10 Things Every Dad Should Know How to Cook

There’s something about a dad who can cook that communicates more than just competence. It says I take care of this family. I show up for the things that matter. I can handle myself.

This isn’t about becoming a chef. It’s about knowing ten things well enough that the kitchen feels like home instead of foreign territory.

Here’s the list.

1. A Proper Scrambled Egg

Start here because it’s the most humbling dish in cooking.

Scrambled eggs are simple and almost universally done wrong. Too hot, too fast, rubbery, dry. The fix is embarrassingly straightforward. Low heat. Butter. Constant movement with a spatula. Pull the pan off before they look done and let carry-over cooking finish them. Salt at the end.

A dad who makes perfect scrambled eggs on a Saturday morning is operating at a different level than he realizes. Master this and everything else gets easier because you understand heat and patience.

2. A Roast Chicken

This is the most important dish on the list.

One chicken feeds a family. It costs almost nothing per serving. The leftovers become soup, tacos, sandwiches. And a properly roasted chicken, golden skin, juicy meat, the whole house smelling like something good is happening, is one of the most satisfying things a dad can put on the table.

The technique is not complicated. Dry the bird the night before. Season aggressively with salt, pepper, and whatever herbs you like. High heat, around 425 degrees, for about an hour depending on size. Let it rest before you cut it. That’s the whole recipe.

Learn this one. Cook it on repeat. It will become the thing your kids ask for by name.

3. Pasta From Scratch (Or at Least a Proper Sauce)

Not every dad needs to make pasta dough from scratch. But every dad should be able to make a sauce that isn’t from a jar.

A proper tomato sauce takes 25 minutes. Olive oil, garlic, crushed tomatoes, salt, time, and a handful of fresh basil at the end. That’s it. The difference between that and jarred sauce is significant. Your kids will taste it. You will taste it.

If you want to go further, pasta dough is four ingredients and the technique is learnable in an afternoon. Fresh pasta changes what dinner feels like entirely. But start with the sauce.

4. A Great Burger

Every dad thinks he can make a burger. Half of them are wrong.

The difference between a great burger and a mediocre one is simple. Don’t overwork the meat. Season the outside, not the inside. Press a small dimple in the center before cooking so it stays flat. High heat, minimal flipping, and don’t press down on it. You’re squeezing out the juice every time you do that.

An 80/20 ground beef blend is the standard. Season with salt and pepper right before it hits the pan or grill. Two to three minutes per side for medium. Let it rest for two minutes.

This is the dish your kids will brag about at school. Get it right.

5. A Sheet Pan Dinner

This is the weeknight move every dad needs in his back pocket.

One pan. Protein, vegetables, olive oil, seasoning. Into the oven at 400 degrees. Done in 30 to 40 minutes. One thing to clean.

Chicken thighs with potatoes and broccoli. Salmon with asparagus and cherry tomatoes. Sausage with peppers and onions. The combinations are nearly endless and the technique is identical every time. Toss everything in olive oil, season well, spread it on the pan without crowding it, roast until done.

This is the recipe that makes a dad look like he has his life together on a Tuesday night when everyone is tired and nobody wants to cook.

6. A Steak

A properly cooked steak is one of the great acts of dad cooking. A dry, overcooked steak is one of the great disappointments.

The technique that works every time for home cooking: pat the steak dry, season generously with salt and pepper, bring it to room temperature for 30 minutes before cooking. Cast iron pan, high heat, a tablespoon of butter and some garlic in the last minute of cooking. Baste while it finishes. Rest for five minutes before cutting.

Internal temperature matters. 130 to 135 degrees for medium rare. Get an instant-read thermometer and use it. It costs $15 and removes all the guesswork.

The rest is just watching the steak and not walking away from it.

7. A Soup or Chili From Scratch

This is cold weather cooking. This is Sunday cooking. This is the thing simmering on the stove when your kid walks in the door from school and the whole house smells like something is being taken care of.

Every dad needs a chili. Not from a packet. One that’s actually his. Brown the beef, season aggressively, build layers with onion, garlic, peppers, tomato, beans, spices. Let it go for an hour minimum. Taste and adjust.

The same logic applies to a basic chicken soup or a beef stew. These dishes reward patience and punish rushing. They also get better the next day. Make more than you need.

8. Pancakes That Are Actually Good

Not from a box. From scratch.

The box pancake is one of those things that seems easier than it is. From-scratch pancakes take ten minutes to mix and are genuinely better. Flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, egg, milk, melted butter. Whisk until just combined, lumps are fine, don’t overwork it. Medium heat, wait for bubbles before you flip, one flip only.

This is Saturday morning. This is the thing your kid asks for on their birthday. This is the cooking moment that becomes a memory. Make it from scratch.

9. Something on the Grill

The grill is historically dad territory. A lot of dads who claim it don’t actually know what they’re doing on it.

Learn the two-zone setup. Direct heat for searing, indirect heat for finishing. Learn when to leave things alone because most grill mistakes come from moving things too early. Chicken needs to cook through without burning the outside, so start on indirect heat, finish direct. Burgers are direct. Vegetables are direct but watch them.

Also learn to clean the grill and maintain it. A filthy grill is a fire hazard and it affects the flavor of everything you cook on it.

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10. A Dish That Is Completely Yours

This is the most important one on the list.

Every dad needs a signature dish. Not a restaurant recipe you followed once. Something you’ve made enough times that you don’t need to look it up anymore. Something your kids can name without hesitation. Something you bring to the cookout and people ask about.

It could be anything. Brisket. A specific pasta. Your version of fried rice. The best guacamole anyone in your circle has ever had. A breakfast sandwich that people request by name.

The what doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’ve put in enough reps that it’s yours. That you could make it at midnight in an unfamiliar kitchen without a recipe.

That dish becomes part of how your family remembers you. No pressure. But also, all the pressure.

Here’s the deal…

Cooking for your family is one of the most direct expressions of taking care of them. It doesn’t require culinary school. It requires showing up consistently, learning a few things well, and not being afraid to try something that might not work the first time.

Start with one. Pick the scrambled eggs tonight. Work your way down the list.

