Kirk Martin has a simple premise that most parenting advice ignores. Your words can light a situation on fire. The same mouth can put it out. And you get to choose, every single time, which one happens.

Martin is the founder of Celebrate Calm and host of the Calm Parenting Podcast, and he specializes in exactly this: practical language for the moments when everything is about to go sideways. We pulled the ten phrases from his most recent episode and stripped out everything except the stuff worth saving.

Listen to the full episode here.

1. “I think I misunderstood your intentions.”

Most kids who lash out or shut down feel misunderstood before anything else. This phrase cuts through the behavior and speaks to the feeling underneath it.

Martin puts it personally: you can call him names and he won’t flinch. But if you assign bad motives to what he’s doing, that cuts deep. Same is true for your kid. Try it as a question too: “Did I just misjudge what you were trying to do?” Works on kids, works on spouses.

2. “I’m curious.”

Replace “What were you thinking?” with this. Those interrogating questions put a kid on the defensive with no good answer. “I’m curious” does the opposite. It signals that you’re alongside them, not coming at them. It’s an invitation to share without fear of a lecture. Martin says he uses this phrase almost every day with someone.

3. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

When a child is acting out, remind them who they actually are. It separates the behavior from their identity and gives them something to live up to. Most kids respond to being seen as better than their worst moment.

4. “You don’t have to talk right now.”

Forcing a conversation during a meltdown doesn’t work. The brain isn’t available for it. This phrase gives them space without abandoning the issue. Come back to it when everyone is calm. The conversation will actually go somewhere then.

5. “I’m not trying to win. I’m trying to help.”

Power struggles usually happen because both sides are fighting to be right. This phrase steps out of the fight entirely. It reframes your role from opponent to ally. Hard to keep arguing with someone who just told you they’re on your team.

6. “I could be wrong about this.”

Humility as a parenting tool. Martin’s point is that it’s almost impossible for a child or spouse to keep attacking when you exercise it. It’s not weakness. It signals enough confidence to drop the ego. And it models the exact thing you’re hoping to see from them.

7. “I trust you to figure this out. I’m here if you want me.”

Kids need to own their problems. If you solve everything for them, you take away the sense of ownership and the growth that comes with it. This phrase gives them space while making clear you’re available. Martin notes that if they do come to you for advice after you’ve said this, they’re far more likely to actually listen because it was their choice to ask.

8. “I can imagine that doesn’t feel great.”

When a kid is saying awful things, the instinct is to react to the behavior. Martin suggests looking past it to what’s driving it. This phrase does that. It acknowledges that something hard is going on inside them without rewarding the behavior or ignoring it. You’re not telling them it’s okay. You’re telling them you see them.

9. “I was wrong.”

Three words. Martin says humility is one of the most powerful calming tools available. It models accountability, it stops an argument cold, and it builds the kind of relationship where your kid can come to you when they mess up because they’ve seen you do it first.

10. “You’re not being defiant. You’re just overwhelmed.”

This one reframes everything. A kid who comes home bossing everyone around isn’t a problem kid. They’ve spent all day being controlled and now they’re trying to get it back in the only way they know. Give them something specific to own, a task they can actually complete, and the bossiness usually disappears. A kid who feels in control of themselves doesn’t need to control everyone else.

None of these are magic. Martin is clear about that. But practiced and used consistently, they change the temperature of most situations before they escalate into something nobody wanted.

Go listen to the full episode at the link above. If you have a strong-willed kid, his show is worth a regular spot in your rotation.

Words stick.

Not the planned ones. Not the speech you prepared for the right moment with the right intention. The throwaway ones. The ones said tired, frustrated, on autopilot, without thinking about how they landed. Kids build their understanding of themselves around what the most important people in their lives say to them. Especially their dad.

Here are ten worth considering to cut from the rotation.

1. “Because I Said So”

This one shuts down the conversation every time and teaches kids one lesson: authority doesn’t have to explain itself.

Research from the University of New Hampshire found that kids raised with authoritative communication, where parents set clear boundaries but actually dialogue with their kids, are more likely to trust their parents and less likely to rebel. Studies also show a 30-million-word gap between kids whose parents focus on real communication versus those who don’t. That gap doesn’t just affect vocabulary. It affects math ability, spatial reasoning, self-regulation, and empathy.

