 25 years of our lives learning, then there are another 40 years that’s really reserved for working, and then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years. That’s clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the work that comes out of this year flows back into the company and into society at large rather than benefiting a grandchild or two.”

— Stefan Sagmeister, The Power of Time Off

Sagmeister also touches on Ferran Adrià, owner of El Bulli, who closed his restaurant for 5 months each year to research and develop new innovative cooking techniques. Bill Gates takes two “thinking weeks” every year alone to a cabin, in what I suggest we call “taking a Bon Iver.” These people aren’t undertaking new approaches to holidays for the fun of it—they know that the success of their business depends on recharging the creative batteries that are all too easy to deplete.

A sabbatical isn’t an option for everyone. Neither is unlimited time off. But perks like these offer a chance for deep, intentional time—to actually unplug and unwind, rather than “quickly responding to an urgent email” from a nice hotel, a beautiful sunset wasted in the background. I’ve been there too many times. Even though a vacation with kids can feel like a “parenting away game”, there’s immense value in taking a holiday together, with research showing it improves both parents’ wellbeing and children’s general skills. And for those who run their own company, or sit on senior leadership teams, it provides a chance to lead by example.

The annual cadence of life in the Mediterranean, the place I call home, is different from the rest of the world. August’s extreme heat makes it difficult to do anything. You might have once heard something akin to “Spain and Italy close down for all of August” and wondered how true that was. Didn’t you go there one August when everything was still open? It probably was, if you landed in a popular holiday destination. But even in a tourist magnet like Barcelona, most restaurants and independent retail stores will pull their shutters down for the month. A few years back, a friend shocked our local community by announcing the opposite: his bakery would stay open throughout August. Wild.

Regular readers will see where I’m going with this. I’ll be in your inbox a few more times in July, and then taking a break for a month. One thing I love about writing this newsletter is how it holds me accountable as the dad I want to be. Would my parents have taken those 6 weeks off and spent the summer together in Ireland as a family, if they could? I guess we’ll never know. But as Dan Pink helpfully informed me in the very first TNF podcast episode, we’re twice as likely to regret the actions we didn’t take as the ones we did. Did any man, on his deathbed, ever wonder:

“What would have happened if I didn’t take that time off?”

I’m not planning on being the first.

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

How did you like this week’s issue?

Don’t forget to smash that “Request Absence” button in Workday.

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Branding by Selman Design. Illustration by Tony Johnson.

This week, I’m delighted to hand over the newsletter to Jordan Bolton, a comic artist from the wonderful city of Manchester, England. If you’d like to see more of Jordan’s work (and after this, I’m fairly sure you will), go check him out on Instagram and Patreon.

Say Hello

Oooooof. Thank you, Jordan, for letting me run this in the newsletter in its entirety.

How was it for you?

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Those who’ve been around for a while might remember that we previously marked the newsletter’s 100th edition with an illustrative issue. The 200th edition flew by earlier this year, so consider this the second edition of a not-so-regular feature.

Until next time.

There’s a photograph I own, taken at the tail end of the 1980s, that is unlike all the others.

Within its frame are three people: myself, my father, and his father before him. Three generations of Maguire men huddled around a single seat in my grandparents’ living room in Ireland. The framing is terrible—we see more of the ceiling than of my grandfather, foreshadowing how my kids would feel when FaceTiming their grandparents decades later. Jack, my grandad, sits up straight, his face proud, wearing a cardigan that I look at enviously as an adult today. Over his left shoulder is my father, Kevin Senior, a few years shy of his thirtieth birthday. Over his right, a small boy, to whom the guard is being passed, who wears a crisp white shirt and looks towards the camera, blissfully ignorant.

In the five years I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve spent more time thinking about my place in the lineage of these men than I’d care to mention. I often think about what fatherhood meant for them, and the countless dads who came before. Fatherhood for those Maguire men may not have been easier, but it was undoubtedly simpler. Their role was set in stone. Variation from the norm was actively avoided, never encouraged.

While the number of children these men raised was different—I am one of three, my father one of fifteen—their versions of fatherhood were remarkably similar. They operated within a model of fatherhood defined not by emotional availability but by physical capability. A version of fatherhood reduced to responsibility. Culture cast those generations as stoic providers, parents who left early for work and returned home late, family disciplinarians with a swift backhand, or emotionally recluses with a stiff upper lip.

We inherited these narratives. We were shaped by them—for many of us, both metaphorically and physically. There is no way the father who came before you did not, in some way, define the one you are today. We were born into the water our fathers swam in, learned its currents, and are teaching our children to do the same. Looking at these three generations of men, I realise that whilst the seas I sail are uncharted, the tools I have to navigate them are better than anything they were given.

Three years ago, as I started to shop around a proposal for what would become the book that I would pour so much of myself into, multiple publishers turned me down, telling me the same thing: Dads don’t read books. It felt like such strange feedback. Of course, dads read books. I’m a dad, and I read all the time. I talk about books with my dad friends—not all of them, but enough. And I had a proof point beyond anecdotal: every week I send these missives out into the world, and more than 23,000 of you willingly receive them.

In the early days of the newsletter, we used to gather in discussion threads on a Friday. “What are you reading?” was always a hit. It was no surprise to learn that dads were reading all kinds of books. But when it came to fatherhood books, we’ve been woefully underserved. At best, the genre sees our role as a list of boxes to be checked off. At worst, it treats it like a joke, a side quest, or a distraction from the main story.

I was gifted one such book in 2014, as my first child was about to enter the world. Titled From Lad to Dad, it was, according to the front matter, written in 2004, but felt like it was cobbled together from cut-outs of UK 90s lad mags like Loaded and FHM, popular with teenage boys of the time. Opening to one page (and paraphrasing here, but only lightly), it offered the following advice to expectant dads: “Boobs! They’re great, right? We all love them. But maybe, for the next few months, don’t grab your missus’s boobs all the time, because they might be a bit more tender than usual.”

Over the next 12 years, with a few notable exceptions, it remained as such. I set out to buck the trend and write what I wish someone had given me at any point over the last decade-and-change. And now that my latest offspring has been in the world for a month, I’ve been hearing from dads who’ve read it. I spoke to them last month as I went out on tour: in New York, London, Manchester and Barcelona. In London, we gathered on a Thursday evening and during the Q&A one guy asked, “What advice do you have for a soon-to-be dad who wants to build up his support network with local dads?” I shared a few relevant pieces from the book: start reaching out to friends you know and putting the vulnerability loop into practice; think about building a Dadvisory Board; find a local dad meet-up, or even start your own.

“You’ve probably got time,” I suggested. “When does the baby arrive?”

“This Tuesday.”