Your kids are watching. Get ’em involved, too. Ok, this made us hungry. Time to eat.

Think about the skills you picked up as a kid that still show up in your life today.

Not the ones that aged out. The ones that traveled with you. The sport you can still do. The instrument you can still play. The activity that keeps opening doors in rooms you didn’t expect.

Now think about the skills you wish someone had put in front of you earlier.

That gap, between what we got and what we wish we’d had, is exactly what we’re thinking about as dads.

Because we have a window right now to give our kids something that compounds. Not just a hobby. A set of skills that travel through life, open social doors, create networking opportunities, and stay relevant at 15, at 35, and at 60.

There’s a Category of Skill Most People Don’t Talk About

Not all activities are created equal.

Some sports peak in your twenties and quietly age out. You stop playing competitive basketball. The pickup flag football games thin out. The intramural stuff disappears with college. And that’s fine, those sports gave you something real. But they tend not to compound.

Then there’s another category. Activities you can pick up at five and still be doing at seventy-five. Activities that travel well, that cross social contexts, that show up at business events and charity weekends and family vacations and retirement parties. Activities that quietly build a life around them.

These are what we’d call lifetime activities. And the earlier your kid learns them, the more runway they have to let them work.

Golf

This one leads the list because no other activity comes close for professional networking.

A four-hour round of golf is one of the longest uninterrupted social encounters modern business produces. There’s no agenda to rush through. No meeting to end. No phone to stare at during a pause. Just you, three other people, and eighteen holes of shared experience. Conversations happen naturally. Trust builds. Deals get done.

We didn’t learn until 22 and still feel the gap. The guys who grew up playing have a fluency with the game that changes how they carry themselves on the course. They’re not thinking about their swing when someone brings up a business idea. They’re just playing golf and having a conversation. That ease is worth something.

For kids, golf builds things that transfer directly into life: patience, honesty, personal accountability, comfort in unfamiliar social settings, and an understanding of etiquette that actually matters in the real world. The rules of golf are essentially the rules of professional behavior dressed up in cleats.

The investment to get a kid into golf is real. Lessons, equipment, range time. But the return compounds for decades.

A 10-year-old who plays golf becomes a 30-year-old who can say yes when a client asks if they play. That yes opens a door. The no closes it.

Start them young. Even basic competency at the game is more valuable than most parents realize.

Skiing and Snowboarding

These are the activities that unlock an entirely different social world.

Ski trips are one of the primary ways that a certain tier of professional and social relationships get formed and maintained. Companies take teams on ski trips. Friend groups organize mountain weekends. Families who ski together build something around it. If your kid can ride confidently, they can participate fully in all of it. If they can’t, they’re on the bunny hill while everyone else is on the mountain together.

Learning to ski or snowboard young is dramatically easier than learning as an adult. The fearlessness of childhood, the low center of gravity, the willingness to fall without catastrophizing, all of it makes early learners pick it up in a fraction of the time. An adult learning to ski is a week of frustration and sore everything. A six-year-old learning to ski is three days and they’re linking turns.

There’s also just the life quality dimension. If your kid grows up comfortable on a mountain, they have access to one of the genuinely great experiences available in this world. Powder days, backcountry trips, ski towns with their own culture and community. That’s not nothing.

We’re glad we learned young. It’s one of the things we’d put near the top of the list for our own kids.

Tennis

Tennis deserves more attention than it gets in this conversation.

It’s one of the few sports you can play meaningfully at 8 and 80. It’s social in a direct, one-on-one way that golf isn’t. You can play it in almost any city in the world with almost no equipment. And it shows up in the same professional and social contexts as golf with surprising frequency.

Tennis clubs, like golf clubs, are networking environments. Charity tournaments exist. Company events get organized around it. And unlike golf, you can get a solid tennis workout in 90 minutes, which makes it more compatible with a busy adult schedule.

For kids, tennis builds hand-eye coordination, lateral movement, spatial awareness, and the ability to handle one-on-one competition with composure. Those transfer broadly.

Running

Running might be the most underrated activity on this list from a social standpoint.

The fitness benefits are obvious. The social ones are not, and they’re significant.

Run clubs have exploded in the last decade. In cities across the country, groups of people are meeting at 5:30am on a Tuesday and logging miles together before the rest of the world wakes up. Something specific happens when you do something hard alongside someone at an hour when you both would rather be asleep. Conversations go somewhere real. Friendships form fast. People who run together tend to actually know each other.

Races add another layer. The half marathon circuit, local 5Ks, charity runs, Spartan races, all of it creates a community with its own language, its own events, its own recurring social calendar. Sign up for the same race as someone in your network and you have six months of shared training conversations before you even cross the start line.

Running also travels. Every city has routes. Every trip has a morning window. Some of the best conversations we’ve had happened on a run with someone we were trying to get to know. The side-by-side nature of it, no eye contact required, nothing to stare at, just moving forward together, creates an environment where people open up more than they would sitting across a table.

For kids, the entry point is simple. School track, cross country, weekend 5Ks with a parent.

Running requires zero equipment beyond shoes and builds the habit of physical discomfort as something manageable, which is one of the most useful things a kid can internalize.

A kid who runs becomes an adult who runs. And an adult who runs has an instant community wherever they go.

Swimming

Swimming is technically a survival skill. But it’s also a lifetime activity in the truest sense.

The 70-year-old who still swims laps every morning didn’t start at 60. They built that habit young and it followed them. Swimming is low-impact, comprehensive, and available everywhere. It scales from recreational to competitive to purely functional across an entire life.

For younger kids, learning to swim confidently also unlocks a whole category of summer experiences, boats, lakes, beaches, pool parties, that are otherwise limited or anxiety-inducing. The social dividend of being a competent swimmer starts in childhood and continues indefinitely.

A Musical Instrument

This one doesn’t open the same professional doors as golf, but it opens something else.

Music gives people a relationship with creativity and discipline that’s genuinely hard to replicate any other way. A kid who learns an instrument and sticks with it learns to practice something imperfectly for a long time before it gets good. That lesson is one of the most useful things a person can internalize.

There’s also the social dimension.