Psychologist Laurence Steinberg puts it plainly:

“When parents say things like ‘Do it because I said so,’ that discourages kids from asking questions and challenging things that don’t make sense to them.”

You don’t have to justify every decision. But “because I’m the dad” costs more than it saves.

2. “You’re Fine”

They called it out loud. You said they were fine. They learned to stop calling it out.

Sometimes kids are genuinely fine and just need a second. But as a reflex dismissal, before you’ve actually checked, “you’re fine” tells them their experience isn’t worth a real response. Over time they stop bringing things to you. You wonder later why they don’t open up.

Take three seconds. Make sure they actually are fine before you say it.

3. “Stop Crying”

Crying is how kids process. Research published in a 2022 clinical review found that crying releases oxytocin and endorphins, which reduce stress and regulate emotion. Telling a kid to stop crying is telling them to seal the valve shut, and whatever was building still has nowhere to go.

A meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that kids who are consistently told to suppress their emotions don’t become tougher adults. They become adults who can only identify their emotional needs when they’re in crisis, because the suppression mechanism finally fails. By then they’re not dealing with one feeling. They’re dealing with years of them arriving at once.

Let them cry. Sit with them in it. It stops on its own.

4. “You Always Do This” or “You Never Listen”

Always and never are almost never accurate. And when you say them to a kid, you’re not describing a behavior. You’re describing a person. A kid who hears “you never listen” often enough starts to believe that’s who they are, not what they did this morning. Once it’s an identity, it’s much harder to change. Stay specific. Talk about what happened today. Leave always and never out of it.

5. “Why Can’t You Be More Like Your Brother/Sister?”

This one damages both kids.

The one being compared feels like they’re losing a competition they didn’t sign up for. The one held up as the example feels the weight of being the permanent standard. And the relationship between them gets more complicated every time you say it.

Your kids are different people. Work with who they actually are.

6. “I’m Not Angry, I’m Disappointed”

You think it hits harder than anger. You’re right. That’s the problem.

Disappointment from a parent cuts deep in a way that anger doesn’t. Used too often it becomes a tool that makes kids feel fundamentally inadequate rather than just responsible for a specific thing that went wrong. Be straight about what happened and what you need from them. Leave the weaponized disappointment out of it.

7. “Man Up” or “Toughen Up”

The instinct isn’t wrong. You want your kid to be resilient. That’s worth wanting.

But “man up” doesn’t build resilience. It suppresses emotion long enough to look like it did. Real toughness comes from going through hard things with support, not from being told your reaction to hard things is weak.

Parents who respond to kids with empathy raise children who are more socially well-adjusted than parents who tell kids they’re overreacting.

Show them how to push through something difficult. Don’t tell them the feeling is the obstacle.

8. “You’re So Smart”

This one surprises people because it sounds like a compliment.

Carol Dweck’s research at Stanford is clear on this. Kids praised for being smart become afraid of failure because failure threatens the identity. Kids praised for working hard and trying stay willing to take on harder challenges because the effort is what gets recognized, not the innate ability.

Tell them you noticed how hard they worked. Tell them you saw them keep going when it got difficult. Praise the specific thing they did, not the fixed trait they were born with.

9. “Do You Want a Spanking?”

Even if you never follow through, the question puts physical punishment on the table as a negotiating tool. The relationship becomes one where your kid weighs whether the behavior is worth the consequence, rather than understanding why something matters.

And the kids who’ve heard it enough times to know you won’t follow through have already stopped taking it seriously.

10. “I’ll Do It Myself”

This one comes from frustration and impatience, which is understandable. They’re doing it too slow, too messy, not quite right. You could finish it in a third of the time. But every time you take over, you send a message: you can’t do this well enough, so step aside. That compounds. You end up with a kid who stops trying because they expect to be replaced.

Let them do it badly. Let them do it slowly. That’s how they eventually do it right.

Nobody gets this perfect. Every dad says things he wishes he hadn’t. The goal isn’t to never mess up. It’s to notice the patterns, catch yourself a little sooner each time, and repair it when you don’t. Your kids aren’t keeping score. They’re just paying attention.

Darren Litt ordered a bottle of kids’ vitamins from Amazon. When it arrived, the gummies were stuck together in a plastic tub with a layer of sugar on the bottom. He checked the label. Sugar, artificial dyes, fillers.

He thought: this isn’t healthy. It’s candy in disguise.