As I was signing copies, I saw that dad-to-be sat with another two. Three local dads, none of whom I knew, swapping numbers, suggesting they start a local meet-up. I witness moments like this and see stark reminders of how essential this work is. Friends and strangers have been sending me messages with their favourite passages highlighted, or emailing to share their perspective on their place in the lineage of dads who have come before and will come after. Rikesh Chauhan, who moderated the London event, even made a video about it:

“Fatherhood is challenging when you’re walking down a path you’re simultaneously creating yourself.” I had 80,000 words, and couldn’t have said it better than Rikesh. What will this path look like for my son when he’s old enough to become a father? If he follows in my footsteps, he’ll welcome a child into the world sometime around 2050. The planet might be on fire, and in 25 years, Dad’s role might amount to the occasional trip outside the bunker, heading to the surface to scavenge for supplies. But I’d wager that whatever being a dad looks like for him, it’ll be closer to the dad he grew up with than my version was to the men at the top of this page.

A favour, from one dad to another

There’s a reason I sit here, week in, week out, writing to you all. It’s because I know, firsthand, how important it is that we learn to forge this barely-there path before us. How essential it is to our own well-being, and that of our kids, that they grow up with fathers they’re proud of. The work we do here is not easy, but its impact is intergenerational: what we stop from passing on today will be one less thing for our children to deal with tomorrow.

Fatherhood is changing, and it isn’t happening in a vacuum. One question I’ve been repeatedly asked as I’ve done press around the book is, “So, what does The New Fatherhood look like?” To answer it, I’ve often paraphrased US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart: “You know it when you see it.”

It’s the dad who leaves work at 3 pm to go pick up his kids, even as his male manager mutters under his breath, “Why isn’t his wife doing that?” It’s a group of guys who get together in the pub to learn how to braid their daughters’ hair. It’s a bunch of strangers turning up in the comments of a long-lost Aphex Twin video to share their deepest dreams and darkest fears on fatherhood. It’s the father who isn’t afraid to cry at a kid’s movie about a singing lion. And, again and again, it’s an Australian Cattle Dog who helps remind us that our presence, and not our ability to provide, will be what shapes our children’s futures.

This work has put me in the orbit of so many amazing dads, and it’s been a genuine pleasure to learn from you, as I hope you sometimes learn from me. I dedicated years of my life to writing this book because I saw the dads out there working to push fatherhood forward, and wanted to write the book that captured this once-in-an-epoch change. In a genre littered with manuals, I wrote a manifesto—a call to arms for a new kind of fatherhood. But I need your help to get the word out there.

This place has been, and will always be, driven by one thing: dads looking out for dads. And if you’ve got this far, congratulations: you passed the test. You’re proving them all wrong—you’re a dad who reads. And a book can become something a newsletter never can: in the history of humanity, there has been no more dependable way to pass on knowledge from one person to another.

So if this newsletter has helped or humoured you in any way over the last five years, please:

1. Buy the book. (Or if audiobooks are your thing, download it on Audible or Spotify.)

2. If you’ve bought it and enjoyed it, leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon. As of this evening, there are about three reviews from mums for every one from a dad. Your review will help redress the balance, and help other dads find it—and know that it’s worth their time.

3. If you’re more inclined to share privately than publicly, send this link to any dads that you think will get something out of it. There is absolutely no better way for this book to get to the dads who need it and will read it than one friend saying to another, “I’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, and think you will enjoy this book.” Tap to open a ready-made message: WhatsApp | Email

4. If you wanted to go a step further, why not buy it for a friend? You might buy books for mates regularly; it’s just as likely that you don’t. But take it from someone who lives in a city where it’s an annual tradition to do it: it’s one of life’s greatest delights to be handed a book by a buddy and for them to say, “I see you, I know you, I think you’ll dig this.” Think of a positive feeling this newsletter has given you over the years, and then imagine being able to give that to a friend. Pick a mate you know who loves books and is showing up as a dad in a way you admire, and go make his Father’s Day this year.

I’ve got a somewhat secondary motive here. It’s not just selling books. As the press has started to pick up around the launch, interest in the therapy fund has risen accordingly. So over the last month, on top of the interviews, the book tour, the newsletter and the onslaught of end-of-school-year calendar invites, I’ve been fielding an uptick in my inbox from dads looking to be paired with a therapist. The fund is running low, so for this week and next, I’m going to put all my book proceeds towards helping dads get therapy. And if you buy using one of the links below, the affiliate money from these sites will double your donation.

Amazon US | Bookshop US | Amazon UK | Bookshop UK | Amazon Rest of World

Thank you for reading this newsletter, and for doing your part to leave fatherhood in a better place than we found it.

— Kevin

For a hundred years, parents attempting to undertake creative endeavours have had a ready-made excuse, courtesy of Cyril Connolly: “The enemy of art is the pram in the hall.”

Kids, the thinking goes, are where creativity goes to die. But thinks Connolly got it exactly backwards.

This month on the podcast, I sat down with Austin—author of the New York Times bestselling trilogy Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work! and Keep Going—to talk about his new book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again. This book is a love letter to his two sons, and a collection of everything they taught him about creativity.

Austin spent his career helping people tap into their creative potential. Then his kids arrived, and he realised he wasn’t the teacher anymore. He was, in his words, “the apprentice to the beginners,” the studio assistant in his own home, saving the drawings, keeping the paper trail, and watching two small artists figure out how to “let it rip.”

We talk about why children aren’t an obstacle to your creative life but an opportunity for it to grow, the gentle art of benevolent neglect, and how watching your kids create might be the best way to quiet your own inner critic—and re-parent the artist you used to be.

Subscribe to the Podcast

• Spotify

• Apple Podcasts

• YouTube

• Pocket Casts

Where to Find Austin Kleon

• Buy Don’t Call It Art

• Read his blog, especially the parenting tag

• Subscribe to his newsletter

• Follow him on Instagram

Episode References

Books & Essays

• The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Sir Ken Robinson

• The Idle Parent Manifesto by Tom Hodgkinson

• Bringing Up Bébé by Pamela Druckerman

• Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

• 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write by Sarah Ruhl

• The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

• Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann

• Playing With My Son by Andy Baio

• Heidi’s Horse by Sylvia Fein

• American Elf by James Kochalka

Featured Artists, Musicians & Innovators

• John Baldessari – Conceptual artist whose revolutionary “Post-Studio Art” teaching style shaped a generation of creators.

• Lynda Barry – The MacArthur-winning cartoonist, author of What It Is, and professor of interdisciplinary creativity.

• Ruth Asawa – The San Francisco wire sculptor who believed art education should be accessible to all children.

• Eleanor Coppola – The documentary filmmaker who balanced her own creative life alongside an iconic filmmaking family.

• Brian Eno – The ambient music pioneer whose philosophy centres on answering the ultimate creative question: “What is it that I actually like?”