Play an instrument well enough and you become the person who can sit down at a piano at a party and make the room stop.

You can play in a band with friends, compose things, teach your own kids someday. It’s a skill that deepens with age in a way that most physical activities can’t.

The guitar specifically earns a mention. It’s portable, it’s social, it plays well around campfires and beach trips and all the places that matter. Learning basic chords at eight means being the person who can actually play something meaningful at forty.

Martial Arts

Less obvious but worth including.

Martial arts teaches discipline, physical confidence, and the ability to be uncomfortable without panicking. Those qualities show up everywhere in life. A kid who spends years in a martial art understands what consistent practice produces. They understand hierarchy and respect in a way that’s genuinely useful. They’re also, practically speaking, more confident in their body and their ability to handle physical situations.

Many adults who trained as kids return to it in their thirties and forties as a fitness practice and community. The skill doesn’t expire.

Surfing and Water Sports

This one is regional but worth mentioning for the families near water.

Surfing in particular has its own culture and community that runs deep. People who surf share something specific. It shows up in how they travel, where they vacation, who they spend time with. Learning young means having a relationship with the ocean that lasts a lifetime.

Same goes for sailing, paddleboarding, kitesurfing. Any water skill learned young becomes a passport to experiences and communities that are genuinely difficult to access later.

We’ll Leave You With This…

Every activity on this list shares a few things.

They can be done across a full lifetime without significant physical limitation. They exist in social contexts that matter beyond just recreation. They teach transferable qualities including patience, discipline, comfort with discomfort, and how to be gracious in competition. And they compound. The earlier you start, the more you get.

Here’s the dad angle that matters most.

We can’t give our kids everything. But we can give them a set of skills that travel well through life. A kid who plays golf, skis, runs, swims, and plays an instrument has access to social worlds, professional environments, and personal experiences that a kid without those skills simply doesn’t.

That’s not about pressure or achievement. It’s about equipping them with tools that work at 15, at 30, at 60.

Think about the things you wish you’d learned earlier. Then give your kid the head start you didn’t have.

We have almost 500 dads in our Slack group. And this question comes up more than almost anything else.

When should we have another one? Larger age gap or smaller? Anyone have pros and cons for a big or small gap?

It’s one of those questions that feels like it should have a clean answer. A formula. A right move. It doesn’t. But there’s a lot of useful thinking out there from dads who’ve lived both sides of it. And there’s one bigger truth that tends to override all the planning anyway.

More on that in a minute.

What the Research Actually Says

If you go looking for scientific guidance on ideal sibling spacing, you’ll find a lot of hedging.

The most commonly cited sweet spot in parenting research is somewhere between two and three years. The reasoning makes practical sense. Mom’s body has had meaningful recovery time. The older child is out of diapers and old enough to understand what’s happening. The logistics are manageable.

But the research also consistently shows that the effects of age spacing on sibling closeness and child development are heavily influenced by other factors: personality, parenting style, family dynamics, and frankly, how the parents handle the chaos.

There’s no gap that guarantees close siblings. There’s no gap that guarantees difficult ones.

What the data is clearer on is the stress curve. Very close gaps, under 18 months, are significantly harder on the parents in the short term. The physical and emotional demands of two babies essentially at the same time are real. On the other end, very large gaps, five years or more, tend to produce more of a separate-childhoods dynamic where the kids have less overlap in life stages and sometimes less natural closeness.

Everything in between exists on a spectrum. And the people living it are the best source of actual data.

What Our Guys Said

The Dad Day community had thoughts.

• Jon, who has a 2.5-year gap, put the logistics case well: “Larger gaps are hard because when you finish a milestone the other is entering it. Diapers, daycare, etc. Two years is nice because they can still be in a similar friend group.”

That overlap point is real. With a closer gap, you’re buying diapers for two kids at once, yes. But you’re also finishing that phase faster as a household. With a larger gap you get a breather, then you restart from scratch. Depending on your tolerance for restart, that’s either a relief or a grind.

• Eric also in the 2.5-year camp, described something that’s hard to put a number on: “They’re so bonded and literally follow one another’s lead in both directions all the time. It’s pretty special to see their closeness continue to grow.” He also noted a practical win he didn’t expect: “Our second was way faster to get out of diapers because he was following the leader.”
• Richard O. offered the longer-gap perspective from lived experience: “With my 4.5-year gap to my middle brother and another 4.5 to the older, we didn’t bond much as kids. We get along fine, but we couldn’t share a lot of interests at the same time and definitely couldn’t share friend groups.”
• Daniel had the line of the whole conversation. With 2.5-year-apart kids himself, he described his own family of origin, where brothers 13 months apart grew up extremely close, and then there’s Daniel, arriving 6 years after the last sibling. “I was kind of on my own. But it took my parents 5 tries to finally get it right.” 😏

The Thing You Can’t Plan For

Here’s where we want to be honest about something.

All of this assumes the universe cooperates with your timeline.

Our boys are three years apart. We now have a five-month-old girl. And part of us wishes we would have just gone for all three a lot sooner. But number three didn’t come easy. There were things we couldn’t control and didn’t plan for. And so we feel genuinely, deeply blessed to have three healthy kids. Full stop.

That’s the part of this conversation that doesn’t get said enough.

You can read every article, poll every parent in your life, make a spreadsheet if that’s your thing. And then biology, or timing, or circumstance, or something completely outside your control enters the picture and changes the plan.

The couples who planned an 18-month gap sometimes end up with four years. The couples who wanted to wait ended up surprised sooner. The ones who thought they were done ended up with a beautiful third who came when they least expected it.

The gap between your kids is something you can have intentions about. It’s not something you can always control.

So What Do You Actually Do With All of This?

A few things that seem genuinely useful.

Think about the phase overlap honestly. Closer gaps mean more concurrent chaos. Double strollers, double diapers, two kids who both need you physically at the same time. It’s hard and then it eases. Wider gaps mean less concurrent chaos but a longer total runway of the intensive early years. Neither is objectively better. One might fit your life better than the other.