That moment, annoying and forgettable on the surface, was the start of Hiya. Darren co-founded the company in 2019 with Adam Gillman, another dad who had the same problem and the same instinct that there had to be a better way. They built it from their own savings, never raised outside capital, and launched in March 2020, the same week the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Five years later, Hiya sold for $260 million.

It’s a business story, yes. But it started the way most good things do: a dad paying attention to something that didn’t sit right.

Darren lives in Los Angeles with his two daughters, now 14 and 15. The little-kid years are behind him, and by his own account, he’s glad about that.

Not because fatherhood was hard, but because the version of it he’s in now is genuinely interesting. His daughters are funny, opinionated, and increasingly themselves. He likes spending time with them. The relationship, he says, gets more interesting every year.

What’s changed is the job description. When they were small, the work was more obvious: keep them safe, keep them fed, keep them from hurting themselves. Now it’s something harder to define. Knowing when to step in versus when to let them figure something out. Helping them build resilience and judgment instead of preventing every mistake.

He doesn’t always get that balance right. But he’s clear on the direction.

Darren runs on flexibility. He’s built his schedule around being available, not just present on paper. Mornings in the kitchen, dinner together as a family, driving someone somewhere, hearing about the drama or funny thing that happened.

The no-phones-at-dinner rule is non-negotiable, not because he’s precious about it, but because it’s the one reliable moment in the day when everyone is actually there.

Outside, he resets. Not necessarily with defined exercise. Sometimes it’s a coffee walk. Sometimes it’s taking a call outside instead of sitting at a desk. Just being in the air rather than under a roof.

When he travels alone, he goes somewhere new. Small music venues. Long rabbit holes into whatever topic has his attention that month. Jogging. The kind of solo time that refills something without requiring a reason.

The piece of parenting wisdom that stuck with him isn’t a quote from a mentor or a book he’d recommend. He’s learned more from watching what works, noticing what doesn’t, and adjusting. That honest feedback loop, applied consistently over fourteen years, is the closest thing he has to a philosophy.

What he wishes he’d known earlier: how little of parenting is about having the right answer. It’s mostly about being available. Speaking openly. Building the kind of relationship where your kid actually tells you what’s going on, not the version she thinks you want to hear.

Transparent communication is the one thing he won’t negotiate on. He wants his daughters to feel like most topics are open for discussion. He’d rather have an uncomfortable conversation than pretend something complicated doesn’t exist.

Hiya is still growing. What started as a sugar-free chewable multivitamin has expanded into a full kids’ wellness line, built with pediatricians, tested by third parties, and designed without the junk that fills most of what’s on pharmacy shelves. The company Darren co-founded because he was a dad paying attention became one of the fastest-growing brands in children’s health.

He’ll be the first to tell you he didn’t have it all figured out when he started. He still doesn’t. But he asks good questions, adjusts when something isn’t working, and shows up consistently for the people who matter.

That’s pretty much the whole job, whether you’re running a company or raising a teenager.

Follow Darren and Hiya at @hiyahealth

The meltdowns are coming.

Not maybe. Not if things go sideways. They’re coming. The first week of school brings a level of emotional output from kids that would humble most adults, and most dads walk into it without a plan.

Kirk Martin, founder of Celebrate Calm and host of the Calm Parenting Podcast, put together five practical ways to handle exactly this. We pulled out the parts that landed.

1. Expect It and Stop Being Surprised by It

This is the one that changes everything.

Kirk’s argument is simple: if you wake up already braced for the fact that today will include at least one big emotional moment from your kid, you stop getting triggered when it arrives. You planned for it. It’s not an ambush, it’s Tuesday.

He walks through a hypothetical of a dad mentally pre-loading his day: the kid who will vent about school on the ride home, the grocery store tantrum over a cookie, the inevitable sibling fight while he’s trying to make dinner, the tears at bedtime.

When you’ve already accounted for those moments, your nervous system doesn’t spike when they happen. You just respond.

The fire drill mentality is what he calls it. A firefighter doesn’t show up to a fire and start panicking. He assesses, problem-solves, and acts. Same idea. You’re not going to eliminate the fires. You just get better at working them.

2. Stop Doing Everything for Your Kids

This one lands harder than it sounds.