• Michel de Montaigne – The Renaissance essayist whose father instituted a spartan pedagogical plan, including being raised by peasants and learning Latin as a first language.

Misc

• Cyril Connolly’s “Pram in the Hall”

• Jeff Tweedy on Making Art without Control

Timestamps

0:00 — welcome to this episode

03:59 — advice for a first-time author

06:45 — Austin’s houseful of weirdos in Austin, Texas

08:03 — bottling the energy of two little kids

10:36 — growing up in rural Ohio cornfields

17:45 — Owen’s magic line

23:50 — being your kids’ apprentice

27:17 — young parents, keep a dairy

36:00 — kids know what they like

40:56 — scarcity vs. abundant fatherhood

42:36 — read some mother artist memoirs

47:17 — kids as a source of creative energy

47:52 — go to therapy before you have kids

Credits

Host: Kevin Maguire

Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Sound Editor: Sam Williams

Theme Music: SOHN

Because there’s another book taking up real estate in my head, and it isn’t mine. Last month, I read Transcription—Ben Lerner’s latest entry to the genre of autofiction he has helped popularise since his debut novel was released in 2011—for the first time, on the plane between New York and Barcelona. On the recommendation of a friend, I “re-read” the audiobook over the last week: one chunk of it on the train between London and Manchester, nodding off as the train hurtled towards the future; the second as I flew home last night.

The book is structured as a triptych of three paternal portraits as an unnamed narrator—a Lerner staple, although the biblical Adam sometimes stands in as tribute—reminisces about the times when he was “still young enough that months were long,” and navigates the anxieties, internally-faced and externally-caused, in the life of the modern father. The book opens on a train as he heads towards a meeting with his mentor, Thomas, a German intellectual who came of age during Nazi rule. He listens to a talk Thomas gave 49 years earlier. He sits backwards, or as his daughter says, “facing the past,” and our past comes through in flickers: a masked face visible in the reflection, a subtle clue we’re reading a pandemic period piece.

Thomas is fading, seemingly suffering from dementia, confusing the protagonist with his own son, lamenting that he cannot remember the colour of his father’s eyes, feeling his body carrying “the data of his past,” whilst losing “the numbers and the names” that give our memories their flavour. After dropping his phone in the sink, rendering it unusable, the narrator wrestles with the friction that comes in navigating a world without it: his wife and home the only two numbers he can recall from memory, “a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication […] the stones made stonier by being offline,” making sense of his own dependence on his device as his adolescent daughter pushes for one of her own.

The irreversible friction between modern technology and human connection is a recurring motif in Lerner’s work. This book explores our dependence on the world of ones and zeros—the way smartphones influence the relationships in our lives, making personal connections feel both more familiar and more remote, the ambient intimacy afforded by social networks that claim to be built for closeness, but have consistently driven division. Is this a new world, or do digital tools only supplement human behaviours? A son reflects on his father’s distance during his childhood: “Our proximity produced the most intense forms of estrangement.”

Running through the novel’s spine are three generations of a family and their different connections to the digital world: the first who abhors the impact of technology on the world; the next who has become reluctantly dependent upon it; the youngest who has never known life in a world without smartphones, iPads, and the bottomless feast of every video known to man.

It’s a book about the fathers we grow up observing, the mentors we search for in an attempt to fill the vacuum that was missing, and how we reconfigure these inputs into a format that will allow us to navigate the choppy waters of raising children, keeping our heads when all about us are losing theirs. In a passage that had me wiping the tears from my eyes—I’ll blame the altitude, yeah, that’ll do it—a family member says goodbye to another over the phone, social distancing protocols forbidding the delivery of all that needed to be said in person; the goodbye we hope to get the chance to say one day, if not already.

In an interview with AnOther magazine, Lerner talked about how becoming a father to two daughters had influenced his work:

My daughters inform the writing in all kinds of ways, but it’s this mixture of wanting to let them in and keep them out, because you can’t take care of your kids in your work, or you would write really boring shit.1 I’ve written a lot of poems about this: wanting to protect my children from my voice, and to protect my voice from my children.

I also became more interested in how things are transmitted or transcribed across generations, and the voice as intergenerational technology. When you start talking to your kids, you open your mouth and all this stuff comes out that’s not you. It’s your parents, or your image of what parents should be, or your own voice as a child, travelling into the future.

I’ve often reckoned with the 151.8 gigabytes of memories I have placed in the care of Google Photos—92,738 photos stored in the cloud—its machine learning algorithms categorising my life history—or at least the last two decades of it—by places, faces and things. I have already taken more photos of my son than will ever be taken of my mother. My own failing memory is hoisted up by this more reliable digital twin, scaffolding supporting a failing structure. When I was back in Manchester this week, my dad showed me the four cardboard boxes filled with photos that he wanted me to sort through when I’m back over the summer. No boxes exist in our house; occasional printouts act as physical manifestations of times long gone. When we die, will our digital archives be passed on to our children? Will they even want them?

I’m trying my very best to get into this without spoiling it for you, but the final third of the book takes an incredible turn as the realities of the pandemic come crashing together with the existential anxiety that parents face in their role as protectors and providers. My memory of the first read-through had coloured the second—there were huge story beats that my own memory, even over the course of a few weeks, had forgotten and altered. My recollections are unreliable, whether it’s the chemicals that have passed through my body over the last 25 years, or my body keeping the score of those early years. It is not always something I can depend upon. My mother was the family historian, the chronicler of our collective journey; in the early years of writing this newsletter, I could rely upon her to confirm foggy remnants of the past, to paint in colour where I could only sketch in pencil. The stories we pass down from generation to generation, one unreliable narrator after another mangling the memory even further, a game of telephone told through the ages.

So, yeah. I liked it. You probably will too. It’s a perfect dad summer book—144 pages long, deceptively small, and something that will sit with you long after you close the last page. Ryan Holiday says I should be selling you my book—instead, I’ve spent 1,200 words selling someone else’s. So read mine first. But once you’re done, go show a little love Lerner’s way, too.

Lord knows, he could do with the help.

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

How did you like this week’s issue?

Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad

And if you read the book, curious to hear what you thought in the comments.

One hiccup last week was an influx of messages from dads outside the US, asking why the online stores were showing delivery times in July. After a little digging around, it turns out the initial run of books sent outside the US has sold out! My publisher is working on a re-up, and the books are making their way across the Atlantic as we speak. So if you’ve ordered a copy and received a delay notice, or are looking to get one before Father’s Day, don’t worry. Any orders placed will put you at the front of the line for the next drop. Get it while stocks last, I guess?!

After a sold-out event in London last night, I’ll be in Manchester next Tuesday, June 2nd, the next leg of the tour. Homecoming date. Hope to see some of you there.

The idea of my kids not playing videogames was always a non-starter.