Think about sibling closeness differently. Closeness between siblings isn’t primarily a product of age gap. It’s a product of how the family operates. Kids who are encouraged to play together, who spend time together, who are raised in an environment that values the sibling relationship, tend to be close regardless of the gap. You have more influence here than the birth spacing does.

Don’t optimize too hard. The families who seem to navigate this best are the ones who made a reasonable decision, went for it, and then adapted to whatever actually happened. Over-optimizing the gap is a way of trying to control something that is, at best, partially controllable.

Give yourself some grace. Whatever gap your kids end up with, whether it was planned or not, there are people living that exact situation and doing great. The gap doesn’t determine the outcome. You do.

We’ll Leave You With This

There isn’t one right answer.

Two to three years seems to be the most commonly recommended range and there are real practical reasons for that. But people with 18-month gaps have beautiful sibling relationships. People with five-year gaps have beautiful sibling relationships. And some people with two-year gaps still have kids who aren’t particularly close.

Have the conversation with your partner. Think about your bandwidth honestly. Make a plan if it helps you feel grounded.

And then hold that plan loosely, because the universe tends to have opinions.

There is no objectively right answer here.

That’s the first thing worth saying. Because most conversations about this topic end up sounding like someone is defending a choice they already made. Either you live near family and you can’t imagine doing it any other way, or you live far away and you’ve built something that works and you’ll tell anyone who asks that it made you and your spouse stronger.

Both of those people are usually right. That’s what makes this one of the more genuinely complicated decisions in family life.

Here’s an honest look at both sides, with some real talk about what the research says and what dads who’ve been in both situations have learned.

The Case for Living Near Family

Built-in support is real and it matters.

The research on this isn’t subtle. Having extended family nearby, specifically grandparents, is associated with lower parental stress, higher child wellbeing, and more flexibility for both parents in terms of work and personal time. A grandparent who can take the kids for a Saturday afternoon isn’t just a convenience. That’s a mental health resource. That’s margin in a schedule that has no margin.

The babysitter angle is obvious so let’s get it out of the way fast. Free, trusted childcare is one of the most expensive things in modern family life.

The average cost of full-time daycare in the US runs between $10,000 and $20,000 a year depending on where you live.

Having family nearby doesn’t eliminate that cost entirely but it meaningfully reduces it for a lot of families. That’s real money.

Beyond the logistics, there’s something about kids growing up with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins around that’s genuinely hard to replicate. Extended family gives kids a sense of where they come from. It gives them relationships with adults who love them unconditionally but aren’t their parents. Different perspectives, different personalities, a wider web of people who are invested in who they become.

There’s also the crisis variable. When something goes sideways, medically, emotionally, professionally, having people physically nearby who can show up matters in a way that no amount of FaceTime can touch. A parent who gets sick. A rough patch in the marriage. A kid who needs more than you have in the tank right now. Those situations are harder alone.

The Case Against (Or at Least the Real Complications)

Here’s where it gets more honest.

Living near family works best when the family is functional. When it isn’t, proximity amplifies every existing problem instead of solving it.

The friction is real. Differing opinions on how to raise the kids. Boundaries that get crossed. Grandparents who undermine rules you’re trying to establish. The aunt who always has a comment. The family dynamic that was fine when you were seeing everyone at holidays but becomes harder when you’re navigating it every week.

If you don’t get along well with your family, or if your family doesn’t fully respect your parenting choices, geographic distance is a legitimate form of protection.

Not just for you. For your kids. Kids absorb family tension even when adults think they’re hiding it. Fewer toxic interactions at close proximity is sometimes the better environment regardless of what proximity could theoretically offer.

There’s also the independence factor. Something happens when you move away from family and figure things out on your own. You build confidence as a parent in a way that’s harder to develop when there’s always someone to defer to nearby. You and your spouse learn each other’s strengths in ways you might not have to if help is always a 10-minute drive away.

The Thing About Your Marriage

This one deserves its own section because it’s the part that gets talked about least.

When you move away from family and it’s just the two of you, you become each other’s person in a more complete way. Not because you chose it exactly. Because there’s no other option. Your partner becomes your best friend, your support system, your co-pilot in a way that doesn’t always develop as fully when you have family infrastructure around.

It sounds like a constraint. It often turns into a strength.

That forced interdependence builds something. You learn to communicate better because you have to. You solve problems together because there’s no one else to hand them to. You build a family culture that’s genuinely yours rather than an extension of whoever’s family you’re geographically closest to.

That’s not to say couples near family don’t have strong marriages. They do.

But there’s something specific that gets built when you’re on your own that’s worth acknowledging.

The flip side is real too. The stress of doing it without a support network can strain a marriage. Burnout is more likely when there’s no backup. Two people carrying everything with no relief valve is genuinely hard. Some couples near family are closer because they have breathing room. Some couples far from family are closer because they’ve had to figure things out together. Both happen.

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If You Don’t Live Near Family: What Actually Helps

For the dads who are doing it on their own, here’s what actually makes a difference.

• Build your chosen family. This is the single most important thing. Find other families you trust and invest in those relationships. The people you call when you need someone to grab your kid from school. The couple you process hard weeks with. The dad friends who actually show up. These relationships don’t form by accident. You have to pursue them intentionally the same way you would any other important thing in your life.
• Create your own rituals. Extended family gives kids a sense of tradition and continuity. You can build that yourself. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Sunday dinners. Annual trips. A specific thing your family does that belongs to you. Kids anchor themselves in these rituals and they give a sense of identity that doesn’t require geography.
• Use technology for the good stuff, not just the logistics. Weekly video calls with grandparents that are actually consistent. Shared photo albums. Intentional connection rather than sporadic FaceTime when you happen to think of it. Distance doesn’t have to mean disconnection. It just requires more deliberate effort to maintain than living down the street does.
• Be honest about the hard seasons. There will be stretches where being far from family feels like a mistake. Usually when someone gets sick, or when you’re both depleted, or when you’re watching other families do things together that you can’t replicate. Name those seasons out loud with your partner. Don’t pretend they’re not hard. And build in enough margin in your schedule and budget to visit family more when those stretches hit.
• Protect your own wellbeing. Without built-in relief valves, you have to create them. Regular date nights. Time alone that isn’t negotiable. Exercise that actually happens. The dads who crash in this situation are usually the ones who tried to absorb everything without any outlet. You can’t pour from an empty tank and the tank needs to get refilled deliberately when no one is automatically offering to take the kids.