Kirk points out that a lot of parents who find themselves resenting their kids’ behavior actually set that cycle up themselves. You do everything, you expect gratitude, the gratitude doesn’t come, and now you’re frustrated at a kid for not responding the way you hoped to something they didn’t ask for.

His point isn’t to stop showing up for your kids. It’s to stop doing so much that you run yourself empty and then get resentful when they don’t fill you back up. Make your own needs an actual priority. If you don’t treat yourself like someone worth taking care of, nobody else will either. He says it plainly: if you don’t care enough about your own physical, emotional, and spiritual needs to make them a priority, why would anyone else?

3. Get Yourself Calm First

This is the one dads most often skip.

The instinct when a kid comes at you with a tone or a meltdown is to match the energy. To lay down the law. To remind them who runs the house.

Kirk’s point is that in that moment, you have one job: don’t add more heat to the fire.

He tells a story about his son coming at him with that tone around age twelve. His first impulse was the same as most dads. Go to your room. Instead he paused, pulled his own emotion out of his voice, and said something like: “Hey, when I hear that tone, it usually means you’re anxious, frustrated, or hungry. Those are your triggers. You’ve got two options here. You can keep going this direction and you know how that ends. Or grab the salsa from the fridge and meet me on the deck. I’ve got chips.”

The son went and got the salsa.

No lecture. No power struggle. No sending his kid away right at the moment the kid actually needed him. Just chips, salsa, and a chance to decompress side by side.

4. Motion Changes Emotion

Telling a kid to calm down has probably never worked once in the history of parenting.

Kirk’s approach is to redirect physically instead. Get them moving. Change the setting. The mom and teenage daughter story he tells is a good one: screaming match, mom sits down and starts coloring. That’s it. No big speech. Just sits down and starts coloring. The daughter watches, sits down, starts coloring. Confrontation gone.

The activity itself almost doesn’t matter. Catch in the backyard, a drive, building with Legos, going to get a smoothie. The point is that you change the physical environment before you try to have the conversation. A kid in a calm body is a kid you can actually talk to. A kid mid-meltdown is not.

5. Give Them a Simple Next Step, Not a Lecture

This is the practical one.

When everything is spinning, kids can’t process a speech. They need one concrete thing to do right now. Go get the salsa. Come sit out here with me. Let’s go throw a ball around.

The action gives them something to focus on, gets them moving, and transitions both of you out of the hot zone without anyone having to announce it. By the time you’re both sitting somewhere different, with something to do with your hands, the intensity has already dropped. Then you can actually talk.

Kirk’s whole framework boils down to this:

You’re not trying to win the moment. You’re trying to get to a place where the moment can actually resolve. That’s a different goal and it leads to different decisions.

Go listen to the full episode of the Calm Parenting Podcast with Kirk Martin at Celebrate Calm. This one is worth the full run time, especially if back to school season has already started showing you its teeth.

Jon-Mark Craddock runs a leather goods company out of Texas called La Matera, co-owns a place called Ramp Ranch, and hosts The Dadrepreneurs Podcast. He lives in Spicewood with his wife and two daughters, ages four and one. He drives a 1974 MG Midget that has followed him from Charleston to Atlanta to San Francisco to Austin over the past twenty years.

He does not have it all figured out. He’ll tell you that himself.

The thing Jon-Mark keeps coming back to is attention. Not time, exactly. Attention.

His life runs on three pillars: his wife, his kids, and the business. The problem is they never need the same amount from him at the same time. Some days the business can coast at 60% because one of the girls needs more of him. Some days his wife is having a rough one and she needs him to show up fully before anyone else gets a turn.

The hard part isn’t managing the calendar. It’s recognizing which pillar needs him most in a given moment, shifting without guilt, and trusting that the others can handle a little less for a while.

He’s gotten better at it. He’s still working on it.

Most mornings start the same way. His wife gets a workout in while Jon-Mark handles wake-up and breakfast. They eat together, and he has his coffee while the girls eat, watching the sun come up from the dining room table.

“It’s nothing elaborate,” he says, “but it’s easily the best part of my day. Every day. I’d give up just about anything else in my life to protect that time.”

He picks them up from school most afternoons too. The schedule is built around access to them, not the other way around.

The business is called La Matera. They make leather goods, the kind worth keeping. His wife works in the company with him. The girls come to the warehouse and, in his words, sling belts. Business conversations happen at dinner, in bed, and just about everywhere in between.