Our house is stacked with consoles, the closed TV cabinet door hiding all manner of oblongs emblazoned with a trio of logos: Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony. And those are just the ones in active circulation. There’s a cardboard box in the bottom of a cupboard filled with the dusty remains of those who came before, ancestors who paved the way: an imported Japanese GameCube, delivered after Santa’s last hurrah; a Nintendo 64 with a copy of Goldeneye seemingly sealed into the cartridge slot; a Dreamcast, sadly left us way too young. When we moved to the US, and were only granted 500kg in shipped goods (which seems like a lot, until you realise it’s only twenty 25kg suitcases), we were faced with the difficult decision of deciding whose yellowing Super Nintendo we would keep—mine or my wife’s—before selling the other.

During my own childhood, videogames were an escape, a world to fall into whilst hidden away in my bedroom, my parents confused as to why I was spending so much time jumping through green pipes and eating reality-shifting mushrooms. (One of those things I’d end up doing a lot more as a fully-functioning adult).

But with my kids, it became a bonding ritual and a passing of the torch. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Spain entered a period of lockdown that we were sure would end soon, naive and utterly oblivious to the 42 days we’d spend in the house with a five-year-old and one-year-old, their exit from the front door deemed an illegal act. It was during this time that Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It was, as Keza Macdonald writes in the fabulous book Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play, a game that “offered community, creativity, relaxation and connection to a world that was suddenly starved of all those things.”

Japanese videogame designer Katsuya Eguchi was the mastermind behind the game, and created it with his own children in mind, after his job as a producer and director for Nintendo, working on classic games like Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World and Star Fox, meant missing time spent with his children at home. As Simon Parkin wrote in the New Yorker, covering the game in March 2020:

Eguchi joined Nintendo, in 1986, at the age of twenty-one and found himself alone, in a new city, severed from friends and family. Even as he climbed the company ladder, he routinely had to work past his children’s bedtime. Animal Crossing was his response: a game in which people, playing at different times, could bond in unprecedented ways. Eguchi could finally spend time with his children.

This game would bring my daughter and me together, fulfilling Eguchi’s vision. We’d spend the endless pandemic days working on our island, visiting friends across the world who were also doing the same. It would become our first foray into a shared digital world. But it wouldn’t be our last.

For the last year, I’ve been getting up every Saturday and Sunday to work a weekend job.

I’ll head to the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water and walk into the living room. I’ll check with the kids if they’ve eaten breakfast—fun fact, parents with younger children, at one point in your future, your offspring will start making their own breakfast on the weekends while you stay in bed, often, but not consistently—and my daughter will ask me, “Are you ready?”

And we’ll pull on our pixel overalls and clock in for a shift on the farm.

I turned my daughter onto Stardew Valley a few weeks shy of her 10th birthday. Released in 2016, the game is, at its most simple, a farming simulator: you begin having left a stressful city job behind, taking up residence on a dilapidated farm you’ve inherited from your recently passed grandfather. You start with a crummy set of tools: a pickaxe, a hoe, an axe, a scythe and a watering can, and are given very little instruction. The first task at hand is simply cleaning up the mess that you were left: unruly hedges left to run riot, stubborn tree stumps that won’t respond to your puny axe, trash-filled ponds unable to sustain life. You head to the local store, buy some seeds, and grow your first crops. You pick up a fishing rod and understand the hidden value beneath sea level. And, as you make your way around the village and get to know its local inhabitants, the game gently introduces you to its many delights.

Padme had been playing the game for two in-game years (cigarette packet maths: 15 real minutes per in-game day x 28 days per in-game month x 4 months per in-game year = 56 real-life hours) with her dad watching on the sidelines. I’d offer tips: had she thought about putting mayonnaise makers in her coop, since processed mayo would sell for more than the eggs the chickens lay every day? And with the cows, cheese presses would be a good way to turn that milk into pure profit. “But those things cost money,” she’d reply. “Yes,” I’d retort, “But here’s a lesson about the world: you have to spend money to make money. If you invest in something today and it starts making money, soon your initial outlay will turn into profit, and those things will start to add up.”

She hated seeing the gold counter that indicated her farm’s net worth in decline. All that hard work she’d done! But the solution was right in front of us. The game’s solo developer, ConcernedApe, hand-crafted every single part of the world: designed the pixel art villagers, wrote the dialogue for every character, programmed the seasons and the weather cycles, and even composed the soundtrack, still listened to by almost half a million people on Spotify every month. Over the last decade, he has continued to ship updates to the game, and Version 1.3, released two years after launch, added the most requested feature: multiplayer. Now, additional houses could be built onto the farm, and the joys of local co-op were unlocked. Dad would start mucking in and mucking out.

A quick multiplayer refresh, for those at the back: once upon a time, there was only one way to play videogames with each other—co-located, side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder. Whether stood in front of an arcade cabinet giving your best HADOUKEN, or sat cross-legged in front of a CRT television trying to pop your siblings’ balloons in Super Mario Kart, we played together. Later, with the advent of the internet, multiplayer moved online, as games like Quake, Counterstrike and Unreal Tournament required lightning reactions to nail that perfect headshot; whilst fortune favours the brave, these games favoured those in the US with T1 connections and low ping rates that my humble 56k dial-up modem could never.

My kids are allowed one hour videogames on Saturday, and one hour on Sunday, and I won’t ever be telling them the screen time rules—or lack of them—that I grew up with, so quiet in the back. Whilst we’d play the game for only two hours a week, the mental grip it held on us extended far beyond those boundaries. We went in deep, watching YouTube videos on how to optimise farm layouts, strategies for besting the Skull Cavern, and how to find and grow the mythical ancient fruit. It was a core topic of conversation, and became more than a game—it was an opportunity to talk about how the world works: the golden loop of hard work, saving and investment, the importance of planning your time, how to choose what to focus on, and accept things that are out of your control. And, over time, I’d begin to learn as much from her playstyle as she would from mine.

Whilst I was ruthlessly focused on profit, her time spent in the village was spent on building the relationship meter with the game’s 28 villagers, researching and gifting their favourite items, running fetch quests for them in order to unlock more “heart events,” unlocking the mysteries of the game—the quiet, brooding man who is revealed to be struggling with alcoholism, the woman desperate to follow her dreams of becoming an artist, but still working to build back her confidence after a long-term relationship with an unsupportive spouse.

In this time of modern masculinity and awakened definitions of fatherhood, I’m not sure “my dad could beat up your dad” carries the same weight in the playground as it once did. But “My dad could destroy your dad in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” has a fairly good ring to it. Our children offer a limitless well of hobbies, old and new: whether it’s using your daughter as an excuse to learn how to play the piano, or spending a Sunday morning watching your son swap football cards whilst you practice your Spanish with local dads. Abundant Fatherhood means attuning your senses to the many ways our children can be an excuse to find joy and improve our lives.