If You Do Live Near Family: What to Watch For

For the dads with family nearby, a few honest things to consider.

• Set boundaries early and hold them. The time to establish expectations about drop-in visits, parenting decisions, and who has authority over what is before friction develops, not after. A conversation that happens proactively is ten times easier than a conversation that happens after someone’s feelings are hurt or your rules have been undermined in front of your kid.
• Make sure you and your partner are still building your own thing. It’s easy when family is around to let them become the social infrastructure and never build anything independent. Make sure you have couple time that isn’t in the context of the extended family. Make sure your kids are developing their own identity as your family, not just as a branch of the larger tree.
• Don’t assume proximity equals involvement. Living an hour away from grandparents does not automatically mean they’ll be in the picture in a meaningful way. The relationship between your kids and extended family requires active cultivation regardless of geography. Proximity makes that easier but it doesn’t make it automatic.

The Honest Bottom Line

Neither situation is inherently better. Both are workable. Both have real costs and real benefits that depend enormously on who your family is, what your marriage is like, where you are in your career, and what kind of life you’re trying to build.

What we’d say to any dad facing this decision is to be honest about your specific situation rather than chasing a theoretical ideal. Living near a warm, supportive, boundaried family that respects your parenting is a genuine advantage. Living near a complicated, enmeshed, or critical family might be worse than going it alone.

And if you’re already far away, building something intentionally takes more effort but produces something that’s genuinely yours.

Either way, your kids need you present. The geography is the backdrop. Your engagement is the thing.

Most dads are pretty good at showing up for the moments. The birthday. The game. The big stuff. We’re there for that.

What most of us are worse at is showing up for the future. The version of our kids that doesn’t exist yet. The 18-year-old who is going to need a car, or a college deposit, or a first apartment, or just a head start on something we wish we’d had.

Here’s the thing about that future: it’s being built right now. Quietly. In the background. Whether you’re paying attention to it or not.

The question is whether you’re building it on purpose.

The Number That Changes Everything

$10 a week doesn’t feel like much. That’s a couple of coffees. A lunch. The random stuff that disappears from your account and you’re not even sure where it went.

But $10 a week from the day your kid is born, invested consistently and left alone, grows to roughly $17,679 by the time they turn 18.

They didn’t earn it. They didn’t even know it was happening. You just made a small, boring, consistent decision and time did the rest.

Now run that same math at $25 a week. You’re looking at over $44,000 at 18. At $50 a week, nearly $90,000.

This is compound interest. It’s not exciting. It’s just math. And it is one of the most powerful things you can do for your kid that requires almost no effort once it’s set up.

The Trump Account: Free Money You Should Probably Know About

If you have a baby born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028, the federal government is putting $1,000 into an investment account for your child.

This is real. It launched July 4, 2026, via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Officially called a 530A account, the program gives every qualifying newborn a $1,000 government seed contribution that grows tax-deferred until they turn 18.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Who qualifies for the $1,000: U.S. citizen babies born between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2028 with a valid Social Security number. Your immigration status as the parent does not affect eligibility.
• What about older kids: Children born between 2016 and 2024 don’t get the $1,000 government bonus, but they can still open a Trump Account. And if your child is 10 or under and lives in a ZIP code with median household income under $150,000, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation is contributing an additional $250 per child for the first 25 million accounts. That’s worth checking.
• How to open one: File IRS Form 4547 through TrumpAccounts.gov, the Trump Accounts app (built with Robinhood), or when filing your taxes. Bank of New York Mellon manages the accounts.
• Contribution limit: $5,000 per year from all sources combined. Friends, family, and grandparents can contribute. Employers can kick in up to $2,500 per year tax-free.
• When can they access it: Funds are locked until the end of the year they turn 17, with limited exceptions. This is a long-game account, not a rainy day fund.

That $1,000 seed, left alone for 18 years at a 7% average annual return, grows to roughly $3,380. Stack that on top of your weekly contributions and the number gets meaningful fast.

What We Use: FutureMoney

We’ve been using FutureMoney for this and it’s the cleanest solution we’ve found for families who want to actually do this without overcomplicating it.

FutureMoney is built specifically for family investing. It’s not a brokerage that also happens to have a kid account buried in a menu somewhere. This is the whole product.

Here’s what makes it worth looking at:

• The Junior Roth IRA is exclusive to FutureMoney (this is what we have). This lets parents invest up to $35,000 in their child’s future with the potential to grow completely tax-free, without requiring the child to have earned income. That’s a structure you can’t get most places.
• They also offer 529 plans, Custodial Roth IRAs, UTMA/UGMA accounts, general investing, and a Trump Account Sidecar designed to pair with the government program.
• The gifting feature is genuinely useful. Instead of another toy nobody needed, grandparents and relatives can contribute directly to your kid’s FutureMoney account for birthdays and holidays. The money actually goes somewhere instead of ending up in a donation bin two years later.

Fees are low. The subscription runs $0 to $5 per month depending on your tier. For a fully managed portfolio, that’s hard to beat.

SIPC insured up to $500,000. Assets held with SEC-registered custodians including Alpaca Securities and Altruist. Bank-level AES-256 encryption. The trust piece is there.

We use it. We like it. We think it’s the right tool for dads who want a simple, solid way to start building something for their kids without needing to become a finance person to do it.

[Sign up for FutureMoney here] 

—

Here’s the deal…

We know this feels like one of those things you’ll get to eventually. After the house stuff. After the credit card. After the next raise. After things settle down a little. They don’t settle down. The window doesn’t get more convenient. Your kid’s time horizon starts at birth and every month you wait is a month of compounding you don’t get back.

$10 a week is not a sacrifice. It’s a decision. A small, boring, automatic decision that your 18-year-old will not be able to thank you enough for.

Set it up. Forget about it. Let time do the thing it’s very good at doing.

Get started here.