“It’s one big bowl of chaotic spaghetti,” he says, “but somehow it all seems to work out.”

He’s not interested in the idea of clean work-life balance anymore. The longer he’s in it, the less he believes that’s a real thing. Everything is mixed together and he’s made peace with that. When it all hits at once, they figure out what needs them most and let the rest wait.

His non-negotiable is letting his girls into the world he’s building.

He wants them to see how things actually work, the business, the good days, the hard ones, how something gets built from scratch. Not as a lesson. Just as exposure. If he’s heading to a meeting and it makes sense to bring one of them, she’s probably coming.

“I don’t want them to just hear about what their parents built someday,” he says. “I want them to grow up inside the story.”

The advice that stuck with him is three words: mind like water.

The idea is simple. When a rock hits water, the water responds exactly as much as it needs to and then returns to calm. No overreaction. No carrying it longer than necessary.

He thinks about it most when he’s running on four hours of sleep, the house is in an uproar, and his youngest has just dropped her second full glass of milk on the floor. The goal isn’t to never react. It’s to respond appropriately, clean up the milk, and find your way back to even keel.

His reset is the workshop behind the house.

There’s no shortage of projects in there that are either 75% complete or working about 75% of the time. The MG Midget is his favorite. He bought it in college and it has been with him through every city, every chapter, every version of himself. Working with his hands gets him out of his head, and that car has a way of reminding him who he was before life got quite so full.

When he’s on the road alone, the bar is low and that’s the point. Diet Coke on the plane, an action movie in the hotel room, a quiet dinner at a nice bar by himself. “The older I get,” he says, “the more luxurious a quiet meal with nowhere else to be feels.”

At home, though, he doesn’t really enjoy the solo thing. If the girls leave town with mom, he’d rather just go. He prefers the chaos to a quiet house.

That probably tells you everything you need to know about him.

Follow Jon-Mark and La Matera at @lamatera and find The Dadrepreneurs Podcast wherever you listen.

Back to school season sneaks up fast. One minute it’s summer and the next you’re Googling what supplies are on the list and wondering how another year passed this quickly. We got some advice from a friend of ours who happens to be a school principal. Not the generic kind. The kind that actually makes you think. Here’s what he had to say.

Get Them Out There

Push for at least one extracurricular. A sport, a club, band, robotics, student government, it genuinely doesn’t matter which one. What matters is that your kid is building something beyond just being a kid who goes to school and comes home. Kids who are involved in something outside the classroom tend to show up more consistently, perform better academically, and have an easier time building friendships. Leadership opportunities also tend to surface naturally in those spaces without anyone having to manufacture them.

And here’s a nudge worth taking…

If your kid has been playing the same sport or instrument since kindergarten, encourage them to try something completely different this year too.

Art, debate, a foreign language class. New rooms mean new people. That’s valuable at any age.

Widen the Friend Circle

Talk up variety when it comes to friendships. Encourage your kid to sit with someone new at lunch once in a while, or pair up with someone they don’t usually work with. Kids with diverse friend groups tend to be more adaptable and, honestly, more interesting people.

Also, retire “how was your day” as your primary question. You already know the answer. Try “who’d you sit with at lunch?” or “who’s in your group for the science project?”

Those questions get you real information and signal that you actually want to know their world, not just check a box.

If you can swing it, host something at your house. Pizza and a movie, shooting hoops in the driveway, whatever works. The families whose homes become the hangout spot are the parents who actually know what’s going on. That’s a good position to be in.

Stay in the Loop

Bookmark the parent portal and actually open it. Weekly is plenty. A quick glance at grades and missing assignments before they pile up into a crisis takes five minutes and saves a lot of stress. When you spot improvement or a good grade, say something. It builds momentum.

Learn your kid’s teachers’ names. First and last. Not just “the math teacher.” It matters when you need to reach out, and it matters to your kid that you know who their people are.

Show up to back to school night. Even if it’s awkward, even if you’d rather be doing literally anything else. Ten minutes of face time with a teacher early in the year makes every conversation easier down the road, especially if something comes up.

If your school district offers grade alerts, turn them on. An email when an assignment goes missing or a grade drops below a certain point is a lot easier to deal with than finding out at parent conferences.

Get the school calendar on your own calendar. Early release days, teacher in-service days, report card dates. Don’t rely on your partner or a crumpled flyer in your kid’s backpack.