The net worth of Paradise Farm recently crossed 2 million gold coins. Passive income has been achieved, my watch has ended, and I have hung up my overalls. I will soon swap them for a black cowl and cape and venture into a fake plastic Gotham City with my son for Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. In my stead, my wife has taken up the mantle of farm hand, starting afresh with my daughter on an entirely new farm, nary a penny to her name. They’re saving up for a horse stable. My daughter wanted to invest in agricultural infrastructure. My wife pushed back that they needed the money for the horse.

“Mum,” she offered, “You have to spend money to make money.”

Before looking over at her smiling father, and rolling her eyes at the accidental assimilation of another life lesson.

3 things to read this week

I’ve been out and about promoting the book! Here are a few things you might enjoy.

1. “The New Fatherhood: You Either Sort It Out or Pass It On ” by Dr Becky on Good Inside. I talk with Dr Becky Kennedy about the emotional transformation happening inside modern fatherhood, and the work modern dads are doing to parent differently than we were parented ourselves. (Podcast link, if you’d prefer to listen than watch)

2. “7 Expert Habits to Make You a Better Dad” by Lynda Lin Grigsby in GQ Magazine. Whilst my dream of being a GQ cover star will have to wait a little longer, it was fun to share some of the tools and techniques I’ve developed in over a decade of parenting in their Expert Habits column, written up by Lynda Lin Grigsby, a long-time reader of the newsletter.

3. “The New Fatherhood” on Chicago’s WGN 9 Midday News. In my live TV debut, I spoke with Patrick Elwood from WGN 9 Midday News in Chicago, and managed to get through the whole thing without shouting “CHI CITY!” which I’m particularly proud of.

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

How did you like this week’s issue?

Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad

If this newsletter has provided you with support, joy, or a sense of being seen over the years I’ve been writing it, please go grab the book. I am so proud of it, and so unbelievably excited for you to read it.

For the last two years, there’s one question I’ve heard more often than others.

“How are you?” Nope.

“How is the family?” Not that, either.

“So, how’s the book going?” Friends, family, well-wishers. All would ask. Incessantly. On a good day, I’d smile and change the subject. On others, the question was enough to send a shiver down my spine. It would regularly wake me up at 2 am in a cold sweat. How was it going? It was an undertaking unlike anything I’d ever attempted. The difference between writing a book and writing a newsletter was like the difference between raising a kid and raising a cat.

Fun fact: the time between signing the contract to write the book until the day I delivered the initial manuscript was nine months. The most poetic gestation period. I couldn’t have asked for better. The first trimester was chill: background reading, chapter outlining, trying to figure out the arc of the story I wanted to tell. The second trimester, things ramped up—a bout of writer’s block saw very little movement for weeks, until I remembered a line by the French auteur Jean-Luc Godard who said: “A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order.” I started writing in the middle, and fought my way out in the only way my ADHD-riddled brain would allow: by focusing on the shiny bits. Chapters that I was writing because I felt “I had to” were cast to the side. All killer. No filler.

The third trimester was—as it is for so many dads—when shit got real. I’d spend parts of the day running the mental gymnastics required to convince myself I could turn out 80,000 words in the required time: calculating the remaining words to get there, divided by working days I had left, minus the day a week I’d spend on the newsletter, minus bouts of sickness (my own and my kids) and whatever battle would be thrown my way that week.

When that initial manuscript was handed over—May 4th, 2025—I exhaled. For a few months, it was no longer my problem. Until it boomeranged back with edit suggestions from my publisher, agent, and two good friends, Aaron and Justin. There were two consistent “themes” in the comments. The first was what I termed “George Bernard Shaw” problems, based on the Irish playwright’s wry observation that the UK and US were “two countries separated by the same language.” What the hell is a space hopper? What are wellies? And shouldn’t there be more Zs in all of these words?

The other comment was about references. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you know I always bring the receipts: the peer-reviewed papers and sources I link to liberally. “You’ll need a lot of citations in this book,” my editor warned. I wasn’t worried—I’d been hyperlinking everything as I went. How hard could it be? How wrong I was. The Chicago style guidelines that came back required page number, publication year, and edition for every book. So many of my sources were Kindle highlights or quotes I’d picked up over years of internet travels. I decided to triple-fact-check everything and only cite original sources wherever I could, which meant hunting down the research papers that publications like Psychology Today, NPR or The Atlantic had cited. And with painful regularity, I’d find the data in the paper and the interpretation in the article didn’t quite line up. Meaning even more rewrites were required.

Was it tough? Oh yes. The book only got better as a result. But those last few weeks nearly finished me. The lowest moment came last summer, when my role as a writer came into direct conflict with my role as a dad. It was August, and if you’ve ever set foot in Spain or Italy during the height of summer, you’ll know one thing: it’s hot. Life on the Mediterranean means most locals will shut up shop and get out of the city to escape the unbearable heat. My rewrites dropped right in the middle of this period where, after an intense year, we’d booked a HomeExchange for a week of downtime: a small apartment an hour outside of the city, with a shared pool for the kids. The amount of work required for the rewrite meant I’d spent that week hidden out in the loft of our temporary habitat, air conditioning only a dream, a fan slowly rotating, blasting some sweet relief my way. I could hear the kids fighting downstairs, and who could blame them? We’d come out here to have fun, and I was stuck with my head in my laptop, shouting at them to leave me alone so I could sit and write a book about being a better dad. I began to realise how Jack Torrance felt at the Overlook Hotel, chained to his typewriter and losing his mind while his wife and son watched his sanity slowly slip away.

259 endnotes later, I was done. Of course, there was still more work to be done: every time I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. But then came the cutoff, and no more changes could be made. For the last few months, I’ve been existing in what artists always refer to as a liminal space, or what a parent might call nap time—that quiet moment between certainty and uncertainty, an acceptance that my work writing this book is done.

In 2013, British actor and director Marcus Romer took to Twitter to share the six stages of the creative process:

It’s been three years since I started working on this book. And after going through the exact process Romer outlined—and spending a lonnnnnnnng time at point 4—I now have enough space that not only do I like this book, I truly love it. For the last few weeks, with copies spread across the house, I’d find myself opening it to a random page, and treating it like I would any other book (or more accurately, every other book) I haven’t written. And breaking out in a smile.

“How’s the book going?”

Now, finally, you can find out for yourself.