—

*This post contains an affiliate link to FutureMoney. We use FutureMoney ourselves and think it’s the right tool for the job. As always, this is not financial advice. Talk to a financial professional about what’s right for your specific situation.*

Voicemails, book recommendations, gear talk, and the debate every dad with kids away from home eventually has: is it actually better to live near family, or does distance make you closer as your own unit?

What This Episode’s About

Adam and Ben run through listener calls (analysis paralysis, staying present instead of chasing outcomes), Ben’s re-read of David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me as a new dad, and a Dad Day update on the site relaunch and new YouTube content. Then they dig into the real topic: what it’s actually like raising kids far from extended family, and whether the grass is greener closer to home.

The Big Takeaways

• Just send the text. Following up on a listener’s story about reconnecting with friends, Ben tried it himself: “A lot of them came from ‘are you alive’ as my text. And every single one of them had something incredibly hard going on.” One low-effort text, real results.
• Re-reading the same book at a different life stage hits differently. Ben on revisiting Can’t Hurt Me as a father: “To be that committed to one thing, to be that successful at one thing, you have to drop off some other stuff.” Fatherhood reframes what “winning” even means.
• Boredom is part of the deal, and that’s fine. Ben’s honest take on the infant stage: “Some of this stuff is boring, and I think just embracing the boredom during some seasons and being consistent with it is okay.”
• Living far from family can make a marriage stronger, even if it doesn’t feel that way some days. Adam’s take: “We’ve had to rely on each other. I feel like we’ve gotten way closer as a team, just a family unit.”
• Don’t romanticize the move you haven’t made yet. Ben’s closing line after weighing whether to relocate closer to their parents: “Unless you’ve done it before, a lot of this is romanticizing. Pull out a sheet of paper, put pros and cons down, talk to your family about how much they can actually help.”

Best Quote of the Episode

“It’s easy to romanticize on what you think it will look like, but it might not be that way, you know. So I would heed some caution when you’re thinking about the next big move, and really think about where you guys wanna be.” — Adam

Listen to Episode 16
🎧 Spotify/Apple

Related Reading

–I Downplayed It — Guys Being Dads Ep. 11
-Read: Living Near Family vs. Not, on Dad Day

Join the Conversation
Living close to family or far away, and have a take on which one’s actually easier? Email us at podcast@dadday.co or call 833-DAD-SHOW. We might play it on the next episode.

What a Fitness Daily Actually Is

A fitness daily isn’t your workout. It’s your floor.

It’s a small set of movements you do every single day regardless of what else is or isn’t happening with your training. Whether you have a full hour at the gym or twelve minutes before the kids wake up. Whether you’re traveling, tired, sore, or just not feeling it. The daily gets done.

Think of it like brushing your teeth. You don’t skip it because you’re busy. You don’t negotiate with yourself about whether today is a good day for it. It just happens. Same idea here, except your chest gets bigger.

The point isn’t the specific movements. The point is the consistency. Fewer decisions. Fewer excuses. More reps accumulated over time than you’d ever get from a program you follow for three weeks and abandon.

Why This Works When Everything Else Doesn’t

Most fitness programs fail for the same reason. They ask too much on the days when you have nothing to give.

Life with kids is unpredictable. The workout you planned at 5am gets derailed by a sick kid. The gym session you blocked off gets eaten by a work call. You skip one day, then two, then a week goes by and you’ve lost the thread entirely.

The fitness daily sidesteps all of that. Because it’s not asking for your best day. It’s not asking for an hour. It’s asking for ten to fifteen minutes of simple, repeatable movement that never requires a gym, a spotter, or anything other than your own bodyweight and a floor.

The bar is low by design. Low enough that there’s no legitimate excuse to clear it.

And here’s what happens when you clear that bar every day for thirty days. The habit calcifies. It becomes non-negotiable the same way coffee is non-negotiable. Your body expects it. Missing it starts to feel weird. You’ve built something that compounds quietly in the background while the rest of your training fluctuates around it.

How to Build Yours

Pick three movements. That’s it. Three.

They should be movements you can do anywhere, require no equipment, and hit enough muscle groups to feel like you actually did something. Pull-ups, push-ups, and air squats are a solid default. Fifteen, fifty, and fifty respectively is a reasonable starting point for most dads with a base level of fitness.

But the exact numbers aren’t magic. What matters is that they’re challenging enough to mean something and achievable enough that you have no excuse to skip them.

A few principles worth following:

• Keep it bodyweight. The moment your daily requires equipment it gains an out. No equipment, no excuses.
• Time it. Know roughly how long it takes. Most fitness dailies run between eight and fifteen minutes. Knowing the time commitment removes the mental friction of starting.
• Do it at the same time every day if you can. Morning tends to work best because nothing has had a chance to get in the way yet. But whenever works for your life, pick that time and protect it.

Don’t count it as your workout. This is important. The daily is the floor, not the ceiling.

On days when you have time and energy to do more, do more. On days when you don’t, the daily is enough. It just isn’t your whole fitness plan.

When to Change It

Run the same dailies for at least thirty days before you touch them.

The first week will feel easy. The second week you’ll start to feel it in a good way. By the third and fourth week your body has adapted and you’re banking reps on autopilot. That’s the goal.

After thirty days, take a look. Are they still challenging? Can you do them without thinking? Time to add reps, add a movement, or swap something for a harder variation. Pull-ups become weighted pull-ups. Air squats become Bulgarian split squats. Push-ups become archer push-ups.

The dailies should grow with you. But they should always stay simple, always stay achievable, and always stay non-negotiable.

We’re Not the Only Ones Saying This

The Sober Fitness YouTube channel has been running this concept for a long time and has over 300 episodes dedicated to it. Worth watching if you want to see what a real fitness daily practice looks like in action.

The channel is worth a follow whether you’re just starting out or looking for a way to tighten up what you’re already doing.

Go Do It Now

You don’t need to plan this for Monday. You don’t need to wait until you finish the program you’re currently half-following. Pick three movements right now. Do them before you go to bed tonight. Do them again tomorrow morning.

That’s day one.

You walk into a room and forget why you’re there.

