​
​10 Things I Learned From Interviewing 40 Dads

During my past four years of my rookie season of child-raising, I have frequently reminded myself, “They said this was going to happen.” Or, “Someone told me about this exact thing/feeling/challenge.” Because I had interviewed 40 dads over a period of about two years, I had so many bits of their wisdom and their stories rattling around in my head. And it turns out they were right about many, many things.

Since those interviews are now public as of the launch of my book So Far, So Good: 40 Dads Talk About Becoming Parents and How They Figured It Out, I thought I’d share a handful of my favorites:

1. The clichés are true.

In every interview I conducted, I asked the same 20 questions, including this one: “What's something nobody told you about parenting that you think is worth sharing?”

Here’s what my friend Ed said, verbatim, in his response:

"It's less that nobody told me and more that I didn't believe all the clichés. It's just endless clichés, it's like, 'Oh, they grow up so fast,' and this and that, and 'You're wearing your heart on the outside of your body now,' and all this kind of stuff. All the stuff that you hear people who generally I don't have anything in common with would say. It's all true, they do grow up unbelievably fast. I yanked out my daughter's second tooth that she's lost last night, and I was like, 'How is this possible that she's this old?' The whole thing about how fast it all goes. I think the thing that is unexpected to me is, it sounds crazy, I'm going to start crying about it, but how important they are."

2. Everybody else is winging it too.

Mark, who is a dad to a son and daughter now in their mid-20s, said this:

"I think you will never feel adequate, so you might as well just relax. You will never feel like you are the perfect parent and you got this shit down. So you might as well just enjoy it. And when the mistakes happen, or the sleep doesn’t happen and stuff like that, just understand, there’s no book, there’s no video, there’s no doctor who’s going to tell you anything that helps. I think especially for people who are driven and have had a modicum of success to whatever, or maintain a lifestyle where everything is somewhat provided for, to realize that you’re just winging it every day, so know that and not beat yourself up for it."

3. You never get it all figured out.

My friend Pitt is a dad of three kids, and he had this great perspective on the ongoing challenges of helping a little human figure out their way in the world:

“Once you become a parent, you realize that you are just at the beginning. Almost always. You’re never in the middle. You’re just at the beginning of figuring stuff out, no matter what it is.

The first few years of being a parent you want to cross the goal line, you want to pass the checkpoint, whatever it is. You realize that there are no real goal lines. There is no checkpoint. Keep moving forever. That’s what you’ve got to do.”

(This reminds me of this quote in Oliver Burkeman’s book Meditations For Mortals, in which he quotes a friend of podcaster Sam Harris, who asked him, “Were you really expecting to have no more problems at some point in your life?”)

4. No matter how much money you make now, you can’t get time back.

This came up many times in many interviews, so much so that I only included a couple instances of it in the final book, one from my friend Kurt:

“The one thing I’d change? I’d be home more. You cannot get time back. No matter how rich you are, you can’t go back. I’d be home more. Even though I was a lot at the time, it still was not enough.”

And my friend Drew, who has two daughters, and said:

“You can always go make more money, but time is that thing that disappears really fast on you. You can find work. You can make money anywhere. It’s about finding a good balance where you can devote to the kids and give them that dad time, rough house with them, go for a walk.”

(Obviously this is different for everyone and if you're working two jobs just to pay rent, you aren't in a position to be able to choose one over the other. But over the past four years I have found this sentiment guiding lots of my decisions, probably to the detriment of my "career" + income, but hopefully for the good of my relationship with my kid.)

5. Almost everyone struggles with patience.

One of the 20 questions I asked every dad was “What is something you’re not great at, and you’ve had to work really hard to improve, or learn to be ok with?” And so many dads mentioned patience, including Kris, who at the time had a 6-month-old at home:

“Something that’s really become apparent is how selective I can be with my patience and how this guy I’m super patient with. All these quick exits out of the house in the morning don’t happen anymore, but it’s OK. Good to hang out with this kiddo. I don’t extend that same patience to other people who are important to me, even [Kris’s partner] Yiling. I can be short with her. I can see this version of myself that it’s so willing to go with the flow versus the hyped-up, amped-up version that I can be sometimes with Yiling. That’s something that I need to bring to my other relationships around.”

I drew this illustration shortly after my interview with Kris, and now that I look at it, my personal graph would be much, much taller to reflect the hundredfold increase in my patience over the past four years:

6. People say it’s hard, but more than that, it’s relentless.

When I interviewed my friend Rob, who has had more than a few challenging moments in human-powered adventures all over the world, he said this: “Humans have been parents for millions of years, so it’s just not really that hard. It’s relentless, but it’s not that hard. Not that complicated.”

(I misremembered this quote for the first few years of our son’s life, telling myself, “Yes it’s hard, but more than that, it’s relentless.” And then when I was copy-editing the interviews for the book, I realized that Rob had said it was NOT hard. Which Rob and I are going to have to agree to disagree on.)

7. As a parent, you are never really out of the woods.

When I wrote these interview questions, I was pretty focused on the early years of being a parent, because that’s what I was worried about. But I interviewed dads who were at different parts of the journey, including some who had raised kids who were now adults. My friend Pedro said this:

“The thing about parenting is it’s a 24-hour day for the rest of your life thing. My daughter is almost 21 and she asked me for advice last night. I realized like, ‘Oof.’ I’m not always wise, so you gotta be comfortable with failure because whatever it’s going to be, 70 years of parenting, I’m going to fail so many times and I’m not going to be the dad that I want to be so many times.”

And my friend Kris, who’s a father and a grandfather:

“Being a parent has taught me that I’m not my dad. When my daughter had a tough situation and I responded by not being happy about her decision and letting her know that, was the first time that I had thought, ‘Uh-oh, maybe I am. Maybe I’m going to be that person after all.’ I had thought I was out of the woods. It was the biggest challenge of my parenting. She was young 20s and I wasn’t out of the woods.”

Here's the illustration I made for Kris's chapter of the book:

8. The days are slow, but the years go fast.

So many dads I interviewed said some version of this, and it goes back to the “all the clichés are true” thing. Now that I have a four-year-old, I am realizing that yes, all parents say the same things (or lots of the same things), because I am saying the same things they said. I, too, have had that nagging feeling that I could be “getting something done” instead of sitting with a sleeping baby on my lap or doing tummy time or watching my kid play with LEGO blocks because he asked me to play with him but he really doesn’t want me to actually play with him (he just wants me to be next to him while he plays). And my phone seems to remind me weekly with a photo from a year ago, or two years ago, that oh yeah, we’re done with that phase now, and it’s bittersweet that he doesn’t have that mop of hair anymore, or he won’t wear those overalls, or he’s not as interested in jumping in puddles. And I better get used to that bittersweet feeling of his little life going by and my life going by because that’s how it works.

9. Childbirth is almost never like it is in movies.

Of course plenty of births have happened the way we’ve all seen it in a movie, but there are a million different ways childbirth can go, and from my research, most of them don’t involve a frantic rush to the hospital because a baby has totally out of nowhere decided that it is coming RIGHT NOW, and then is born in the back of a taxi.

10. Almost everybody is aware that as a parent, they are a work in progress.

Maybe this is just the dads I interviewed, but I hope not. Because over and over, the guys I talked to realized that a) they weren’t perfect and b) they could always improve on who they were yesterday. Which involves apologizing, repairing, and moving on.

--

If you'd like to buy the book for yourself or someone who might appreciate it, here's where you can find it in paperback and ebook editions.​