Get the Book

—-

Written by me, and hundreds of you

Warning: This is not a book for new dads. Or, not just for them. I wanted to write the book that I wish someone had handed me at any point over the last twelve years, as I was piecing all of this together on my own. A book that would become an essential resource for any dad, whether your firstborn was on the way or you just had a door slammed in your face by an angsty teenager. The book you would buy for a friend, brother or colleague, who was struggling in The Tunnel with three kids under five. Based on feedback from early readers, I'm confident I got there, and I’ve written a book that dads can learn from and turn to throughout every stage of fatherhood. Searching Google last week, I saw that the algorithms had categorised it as a “self-help book.” And, you know what? They’re not wrong. No one is coming to save the dads. Who is going to help us, if not ourselves?

Core to the DNA of this newsletter has been that The New Fatherhood is being driven forward by all of us—every dad who pushes back against the narratives he inherited unwillingly and who works hard to forge fatherhood in his own terms. Though my name is on the cover, I didn’t write this book on my own—it has been shepherded into existence by so many of you: the dads who jumped into open comment threads in the early days of the newsletter, the ongoing conversations we have in the Dadscord every day, all the ways those in the orbit of this newsletter continue to show up for each other. So, in keeping with how we do things in the newsletter, every chapter ends with a “let’s hear it from the dads” section, in which I hand the megaphone over to some of the most powerful things I’ve heard from the thousands of dads who have been reading the weekly newsletter over the last five years. You might even find yourself in there.

The Wild Dadbot

In addition to the spectacular cover by Selman Design that you’ve all seen, the final copies that arrived also feature beautiful illustrations inside. When I first started talking to Tony Johnson about adapting some of his newsletter work for the print edition, I shared my love of The Wild Robot book, with its monochrome illustrations throughout. After initially pushing back on the idea of an illustration for each chapter—great decision, Tony—we settled on four illustrations, one of each act of the book and a final one for the epilogue. To say these came out well is an understatement; they have to be seen to be fully appreciated.

That’s enough for now. I’ll stop banging on about the book for a while, so long as you go buy it. Thank you for reading, and for being part of this.

RSVP Here

30 years ago, DJ Shadow changed the game when he dropped the revolutionary future classic Entroducing…, which was (as verified by Guinness World Records) the first album made entirely from samples. Crafting sonic landscapes by wielding the Akai MPC60 like a paintbrush, twice he asked listeners, “What Does Your Soul Look Like?” Fast-forward three decades, I find myself asking a very similar question of myself, the REBOOT dads, and the coaching clients I work with:

What does success look like?

Lynn Goldsmith had an idea. She worked what modern business columnists would term a “portfolio career.” Born in Detroit in 1948, Wikipedia notes she is (note present tense) “an American recording artist, a film director, a celebrity portrait photographer, and one of the first female rock and roll photographers.” Her work has been featured on over 100 album covers for the likes of Paul Simon, Miles Davis, Dr Dre and INXS, and her photographs can be found in collections at the Smithsonian and the MOMA. She was, for a short while, the co-manager of Grand Funk Railroad and became the youngest woman ever accepted into the Directors Guild of America. She spent decades capturing the life and times of musical icons: Bruce Springsteen’s canonisation in the hearts of blue-collar America; the infamous stadium tours of The Rolling Stones; the ascent of Michael Jackson from boy band singer to global icon.

Goldsmith has had, by any definition, a successful career. And not just in one area. Island Records—the Jamaican-born label home to artists such as Grace Jones, Nick Drake, U2, Pulp and Amy Winehouse—released an album from Goldsmith under her pseudonym Will Powers: “Dancing for Mental Health.” She referred to it as a “comedy self-help dance record,” and enlisted the help of musicians including Sting, Niles Davis and Carly Simon to collaborate on the project.

The album’s opening—and, honestly, only decent—track is “Adventures in Success,” a wonky 95 BPM number that has since become a staple record in leftfield disco scenes. Atop a groove that would coax even the staunchest wallflower to the dancefloor, Goldsmith’s vocoder-lowered voice offers “three laws of success” in a blueprint Baz Luhrmann would eventually copy and paste for his 1999 hit “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”.

“You are an important person, a rare individual

A unique creature

There has never been anyone just like you

And never will be

You have talents and abilities no one else has

In some ways, you’re superior to any other living person |

The power to do anything you can imagine is within you

When you discover your real self

By practising a few simple laws of success.”

Goldsmith released this album as a parody of the self-help scene she was surrounded by in entertainment circles at the time. She pitched her voice lower in an attempt to present herself as genderless, reminding us that success resides from within, repeating ad infinitum: “It’s you, only you.”

Comparison is the thief of joy. I spent at least a decade measuring my success against that of others, comparing my career trajectory to those more successful than me. I’d work backwards via their LinkedIn experience, creating their career timeline, and measuring it against my own; a professional cover version of that unique flavour of sadness that comes from judging your own life against the carefully curated photos of others on Instagram.

For the longest time, my definition of success was clear: get a job at Google. Sometime around the turn of the Millennium—when Google started to clearly become a better way to find things on the internet than Ask Jeeves or AltaVista, and stories started to surface about the type of work and the kind of environment their employees were enjoying—I knew I wanted to work there. I spent time at various jobs, never intentionally heading towards the Googleplex, but always having it as a north star, a dream scenario, should things go my way. I came tantalisingly close in 2010 when I started working for a digital agency that had them as a client. Then, towards the end of 2011—after 6 months of interviews and being asked as many “how many windows in New York” questions as I’d been led to believe—I got an offer. Contract signed. Box ticked.

I was Heath Ledger’s Joker, the dog that finally caught the car. Now what? With that long-held goal achieved, there was a void where drive had once been, a fuel tank marked “ambition” running empty just as it was pulling into the driveway. Something had to take its place. It became filled with a definition of success that wasn’t my own. I got sucked up into caring about things I once hadn’t: internal visibility, promotions, performance scores, industry awards; corporate junk food, filling my sense of success but ultimately unnourishing, eternally unfulfilling. I internalised what a large company had decreed as success and made it my own. It took a while, but I was cured of this ailment after working with a fantastic coach in 2017. He helped me redefine what success could look like for me, putting me on the path I still find myself walking.

I have friends and peers who have achieved incredible success in their lives. Some became “the youngest ever person to [x],” others launched successful businesses of all kinds and colours, experiencing that meteoric career rise that comes from the perfect combination of determination, inherent talent, privilege, likability, and a sprinkle of good luck. In years gone by, I’d look at their careers and wonder why mine hadn’t quite hit those heights—a career-based remake of Sliding Doors playing in my mind, yours truly starring in the role of future snake oil saleswoman, pusher of ineffective pills and vagina-scented candle manufacturer Gwyneth Paltrow.

Last month marked the eight-year anniversary of leaving Google. I’d like to say “the day I handed in my badge,” but I’d be lying: I kept the badge, told them I lost it. During those years working for myself, I’ve had highs and lows—during the pandemic, I’d have bitten someone’s arm off for a monthly paycheck—but I’ve become increasingly at ease with the idea of life as a “slashie.” This term, originally derogatory, once referred to folks in the creative industries who hadn’t found the success required to work only in their chosen field: busboy/actor; waitress/actress; cleaner/scriptwriter; singer/secretary. In recent years, it’s become a collective term for those who find themselves spread across concurrent multiple careers; multi-hyphenates of the type trailblazed by Lynn Goldsmith decades ago.