Your partner asks you something simple and you need a second to locate the answer. You read the same email three times and still couldn’t tell someone what it said. You’re in a conversation and you can feel yourself half somewhere else the entire time.

This isn’t getting older. This isn’t stress exactly. This is what happens when you have too many tabs open.

Not the Chrome ones. Although yes, also those.

The mental ones.

The email you haven’t responded to that you’re keeping alive by replaying it every few hours. The thing you said to your kid last Tuesday that you’re still low-key processing. The project that’s technically not due for two weeks but is sitting in the background of everything you do. The conversation with your partner you’ve been putting off. The dentist appointment you’ve been meaning to schedule since January. The weird thing your body did last week that you Googled once and then tried to un-Google.

All of it running simultaneously. All of it using some slice of your processing power. All of it making you slightly less present in whatever you’re actually doing.

That’s dad brain. And for dads it’s worse than average. Because you’re not just running your own stuff. You’re running theirs too. School schedules. Sports logistics. Who needs new shoes. Whether that thing your kid said last week means something or nothing. Whether you’re doing enough. Whether you’re present enough. Whether you’re working too much or not enough.

It adds up fast.

What Too Many Tabs Actually Does to You

The research on cognitive load is pretty clear. The human brain isn’t built for true multitasking. What we call multitasking is actually rapid context switching, and every switch costs something. Attention residue, the technical term for it, is what happens when part of your brain stays on the previous task even after you’ve moved on.

That residue is the lag. The blank moment mid-conversation. The room you walked into for a reason you can’t place. That’s not a memory problem or an aging problem. That’s a too-many-tabs problem. And it compounds.

The more tabs you have open, the harder it is to fully engage with any of them. The work gets shallower. The conversations get thinner. The attention your kids get is technically there but not fully there.

They can feel that by the way. Kids are remarkably good at detecting the difference between a dad who is present and a dad who is present but running seven things in the background.

How to Actually Close Some Tabs

The obvious answer is less stuff. But that’s not realistic for most dads. The tabs exist because the responsibilities exist. You can’t just close the tab on school pickup or the project deadline.

What you can do is get more intentional about which ones stay open and how you manage the ones that do.

• Write it down. The single most effective tab-closer there is. When something is living in your head as an open loop, it’s using memory resources to stay alive. The moment you write it down somewhere you trust, your brain lets go of it. Not completely, but enough. A running notes app, a paper list, a voice memo, whatever you’ll actually use. Get the loops out of your head and into a system.
• Do the two-minute thing. If something can be handled in two minutes, handle it now instead of letting it become a mental tab. The email that just needs a one-line reply. The dentist appointment you’ve been putting off. The text you keep meaning to send. Close the tab. Do the thing.
• Build a hard stop. Designate a time each day where work tabs close. Not just the laptop. The mental ones. 6pm, 7pm, whatever your life allows. After that time, if something surfaces, write it down and let it sit until tomorrow. Your brain needs to know there’s an endpoint, otherwise it keeps running in the background indefinitely.
• Name the ones that won’t close. Some tabs won’t close because they’re actually important and need real attention. The conversation you’ve been avoiding. The decision you keep deferring. The thing that’s quietly eating at you. These won’t go away by ignoring them. Name them, schedule time for them, and deal with them directly. An open loop you’ve addressed is infinitely lighter than one you’re just carrying.
• Use the transition. The drive home, the five minutes before you walk through the door, the gap between wherever work happens and wherever family happens. Use those as deliberate transitions. Not more podcast, not more content, not more input. A few minutes of nothing where your brain can actually process and offload before you show up to your family.

The Tab You Can’t Close

Here’s the one most dads don’t talk about.

There’s a background tab running pretty much constantly that never fully closes. It’s the one labeled “am I doing this right.” Am I present enough. Am I providing enough. Am I building something worth building. Is my kid okay. Is my marriage okay. Am I okay.

That one doesn’t close. And honestly, maybe it’s not supposed to.

But it gets lighter when everything else is managed better. When the logistics are out of your head and in a system. When the avoided conversations are actually had. When the work stops bleeding into the evening. The big existential tab becomes more manageable when the small administrative ones aren’t all running at the same time.

That’s the goal. Not a perfectly clear browser. Just enough clear space to actually show up when it counts.

Start with one tab. Close it today.

Two coffees deep, no script, no guest, no editing. That’s Guys Being Dads. And fifteen episodes in, Adam and Ben are proving the thing that keeps coming up on this podcast over and over: you don’t need a perfect plan, you just need to keep showing up.

If you’ve been hunting for podcasts for dads that actually sound like two guys talking instead of a parenting seminar, this is the one to start with.

What This Episode’s About

Adam and Ben catch up on the Land Cruiser YouTube video blowing up, the upcoming Austin “Built for More” trip (October 13–15), and a Derek Grant podcast clip that’s had Adam fired up on his morning runs. From there the conversation turns into the real meat of the episode: why motivation is overrated, why consistency wins, and why “just send it” beats waiting for the perfect plan every time.

The Big Takeaways

Motivation is a starting point, not a strategy. Ben’s take: some guys need a hype speech to get moving, others need an enemy. “I can get motivated different than Adam… For me, I need a little bit of an enemy.” Know which one you are and stop waiting on the wrong fuel.

Consistency beats a six-month shortcut every time. Ben on all the “get rich/get ripped/get famous in six months” promises flooding everyone’s feed: “Consistency will outperform a six month kind of quick turnaround that doesn’t have a solid foundation.”

Blank pages don’t get feedback. Drafts do. Ben’s line on why they never overthink an episode: “I’d rather have something written on the paper than a blank sheet of paper.” Send the rough version. You can’t improve on nothing.

Smash the ceiling, then find the next one. Ben pointed out that a year ago, Dad Day was just a newsletter. Now it’s a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, and live events. The lesson: “You continue to smash ceilings to go to the next level.”

Reach out to someone this week. Adam’s closing thought, sparked by a Dad Day reader’s unprompted check-in text to a friend: “There’s growth in that. Reach out to someone, say hi to someone new this week.”

