Living a Connected DadLife

Rebooting and refreshing the newsletter

Father’s Day 2025

Part 1: Closing Fathering Together

In January 2025, the leadership of Fathering Together, the non-profit I co-founded in 2019, voted to close up shop and donate our assets and operations to All Parents Welcome. We had tried multiple strategies to make the non-profit financially stable, but for several factors, it was not going to happen.

After five months, all pieces of Fathering Together reside in the hands of All Parents Welcome. Which means this substack is getting a reboot and a refresh to continue as my personal newsletter to share my reflections, analysis, and advice for living a connected dad life.

Part 2: Shifting My Mindset

I had originally planned for this post to be titled “Why did I feel like a failure after building a community of 150,000 dads?” because in 2022, I had to take a job and stop working full-time on Fathering Together because we didn’t have the financial resources to keep me on full-time. In the span of a few months, four potential contract negotiations fell through and I faced a future where Fathering Together had no guaranteed income.

I had made a deal with my wife that I would stop working full-time if this scenario were ever to happen and after 2 years, I begrudgingly accepted the reality.

But as I lamented, cried a bit, and ranted a bit more about my failure, several people told me to shut up and look at Fathering Together from a different angle.

Yes, they acknowledged that Fathering Together was a “financial failure,” but they also pointed out that…

• Fathering Together ran a virtual community during the height of the COVID pandemic with over 120,000 members.

• Fathering Together had over 10 virtual groups from supporting dads through recovery to gender equity to local dad chapters like Louisville dads.

• Fathering Together hosted dozens of campaigns inviting hundreds of experts to catalyze dads into being agents for social change, especially during our four Father’s Day campaigns we called “Father’s Friday.”

• Fathering Together had assisted programs to launch in Kenya and Malawi.

• Fathering Together hosted a podcast called Dads with Daughters that had over 200 episodes!

In hearing the accomplishments, I realized 2 things.

The First Thing - I had fallen into old narratives

I had fallen into the trap that I had warned so many dads (and men in general) to avoid. This trap is the narrative that tells us that Dads MUST be financial providers. It is outdated, false, and toxic because dads are more than a paycheck. This trap can lead to dark places when we fail to earn enough money or keep up with the cool stuff that other dads buy their children or worse, lose our job completely.

These dark places are well documented by other sociologists, politicians, talking heads, and therapists who point to the increased suicide rates among working class men and the domestic violence rates where dads lash out toward loved ones and the mass shooting rates of young men who don’t have the emotional skills to process failure any other way.

My summer of 2022 wasn’t violent, but I was plagued by depression and anxiety as I searched for a new job and new income to support my family. And thankfully, I found one!

The Second Thing - I (we all) need new narratives

We need new narratives for dads (and men). We need narratives that allow dads to express themselves as fully human with emotional highs and lows and value that is beyond financial.

Remaining entrenched in a “breadwinner narrative” means dads often hold onto other narratives that Robert Brannon highlighted in his “Masculinity Scale” in 1976 (Brannon, Robert; David, Deborah Sarah (1976). The Forty-Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role. Don Mills: Addison-Wesley Publishing. pp. 49–50.) Published nearly 50 years ago, it is hard to find anything on this scale except the numerous articles debunking it (and rightly so), but he points out 4 key aspects of being a man:

1. No Sissy Stuff (i.e. don’t be feminine)

2. The Big Wheel (i.e. be successful and well-known)

3. The Sturdy Oak (i.e. being tough is an asset)

4. Give ‘em Hell (i.e. be aggressive, competitive, and protect what is yours)

I was lucky to have a dad pushing against these narratives in the early 1980s. Many of my peers were lucky too. But many others weren’t so lucky. Recent displays of Brannon’s 4 aspects (like military parades and petty bully behavior among leaders) show just how hard it is to move away from old narratives.

But new narratives are creeping in all over… just look at the millions of people protesting this past weekend and the many “straight why guys” among the protesters.

courtesy of Mark Greene

Part 3: The Reboot

As I say farewell to an incredibly successful project and hand control over to others, I won’t be saying farewell to dads because I continue to be one. My daughters need me to continue being awesome and working on my inner-narratives as much as displaying external narratives through my actions and words.

So this newsletter will give me the opportunity to highlight and analyze new narratives, raise up examples of dads doing their best to live these new narratives, and invite other voices to collaborate with me through co-written articles, podcast conversations, and more.

Thank you to all those who have journeyed with me since 2018 when Christopher Lewis (an OG dad-blogger) invited me to run a Facebook group called Dads with Daughters. I look forward to continuing that journey and adding more to our community.

Until next time… peace,brian…