Success isn’t a dirty word. Its definition is in the eye of the beholder. As much as I turned my back on one interpretation of success—keeping the dream job, striving for another promotion, working towards a performance-related bonus—I haven’t given it up completely. My criterion is no longer tied to a salary bracket or a job title that might make others seethe with envy. Your level of ambition is irrevocably connected to your definition of success. And no one rationale is more right, or more noble, than any other. You might be driven by the need to provide for your family and your future. You might seek to drive a positive impact in the world through what you do. Yours might be anything. But the question is simple: Is your metric of success your own? Or have you inherited it from someone, or somewhere, else?

January marked five years of writing this newsletter. On the verge of publishing my first book, I’m reminded that all those years ago, after recovering from my episode of paternal post-natal depression, I thought writing a book might be the answer. But who the fuck was I to write a book? All I’d written were PowerPoint presentations for distracted execs, attempting to wrestle their attention away from the small screen in front of them toward the big screen I was pointing at.

Instead, I drifted towards the safer shores of the newsletter. My definition of success was simple and internal: write and publish once a week. If no one read it, it didn’t matter. I wanted to put something out into the world that could help another dad-in-need, who might find himself where I was during those dark months. But I’m feeling nervous for the first time in a long time. This project has already put me in orbit with some of the most incredible dads—people I’ve respected from afar my entire life, kindred spirits who embody the idea of “abundant fatherhood” that underpins the book’s central thesis. This week, I sat down with a hero of mine, whose work truly influenced the gestation of TNF: the writer , to talk about his new book for a future podcast episode. He told me about what Jonathan Lethem calls “The Gulp,” the time between completing a creative endeavour and awaiting its release into the world.

Are you tired of reading about the book? I’m getting tired of writing about it. I’m so tired of thinking about it, tired of waking up in the middle of the night and wondering just what will happen when it goes out into the world. Honestly, I’m just plain tired. Welcome to the world of fatherhood, I guess? This corner of the internet has always been a place to share where my head is at on kids, life, and where I’m at in this grand journey of figuring it out as I go, assembling the parachute as I hurtle towards the ground. But I’m almost there. This Sunday, I’ll jump on a plane to New York and take a leap into the unknown. I’ll spend time with some of the people who’ve made The New Fatherhood happen: the guys at Selman who brought it to life, early subscribers of the newsletter who have been solid supporters from the start. I know what my publishers see as success: a big number, books sold, bums on seats. For me, the book’s success will reflect what’s driven me in the five years of writing this newsletter—how many dads will this help? And how might they take what they learn from the book, and use it to show up better for the other dads in their lives?

What will happen next? Who knows.

But it won’t be long until we find out.

“Describe the inner person you’d like to be

Let your mind run wild

Assume you can be anything that you desire

The fact is, you will become the person you honestly describe

You can’t avoid it”

— ” Adventures in Success”, Will Powers

3 things to read this week

1. “What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?” by Jessica Winter in the New Yorker. Winter poses the perennial question facing modern parents: What good is it controlling access to technology at home, if it’s given away for free at school? Her two kids get new laptops at school, which come with an AI assistant as standard, who “reads her poems and knows her passwords” and “is always watching through the screen.”

2. “In Defense of Husbands” by Darby Saxbe in Natal Gazing. Gazing forward to June, and there’s another great fatherhood book on the horizon: Saxbe’s Dad Brain, which details the surprising changes in our brains after we have kids. In the meantime, her latest newsletter covers the shift in the share of household work over the last twenty years, in which the “core” chore gap (cooking, cleaning, laundry) has narrowed by 40%, as we head into an era of cautious hetero-optimism.

3. “Passed Out on Gummies” by Juno DeMelo in The Cut. Melatonin, the hormone produced naturally by the body to regulate our sleep cycles, is available as an over-the-counter supplement in the US, and is increasingly given to kids to help them sleep. When we lived in the US and flew back to the UK to visit family every year, these gummies were a lifesaver: a way to short-circuit the circadian system and help our kids get back onto a regular sleep cycle and minimise the dreaded jet lag. This piece serves as a snapshot of the current lay of the land, with multiple class-action lawsuits filed in the US, and actions being taken by parents and manufacturers to prevent kids from tucking into them like they’re Skittles.

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Last Sunday, my son and I did something fantastic.

Something I never would have done if I weren’t a dad.

As previously foreshadowed mere weeks ago—it’s almost like I plan these in advance, as if my “editorial calendar” wasn’t sketched onto toilet paper in pencil—my son is deep into his football-card-collecting era. With it, he has finally come to understand the value of money. For so long, the concept was alien to him: one Euro was a shiny coin. Nothing more. It was something he saw, not something he could use.

Fast forward a few months. The world has changed, and the exchange rate is crystal clear. He now innately understands that €1 is equal to 1 shiny envelope filled with 7 cards, a number of which may be shinier than others, if he’s lucky. He also inherently understands two 50c pieces can be exchanged for a sobre of cromos. They take anything at the kiosk: 5 x 20c pieces, 10 x 10c pieces, or whatever else he can cobble together from the previously ignored loose change left around the house he suddenly developed an interest in.

He’s got cards on the mind, morning, noon and night. It’s all he wants to talk about. Any new guest to the house is instantly inducted into his collector’s VIP circle, and before long, they’ll know his favourite team, favourite player, favourite card, favourite shiny, which card he wants the most, which kids in his year have said card, and how many are out there on the open swap market.

He knows every card he has: his gots, in the parlance of my youth. His needs. His swaps, or as you’ll hear him talking about in Catalan, his repets. He’s learning not just the value of a Euro, but the value of one card versus another. He knew his spare Kylian Mbappé Panini Gold card was worth at least 10 cards from his classmate’s pile. In the school yard, his potential pool of swaps is limited. Not every kid is going to be collecting them. And amongst the ones that do, some days are less liquid than others, and he might have already exhausted the pool of his needs.

So, to cast a wider net, we hit up a local meetup at Mercat de Sant Antoni, where kids (and, as you’ll soon see, not-kids) gather every Sunday to swap football cards. I bumped into another dad I knew there: we reminisced about the sticker albums from our youth, the ones we’ll never forget. These two naive dads thought this would be an easy way to get our sons swapping with each other. But, alas, my boy was collecting La Liga; his boy was collecting World Cup 2026.