Best Quotes of the Episode

“Courage will be needed if you’re going to expand past what you have known… So the reward will always come after the courageous act.” — Derek Grant, played as a clip during the episode

“How do you want your obit to be? I want it to be something like Ben always tried to be an amazing father and always showed up to support his family. That other stuff, like founder of Dad Day, will most likely be there, but not as prevalent as who you are as a person.” — Ben

Listen to Episode 15

🎧 Spotify|Apple

Related Reading

• Why Every Dad Needs Life Insurance (Yes, Even You)
• Built for More: Our Austin Experience Is Here

Join the Conversation

Got a take on “choosing your enemies” as motivation, or a story about reaching out to someone at the right time? Drop it in the Dad Day Slack or shoot us a voicemail at 833-DAD-SHOW. We might play it on the next episode.

We’re all guilty of it.

The phone comes out at dinner. It’s the last thing we look at before bed and the first thing we reach for in the morning. It fills every gap, every quiet moment, every 30 seconds of waiting for anything.

Nobody sat down and decided this was the plan. It just kind of happened.

Here are 10 habits worth breaking. Some of these are about your kids. Some are about your marriage. Some are just about being a more present human. All of them are worth an honest look.

1. Checking It First Thing in the Morning

Before your feet hit the floor, before you’ve said good morning to anyone in your house, before you’ve had a single thought that belongs to you, you hand your brain to whoever filled your inbox overnight.

That email from a coworker. That news alert. That group text that blew up at midnight. All of it gets to set the tone for your day before you do.

The first 20 minutes of your morning are neurologically significant. Your brain is transitioning from sleep and is highly impressionable. What you feed it first tends to stick.

Feed it something that belongs to you. A few quiet minutes. Coffee. Your own thoughts. Your kids if they’re up. The phone can wait 20 minutes. It always could.

2. Having It Out at the Dinner Table

Dinner is one of the last holdouts of unscheduled family time. Nobody has anywhere to be. The food is a reason to sit together. Conversation happens naturally if you let it.

The phone on the table, even face down, is a presence.

Research from the University of Texas found that having a smartphone on the table, even without touching it, reduces available cognitive capacity. You are literally less present with your family because the phone exists in their field of view.

Put it in another room. Not your pocket. Another room. The difference is significant.

3. Scrolling While Your Kid Is Talking to You

They notice. Every single time.

You might think you’re multitasking. You might think you’re catching enough of what they’re saying to respond. You’re not. And more importantly, what they’re absorbing isn’t the content of your response. It’s the fact that the phone was more interesting than they were.

That message compounds over years. Put it down. Make eye contact. Let them finish the story even if it takes four times longer than it needs to.

4. Using It as a Pacifier for Your Kids

This one is uncomfortable because it’s so easy and it works so immediately.

Kid melting down at the restaurant? Phone. Long car ride getting loud? Phone. You need ten minutes to finish something? Phone.

We’re not saying never. We’re saying notice how often and what it’s replacing. Every time the phone goes in their hand, something else doesn’t happen. Boredom that would have led somewhere. A conversation. A game they’d have invented on their own. The discomfort that builds resilience.

The phone solves the immediate problem. It quietly creates a longer one.

5. Documenting Everything Instead of Experiencing It

You are at your kid’s first soccer game. They’re out there. They’re doing the thing. And you’ve got the phone up, trying to get the shot, watching the game through a 6-inch screen.

Put the phone down. Watch it with your eyes. Be there.

You will not forget this moment because you didn’t film it. You will forget it because you were behind the camera instead of in front of the moment. Take one photo. Then put it away and actually be at the thing you drove 25 minutes to be at.

---

6. Checking Work Email After 7pm

You are not that important. And even if you are, it can wait until morning.

The problem with checking work email at night isn’t just that it steals your time. It’s what it does to your nervous system. You can’t unsee what you just read. Now your brain is working on it. Now you’re half-present at bedtime. Now you wake up at 3am thinking about it.

Set a cutoff. 7pm, 8pm, whatever works for your life. And hold it. The world will not end. Your inbox will be there in the morning. Your kids’ bedtime is happening right now.

7. Sleeping With It on Your Nightstand

It’s the last thing you look at before you sleep and the first thing you reach for when you wake up. That’s an enormous amount of influence to hand to a device.

The blue light disrupts melatonin production. The content, news, social media, email, activates your stress response right before your brain is supposed to power down.

Sleep quality suffers. The next day suffers.

Charge it in the kitchen or the bathroom. Buy an $8 alarm clock if you need a backup. Your sleep is worth more than the convenience of having the phone two feet from your face.

8. Mindless Scrolling When You Could Be Present

You know the scroll. Not looking for anything specific. Not relaxing exactly. Just… scrolling. Instagram, X, Reddit, back to Instagram. Ten minutes becomes thirty. You look up and your kid was in the room the whole time.

The scroll isn’t rest. Real rest restores you. The scroll is consumption without return. It leaves you more drained than before you picked it up, not less.

If you need to decompress, decompress for real. Go outside for ten minutes. Sit with your coffee and don’t look at anything. Read something. The scroll is the laziest version of rest and the one with the highest cost.

9. Texting During Conversations

Not the half-attention glance. The full text, mid-conversation, while someone in your house is talking to you.

Your partner is telling you about their day. Your kid is explaining something they care about. And you’re composing a message to someone who isn’t there.

The person in front of you gets the message loud and clear: whoever is in that phone is more important than you right now. That message lands even when you don’t mean to send it.

Finish the conversation. Then text.

10. Using It to Avoid Being Uncomfortable

Waiting in line. Sitting in silence. Riding an elevator. Sitting with your own thoughts for two uninterrupted minutes.

All of these used to just be life. Small, unremarkable pockets of time where your brain wandered, rested, or worked through something on its own.

Now the phone fills every gap. And your brain never gets those pockets. The boredom, the stillness, the silence that used to be where good ideas and honest self-reflection lived, it’s gone.

Let yourself be bored sometimes. Let there be silence. You might be surprised what shows up when the phone isn’t there to fill the space. Your kids are watching how you handle your phone. They’re building their own relationship with it based on what they see from you.

That’s the reason all ten of these matter. Not productivity. Not sleep optimization. Not dopamine management.

Your kids are watching.