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.

Here’s the honest truth about this article.

You can read everything we’re about to say and still not fully understand any of it until you’re in it. That’s not a knock on you. It’s just how fatherhood works. It’s one of the only experiences in life that cannot be adequately described to someone who hasn’t lived it. The people who tried to prepare you weren’t holding anything back. The information just doesn’t land until the context arrives.

That said, here’s what we wish someone had put in front of us anyway.

Your Time Is No Longer Yours. And That’s Actually Okay.

This is the one that hits first and hits hardest.

Your mornings used to belong to you. Your weekends had a different texture. You could decide at 9pm to go somewhere and just go. That version of your life is pausing for a while.

What nobody tells you is that surrendering your time doesn’t feel like losing something. Not once you’re in it. It feels like reorienting around something that actually matters. The to-do list you were so attached to starts to look different when there’s a small person who needs you right now, not later, not after you finish the thing, right now.

A 2024 research review describing fatherhood as a developmental transition found that it moves life from the abstract to the concrete very fast. That’s exactly right.

Everything before kids has a quality of being theoretical. After, it gets real in a way nothing else does.

Give yourself permission to let the old schedule go.

A new one will form and it will fit your life better than you expect.

The Baby Season Is Hard. It Is Also a Season.

Sleep deprivation is not a joke and we’re not going to pretend it is.

The first weeks and months are genuinely exhausting in a way that’s hard to describe. You will be tired in a way you’ve never been tired. You will do things on autopilot and not remember doing them. You will have a moment, probably more than one, where you look at your partner and neither of you has words.

Here’s what keeps you going: it changes. Not all at once, not on a schedule, but it changes. The stretches between feedings get longer. The baby starts sleeping more. You start sleeping more. One morning you wake up and realize you got six consecutive hours and it feels like a miracle.

The baby season is hard and it is finite. Both of those things are true at the same time. You don’t have to enjoy every minute of it. You just have to get through it, and you will.

You Will Not Break the Baby

New dads are terrified of this and it’s worth naming directly.

The first time you hold your newborn, you will be acutely aware of how small and fragile they are. You will move slowly. You will be hypervigilant. You will probably hold your breath a little.

Babies are more durable than they look. They need to be held, touched, moved, carried, bounced. They’re not made of glass.

Your instinct to be gentle is correct but your fear of breaking them is overcorrected.

Hold the baby. Change the diaper even when you’re not sure you’re doing it right. Give the bath. Do the things. The confidence comes from doing them, not from watching and waiting until you feel ready. You won’t feel ready until after you’ve done it a few times and it went fine.

Your Partner Is Going Through Something Completely Different

You are both becoming parents. But you’re not having the same experience.

Your partner went through nine months of physical changes and then labor and delivery. Her hormones are doing things yours aren’t. Her body is recovering. The biological bond between a mother and newborn is immediate in a way that’s physiologically different from what you’re experiencing.

Your bond builds differently, through presence and doing, which is just as real and just as strong, it just takes a different path.

Be patient with her. Be patient with yourself. Be patient with the gap between where you both are emotionally right now.

Research on new fathers consistently shows that the transition to parenthood is harder on relationships than almost anything else couples face, not because the relationship is bad, but because the demands are relentless and the bandwidth to tend to each other is thin.

The move is to keep showing up for her even when you have nothing left. And to ask for what you need instead of hoping she figures it out. Communication that was adequate before becomes insufficient now. Step it up.

You Don’t Have to Have It All Figured Out

Fatherhood has no onboarding process. There’s no training week, no manual, no orientation. One day you’re a person and the next day you’re someone’s dad and you just have to figure it out as you go.

Everyone is doing this. Every dad you know who looks like he has it together is also figuring it out as he goes. The confidence you’ll see in more experienced dads isn’t because they had answers. It’s because they stayed in the game long enough to find them.

You don’t have to know what you’re doing. You just have to keep showing up and doing it anyway. The knowledge follows the doing, not the other way around.