We didn’t let that early own goal set us back. Hanging around the stalls selling cards, I gently introduced my son to the other kids there. “¿Quieres cambiar?” I’d ask. He was a little timid at first, swapping with “randoms” and not his school friends, but after a few early trades, he saw just how generous—and equally obsessed—the other kids were and got right into it. One boy, only four cards away from completing the whole set, let him take a handful of cards for free. Another kid, 10 away from being done, saw one of his needs in my son’s pile and offered him 8 cards in exchange. 30 minutes later, my son was in his element. Zero fear. On the eve of his seventh birthday, getting bigger in size and stature every day.

It wasn’t just the kids. Collectors ranged from five years old to 75 years old—by the time we were leaving, the group had swelled to over 200 parents and children, with an older culé (the local term for a Barça fan) doing his rounds in an attempt to land the rare shiny Míticos Invencible card featuring Messi, Ronaldinho and Ronaldo together. Does my son know who Ronaldinho is? Of course not. Does this give us an excuse to now watch YouTube videos of his greatest moments? You bet your damn boots it does. (Sharing a hobby with your offspring: genuinely one of life’s most generous joy-filled hydrants.)

Against all odds, it wasn’t a complete sausage fest. Girls walking around swapping cards on their own, younger sisters accompanying their big brothers on their adventures. Mums were out in force, fastidiously marking off the list of missing cards for their sons. We were OK solo: I remain amazed at my son’s ability to know not just which Barça players he lacked, but exactly which of the dark-haired, olive-skinned Getafe midfielders (who look exactly the same to me) he needed to complete that page.

The dads present could be easily divided into two packs. Those who were in attendance primarily to make their kids happy. And those, like your humble narrator, who could still feel the blood pumping through their veins the same way they once did as a kid, opening a packet of stickers for the Panini World Cup USA 1994 album as an eleven year old boy: Ireland’s last great World Cup run, the final penalty showdown between Italy and Brazil, when Romário played a blinder and the cup was decided when a ponytailed Roberto Baggio put his penalty over the bar.

Those dads? They had a different glint in their eyes. We all know the baldness gene, the coriander-tastes-like-soap gene and the wee-smells-like-asparagus gene are all passed along hereditarily. Walking around, you couldn’t help but assume the collector gene was encoded in our DNA in a similar way.

I once read that if you want to be an interesting writer, you should live an interesting life. Hemingway said it better: “In order to write about life, first you must live it.” However it is articulated, it’s a deep truth.

So if offered an opportunity to make things interesting, I’ll take it. I was recently introduced to Krishinda, a midwife and doula here in Barcelona, who helps women give birth at home.1 In a country where ~25% of births are via caesarean, and only 0.3% are delivered at home, her guidance is necessary for expectant parents who don’t foresee a hospital trip in their birth plan. She’d just delivered a friend’s baby. We got a coffee and talked about life, raising kids in Barcelona. She told me she ran a course helping expectant parents get ready for the big transition, and spoke of how she’d see dads attend like rabbits in the headlights. She asked if I’d come along and talk to her next set of students. I was happy to oblige.

Sitting in a room with six expectant dads—all waiting on the arrival of their first child—I realised that it was a little under 12 years ago when I sat in their place. It feels like a lifetime ago: gloriously naive, unaware of what was to come, The Tunnel I was heading into. And here, I had the opportunity to tell them what I wish someone had told me back then: “If there’s one thing you take from this conversation, it should be each other. Get into a WhatsApp group together, reach out and share the highs, the lows, what’s easy and what’s impossible.” I imparted what I’ve learned seeing the dads who have joined the Dadscord in the same headspace: entering fatherhood with genuine curiosity, not faux certainty. Not afraid to ask for help when needed.

Krishinda asked if she could share the local Dadurday group with some of the alumni dads who had come through her program. “They need this so much,” she offered. Of course they were welcome. Those dads need support—exactly the same kind of support I was missing in the early days of my son’s birth, exactly the support that might have helped me avoid the slip into my episode of paternal postnatal depression. I was expecting a few dads to take her up on her offer, but was shocked by the response: over the course of a few days, 30 dads pulled up, bringing our local group to over 100.

The dads yearn for community. The kids yearn for it too. But it doesn’t happen by accident. It needs work. My son found his in a group of kids swapping cards. I found mine in a group of dads who meet once a month for a beer, the local arm of a breakfast club I run with a friend, the coffee shop where I became a regular. My son might not need me much longer. But for now, we’ll keep heading down to the market. His grandad has just left town, and he’s got a fresh stack of repets.

The reviews are in
A review is in

12 days until the book goes on sale, and it has received its first review. And it’s not my sister writing under a pseudonym from Manchester. (She listened to the audiobook and gave it a glowing review, but she’s biased.) It’s from Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine for the publishing industry, depended upon by librarians, bookstore owners, and industry folks to get an idea of what’s coming out soon.

Around 5% of the books they review get a coveted “starred review,” which signifies a book “of outstanding quality.” And, who’d have thunk it, this book picked one up. Apparently, I’m a “smart and self-aware guide, candid about personal challenges” who has written a book that “will resonate with modern dads frustrated with outmoded parenting advice.”

I’m excited for you all to read it. Two weeks and counting.

Pre-order the book

The Book Launch Tour. Coming to a town near you (if that town is called New York, Barcelona or Manchester)

Going out on the road. Hope to see some of you there. Tour t-shirts, not included. Good dad chats, guaranteed.

• Tuesday, May 12th: New York, in conversation with Sam Graham-Felsen. Lofty Pigeon Books, Brooklyn. 6.30pm–8.00pm. RSVP here

• Tuesday, June 2nd: Manchester, in conversation with Sacha Lord.
  House of Books and Friends, King Street. 6.00pm–7.00pm. RSVP here

• Friday, June 12th: Barcelona, in conversation with Aaron Shulman.
  Backstory Bookshop, Carrer de Mallorca 330. 6.00pm–7.30pm. RSVP here

Lofty Pigeon has kindly offered to distribute signed copies anywhere in the US, so if you’d like one, you can order it on their site and ask for it to be signed/personalised at checkout.

London dads, I’ll be there around the time of the UK launch (May 28th). Location TBC. If you know of a nice bookstore that might be willing to host us, please hit me up at kevin@newfatherhood.email or press reply.

London Dads: Join the Push for Paternity March

UK paternity leave is among the least generous in Europe, providing only two weeks of leave at a low statutory rate (for comparison, here in Spain, dads get 16 weeks at full pay.)

Parenting Out Loud is organising a "Push for Paternity March” on Saturday, May 2nd, to raise awareness of this important issue. If you’re a London dad and want to help push fatherhood forward, RSVP here.

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How did you like this week’s essay? Your feedback helps me keep this ship on the straight and narrow as we count down the days until launch.

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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.

Subscribe to the Podcast

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

YouTube

Pocket Casts

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, h…

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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.