The Bigger Picture

The extracurricular and friendship stuff is what makes school actually enjoyable for your kid. The portal-checking and teacher-names piece is what makes sure nothing blindsides you. Do both and you’re covering the full experience without hovering over every moment.

And enjoy this part. It goes fast. Oh, and don’t forget to pick them up from practice.

Summer is almost over. The kids are starting school. You got five months left in the year. That’s it. January is a long time ago and December is closer than you think.

This isn’t a guilt trip. It’s a reminder that there’s still enough runway to actually do something with the time you have left. Not next year. This year. Starting now.

Here’s the list. Pick one today (or two if you’re feeling crazy).

1. Get a Full Blood Panel

Not the basic one your doctor orders at your annual physical. A comprehensive panel that actually tells you something. Testosterone levels, thyroid, vitamin D, inflammatory markers, metabolic health. You can’t fix what you don’t know about. Book it this month.

2. Pick One Hard Physical Goal and Chase It

Not a vague intention to get in better shape. A specific thing with a deadline.

A race. A weight on the bar. A distance. Something that requires you to show up consistently whether you feel like it or not. The goal matters less than the discipline it forces.

3. Get a DEXA Scan

The scale tells you almost nothing useful. A DEXA scan tells you your body fat percentage, muscle mass, bone density, and visceral fat score. It takes 15 minutes and costs around $75. Book one. Then use the data.

4. Read One Book That Has Nothing to Do With Work or Parenting

Just for you. Fiction, history, biography, something you’ve been meaning to get to for two years. Reading for pleasure is something most dads quietly give up. Take it back.

5. Have the Conversation With Your Partner You’ve Been Avoiding

You know which one. The thing that’s been sitting between you. The longer it sits, the heavier it gets. This year, say the thing.

6. Find Your People

Men without close friendships carry real health consequences. The research on this is not subtle. If you don’t have a group of guys you’re actually close with, that’s worth treating like the problem it is. A run club, a golf group, a standing dinner, whatever the format, make it happen and protect the time.

7. Take One Solo Trip

Even a night. Even two. Somewhere that’s just yours, with an agenda that belongs entirely to you. Distance from the routine has a way of clarifying what the routine is actually for. Don’t sleep on our Built for More experience this fall 😉.

8. Get Your Sleep in Order

Seven to nine hours is not a luxury. It’s when your body repairs, your testosterone resets, and your brain consolidates everything from the day before. If you’re consistently running on six or less, everything downstream suffers. Address it seriously.

9. Build Something With Your Hands

A piece of furniture. A garden bed. A deck. An accent wall. Something physical that didn’t exist before and now does because you made it. That kind of work has a specific satisfaction that nothing on a screen can replicate. Make time for it.

10. Learn One New Skill That Has No Practical Application

Not a certification. Not something that helps your career. Something you learn because it interests you. A language, an instrument, a craft, a card trick. Curiosity for its own sake is worth protecting.

11. Do Something That Scares You a Little

Not reckless. Just outside your comfort zone enough to remind you that you’re still capable of doing hard new things. A cold plunge, a public speaking event, a race distance you’ve never tried, a conversation you’ve been too afraid to start.

12. Get Your Finances in a Place You’re Not Embarrassed By

Doesn’t have to be perfect. Know your numbers. Have a will. Have life insurance your family could actually live on. Have a rough plan for what the next decade looks like. Most dads avoid this because it’s uncomfortable. Do it anyway.

13. Say No to Something You Don’t Want to Do

One thing this year that you say yes to out of obligation and no to out of self-respect. Practice the word. It gets easier.

14. Go to the Doctor for the Thing You’ve Been Putting Off

You know what it is. Make the appointment this week. Not next month. This week.

15. Decide What You Actually Want This Year and Write It Down

Not goals for your kids. Not goals for the business. Goals for you. Who you want to be, what you want to build, what you want to feel like at the end of this year. Write it down somewhere. Look at it more than once.

The list isn’t about being selfish. It’s about being sustainable. A dad who takes care of himself shows up differently than one who doesn’t. His kids see it. His partner feels it. His work reflects it.

Start with one. Pick the one that stings a little when you read it. That’s probably the right place to start.

We’ve been fans of Laird Hamilton for a while now. So when this clip from You Choose Podcast crossed our IG feed last week, it hit us in the feels.