Research from Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center found that self-compassion in new fathers, the ability to be kind to yourself when you fall short, directly correlates with better outcomes for both mental health and bonding with the baby.

Give yourself the same grace you’d give a friend who was learning something completely new.

It Goes Faster Than They Say

Every parent who has been through it will tell you this. You will not believe them until it’s already true.

The phase that feels like it will never end ends. The newborn who can’t do anything becomes a baby who smiles, then a toddler who runs, then a kid who has opinions and friends and a whole personality you didn’t know was coming. Each version of them disappears when the next one arrives.

You can’t slow it down. But you can be present enough to actually be in it while it’s happening.

The parents who look back with the least regret are the ones who weren’t trying to get to the next phase. They were in this one.

Put the phone down more than you think you need to. Let the to-do list wait more than feels comfortable. The emails will be there. This specific moment with this specific version of your kid will not.

The Version of You on the Other Side Is Better

This is the thing we want to leave you with.

Fatherhood changes men. Not slowly and not gently. The research is consistent on this point.

Becoming a dad reshapes how you think, how you feel, what you value, and who you understand yourself to be. The role has a way of doing what years of therapy sometimes can’t.

You will be more patient than you thought possible. You will be more tired than you thought survivable. You will love someone more completely than you knew you were capable of. You will show up for things you would have bailed on before because there’s someone counting on you and that changes the math.

The version of you that comes out the other side of the first year of fatherhood is a better version. Not perfect. Not without struggle. But better.

You don’t know what you don’t know yet. That’s fine. You’re about to find out.

There’s a version of this story where Tony Knapton has all the answers.

He doesn’t. And that’s what makes it worth telling.

Tony is the founder of Radry Golf, a brand he describes as a never-ending art project disguised as a golf company. He makes apparel, figurines, and products, anything he can put his creative golf spin on. He started it seven years ago when he got serious about the game and couldn’t find a single brand in the space that felt remotely interesting. So he built one.

What he didn’t anticipate was the tug of war that comes with it.

Only about 10 percent of his time is actually spent creating. The rest is the business. The logistics, the decisions, the noise that comes with trying to turn a passion into something real. He’ll be the first to tell you it would probably be easier to keep art as a hobby. But that’s not the point. The point is waking up and doing the thing he thinks about.

“I’ve got this voice in my head that demands perfection,” he says. “I overthink things to the point of not doing them.”

Painting became the antidote. You can’t Command Z your way out of a mistake on canvas. You commit to the stroke and you live with it. He’s learning to embrace the imperfections. That lesson, he says, extends well beyond the studio.

One of his most personal pieces is a painting of classic lawn chairs. Colorful. Nostalgic. A reminder to lift his head up from the work. Because time moves fast when your head is down, and one day you look up and your daughter is getting braces and you can’t figure out where your little girl went. That part makes him emotional and he doesn’t try to hide it.

In January of 2023, Tony’s father-in-law was diagnosed with ALS. He and his family were living in Austin at the time. They moved back to Wisconsin immediately. Watching someone disappear from that disease does something to you. It makes mortality concrete. It reorders priorities. It makes you want to do the things you keep saying you’ll do someday, now, while you can.

“I try to honor him as best I can in the decisions I make and how I live my life,” Tony says. “My art reflects all of that.”

He’s now building a space in his hometown. A run club, golf simulators, co-working, a gallery for his work, a place for people to gather and build real relationships. Austin had a creative energy he misses. If that energy doesn’t exist where he is, he’ll create it himself. That’s the mentality.

He’s still in the middle of it. Trying to be the best dad while also showing his kids that passion can become a life if you’re willing to do the hard work. Trying to figure out what success actually means. Is it financial freedom? Is it making it to his kid’s kindergarten graduation at one in the afternoon? He’s not sure. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe the beauty is in not having the answer yet.

“Some days are better than others,” he says. “And it’s all reflected in my art. I’m just trying to figure it out.”

So is the rest of us.

Watch Tony’s full story in our latest Go West film. Tell your friends.