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.

Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad

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.

Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad

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?

Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad

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.

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

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.

Say Hello

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.

Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad

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, how can you possibly say no to that?

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-order the book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Dadvice

Say Hello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 things to read this week

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

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

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

Good Dadvice

Where’s My Snare, I Need More Snare

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

Say Hello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Calendarization of Parenthood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe to the Podcast

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Apple Podcasts

Pocket Casts

Where to Find More From Bilge Ebiri

• Bilge’s writing on Vulture

• Bilge’s dad’s film notebooks

• Review of Train Dreams

• Review of Jay Kelly

• Review of Hamnet

• Review of One Battle After Another

Bilge’s Watchlist

• The Champ

• The Shining

• Bigger Than Life

• Train Dreams

• Jay Kelly

• One Battle After Another

• Walking with Dinosaurs

Timestamps

00:00 Hello

00:31 Becoming Nemo’s Dad

03:30 Let’s talk movies!

05:00 Film diaries c. 1940s

06:10 Apocalypse Now

07:20 Present dad award

10:43 Core memory of The Shining

15:00 Masculinity crisis

16:48 [SPOILERS] Train Dreams

19:15 Providing vs. protecting

19:58 [SPOILERS] Hamnet

20:20 [SPOILERS] Sentimental Value

21:04 [SPOILERS] Jay Kelly

23:50 [SPOILERS] more Train Dreams

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

29:10 The Shining easter egg

31:21 Letting go in the teen years

33:00 Watching movies with your kids

36:43 The outcast dinosaur

Credits

Host: Kevin Maguire

Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Sound Editor: Sam Williams

Theme Music: SOHN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Get up, immediately drink water with electrolytes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 things to read this week

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

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

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

Watch This Beautiful Poem on Raising Boys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Hear From Other Dads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your dad texted,” she said.

“Texted you?”

Mitzi nodded. “He was just checking in.”

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

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

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

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

“Maybe he should give us a ride home?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Dad,” Chris said.

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

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

“Hey,” Mitzi said.

“Mitz, how are you, beautiful?”

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

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

Mitzi laughed.

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

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

Mitzi pursed her lips.

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

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

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

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

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

Papa, he repeated in his mind several times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve got it,” his dad said.

“No, I’ll do it,” Chris said.

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

Chris looked at Amos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thought you might need some air, sheesh.”

Chris’s dad eyed him in the rearview.

“Mitz, you know how he gets.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I know,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

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

“Stop, Chris,” Mitzi said.

He didn’t listen.

“Please, just calm down.”

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

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

“I got something for you,” he said.

“Oh?” Chris said wryly.

Mitzi got out of the car and took Amos.

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

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

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

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

Say Hello

Something entirely different this week. Thanks, Oliver.

How was it for you?

Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad

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

But what if it wasn’t?

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

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

Subscribe to the Podcast

Spotify

Apple Podcasts

Pocket Casts

Where to Find Sam Graham-Felsen

Sam’s website

Sam’s novel Green

Episode References

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

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

Kevin’s essay, “Where’s My Jenny?”

Brooklyn Stroll Club

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

Theodore Roosevelt and the Strenuous Life

Dadurdays: IRL meetups in a city near you

Men calling to wish each other goodnight

Ray Charles — “America the Beautiful”

Bruce Springsteen — “Badlands”

Woody Guthrie — “This Land Is Your Land”

Timestamps

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

Credits

Host: Kevin Maguire

Managing Producer: Elizabeth Van Brocklin

Sound Editor: Sam Williams

Theme Music: Sohn