If you’re not familiar with Laird Hamilton…

He’s widely considered the greatest big wave surfer who has ever lived. He pioneered tow-in surfing. On August 17, 2000, he rode a wave at Teahupo’o in Tahiti that is still talked about as one of the most extraordinary athletic feats in the history of the sport.

He is married to volleyball legend Gabrielle Reece. He has three daughters. And he has spent the better part of four decades doing things on the ocean that most humans cannot comprehend.

Here’s what he said. 

“Before I had children, I thought I knew something. After I had kids, I realized I don’t know anything. Being a father is like building a samurai sword. To make a samurai sword, you take steel, you heat it up until it’s red-hot, you beat it with a hammer, and then you put it in a bucket of ice. Then you take it back out, you heat it back up, you beat it with a hammer, and you stick it back in the bucket of ice.

And you just do that over and over, and eventually, it’s the strongest steel in the world. And so your children take you, they heat you up, they beat you with a hammer, and they stick you in a bucket of ice, and they do that over and over and over.

And then personally, as a man, that’s my evolution. Boy, teenage, young man, husband, father. That’s the part of the evolution. That’s your growth.

It’s called parenting, not childing. It’s for me, not them.

Because ultimately, it’s the tempering of your soul, the vulnerability, and all the things that they bring out in you.  Love them, keep them safe, give them some values. They’re gonna be good. But the whole process of it, it’s for you.”

Steve Soderholm makes perfume for a living.

He’s also a dad of three, an early riser, a deep house music producer, and someone who has quietly figured out that the secret to doing everything well is accepting that you can’t do everything perfectly.

He lives in Nashville. He grills on the Blackstone. He lifts and saunas before dinner so he comes home energized instead of depleted. His wife rolls her eyes at his fitness phases.

We like him a lot.

The tension Steve lives with every day isn’t unique to him, but the way he talks about it is.

“I want to do everything to the absolute best of my ability,” he says, “which ends up meaning I want to give all my time to all three things. But the reality is I can’t.”

The three things are self, family, and work. The math never fully adds up and Steve has stopped pretending it does. What he’s landed on instead is something more honest: as long as nothing gets completely left out, the whole thing holds together. Some weeks family gets 90% of him. Some weeks it’s work. The key is that nothing ever goes to zero.

He’s also figured out that the categories feed each other. He’s a better dad because he gives time to work and himself. He’s better at work because he gives time to his family. The balance isn’t a destination. It’s the point.

Steve’s days start early and deliberately.

Up between 5:30 and 6, coffee first, then prayer time. That window before the kids wake up is his and he protects it. If he’s lifting that morning, he goes. If not, he gets creative work done while the house is still quiet.

Then the kids are up and, as he puts it, the madness starts.

By afternoon he’s at the office. If he’s lifting after work he stops at the gym on the way home, sauna included. “It’s so great coming home energized from a workout instead of exhausted from a long day.” Then it’s Blackstone time, family hang, kids to bed, and a quiet evening with his wife catching up before they both read and call it a night.

It’s a full day. He seems to like it that way.

Steve is a perfumer by trade, the founder of Ranger Station, a fragrance brand built around the outdoors and the kind of memories that stick. It took real belief to build it, and real doubt to get through the early days.

The advice that carried him through came from a mentor who asked him the simplest possible question: what’s the worst thing that could happen?

Steve gave the answer most people give. It fails. I waste years. I look like an idiot.

His mentor pushed back. That wouldn’t be a waste. It would just lead you to what’s next. The actual worst thing is that you don’t try and regret it forever.

Steve has applied that logic to fatherhood ever since. “The worst case scenario is that you don’t try and wish you always had.” It’s the kind of reframe that sounds simple until you actually sit with it.

Before he became a dad, Steve heard mostly warnings.

It’s going to be so hard. Your life is going to change. You won’t have time for anything. The kind of well-meaning caution that doesn’t actually prepare you for anything because it leaves out the most important part.

“I honestly wish I knew how awesome it was.”

He was traveling solo for work recently, no kids, no noise, the kind of trip that’s supposed to feel like a break. He was bored within days. He just wanted to be home.

The most rewarding part, he says, is watching personalities emerge. Seeing his kids go through something hard and come out the other side. Watching them love on other people in that completely uninhibited way small children do. He describes it as childlike faith made visible. For Steve, who takes his own faith seriously, that means something specific.

Faith is how Steve stays grounded when things get loud.

He’s clear that he doesn’t mean it casually. “I wouldn’t even say that it’s a part of my life, but that I am a part of it.” When he zooms out and looks at Ranger Station, his family, his friendships, it’s obvious to him that he’s not the one running the show. His job is to steward what he’s been given and work as hard as he can with it.

That perspective has a practical effect. When something goes wrong or the pressure builds, remembering he’s not actually in control takes some of the weight off. Not as an excuse to coast. As a reminder of what his role actually is.

One thing Steve won’t let go of, no matter how busy things get, is his friends.

He’s heard the research that says men without close friendships carry a health risk comparable to heavy smoking. He believes it. Family and work will consume every hour you give them. Friends require you to actively protect the time. He does.

When he’s flying solo, he usually goes back to music. He found his way into producing deep house a while back and it’s become a genuine creative outlet, something that’s entirely his own. Between that, the gym, and whatever new fitness thing his wife is currently skeptical of, he seems to have found a version of himself that exists outside of dad and founder.

That version, he’d probably tell you, makes the other versions better.

Follow Steve and Ranger Station at @rangerstation.co

It shows up at random times.

In the middle of a work call. Right before you fall asleep. On the drive home when the day ran long and you know they’ll already be in the bath by the time you walk in.

Am I doing enough?

Not in a dramatic, crisis-of-faith kind of way. More like a low hum in the background that never fully turns off. A quiet audit that runs without you asking it to.

You were present at dinner but were you actually there or were you half somewhere else? You made it to the game but did you cheer loud enough, pay close enough attention, talk to them enough about it afterward? You put them to bed but did you rush through it because you had things to do?

The question isn’t dramatic. That’s what makes it hard to shake.

The fact that you’re asking it is almost certainly the answer.

The dads who aren’t doing enough aren’t usually sitting around wondering if they’re doing enough. They’ve made peace with the distance, or they’re not paying enough attention to notice it, or both. The wondering is itself a form of showing up. The audit means you care. The discomfort means your standards are higher than your baseline.

That doesn’t make the feeling go away. But it’s worth sitting with.

The math of modern fatherhood is genuinely hard.

There are more hours in a workday than there used to be, or at least it feels that way. The line between work and home has blurred for a lot of us. The mental load doesn’t clock out. You can be home and still be working, still be worried, still be somewhere else in your head while your kid is trying to show you something.

And then there’s the comparison layer. Other dads who seem to have cracked the code. The ones who coach the team and close the deal and still somehow have time to be the fun dad and the present dad and the patient dad all at once. You know the version you’re seeing isn’t the full picture and you still can’t help measuring yourself against it.

The gap between who you want to be and who you actually are on a random Tuesday at 6pm is real. Pretending it isn’t doesn’t help.

What actually helps, at least a little, is getting specific.

“Am I doing enough” is too big a question to answer. It’s abstract. It loops. It doesn’t resolve because it was never designed to.

Break it down. Enough for what? Enough compared to when? Enough by whose standard?

Your kid doesn’t need a perfect version of you. They need the real one, consistently. They need to know you show up. That when you’re there you’re actually there. That when you blow it you come back and acknowledge it. That they’re on your mind even when you’re not in the same room.

That’s a more manageable bar than enough. And it’s probably the right one.

There are seasons of this thing.

There are stretches where work demands more and the family gets less and you feel the gap every day. There are stretches where you’re fully in it, present and energized, and the whole thing hums. Neither one lasts forever.

The goal isn’t to eliminate the hard seasons. It’s to not let them become the default. To notice when you’ve been running on fumes for too long and the people at home are getting whatever’s left. To course-correct before the drift becomes a distance.

The asking itself is the compass. When the question gets louder, it’s telling you something.

We’ll say this plainly.

You are probably doing better than you think. Not perfectly, not always, but better than the voice in your head gives you credit for.

Your kids don’t need you to be everywhere all the time. They need you to be somewhere, regularly, actually present. To put the phone down when it counts. To show up for the ordinary Tuesday the same way you show up for the big moments. To let them see you try.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

The question isn’t going away. That’s fine. Let it remind you to lift your head up every now and then. Let it push you toward the room where they are instead of the one where the work is.

You’re asking the question. That means you’re in it. That’s enough.