“My Goal In Life Was To Raise Good Adults”
Fatherhood on Friday: Rob Kenney created his wildly popular “Dad, How Do I” YouTube channel to provide the basic advice he never got.
A soft-spoken, 55-year-old account manager from Seattle has risen to worldwide prominence simply for offering help to people who might need it. He’s Rob Kenney, a dad of two adult kids, whose “Dad, How Do I?” YouTube channel features advice on How To Tie A Tie, How To Change A Tire, and other mundane skills that aren’t so mundane to those who never got the chance to learn them.
When you watch these videos, you notice little touches. Like the end of his How To Shave Your Face video, when he tells viewers to be courteous and clean up the little hairs you left in the sink. Or when he explains why a two-by-four is really a 1½-by-3½. Or when he reads Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man In The Arena” to encourage viewers to disregard critics, both without and within. This is the mindset of a man who knows what it’s like to feel clueless and denied a father’s counsel because of terrible family dysfunction. “My goal in life was to raise good adults because I had a fractured childhood,” he says. A lot of dads in our community can relate.
After he taught himself his handyman skills with his brother’s help, he says the urge to pay them forward had been brewing for years. And now that the quarantine has left him out of excuses, he’s feeling thankful for(and a bit overwhelmed by) all the fame, which has also brought him a PR team and a branded Father’s Day partnership with Lowe’s.
We’re glad he finally took the plunge and made such a great resource that people will consult for years, proving that the answer to “Dad, How Do I get 2 million subscribers in two months?” doesn’t have to be all that complicated.
ON THE PODCAST: Two For One!
Since FoF took last week off for the holiday weekend, here are Episodes 30 and 31 of the Dad 2.0 Podcast, where Lunchbox Dad’s Beau Coffron describes how his influencing strategy has evolved over his nine-year career:
… and we launch the #GratitudeClub, celebrating the power of social media to connect to the creators of things we’re glad exist.
IN THE NEWS
After her father passed away earlier this month, the rest of his firefighting company helped her graduate in style.
An amazing story about Punjab police constable Ajaib Singh’s TikTok channel, which has 800,000 followers and features videos of charitable acts during the lockdown in India.
The Community Fatherhood Awards honor Clark County fathers young, older, and posthumously, as part of the annual Juneteenth and Father Fest event. The pandemic canceled the events, but not the award.
Her dad was an injured, unemployed migrant laborer who needed to get home. So his daughter pedaled him on the back of her $20 bike for 700 miles.
In the wake of his new $100 million podcasting deal with Spotify, is Joe Rogan the new face of male influence in media?
Fathers have nearly doubled the time they spend on housework and childcare since 2014–15. It’s still less than moms’ work, but the gap is narrowing.
We don’t acknowledge “Dads & Grads” as a thing. Fathers and graduates deserve separate consideration, beyond being lazily lumped together because they rhyme.
Two large lessons learned from pregnancy centers engaging with new fathers are: 1) many dads feel they have no say regarding the woman’s pregnancy, and 2) they have no male role model with whom to talk.
A great piece about the Nuggets’ Torrey Craig, who’s making the most of Quarantine Life with his 5yo son: “I sat with him through all his classes every day, I helped him study for his tests, I help him read.”
PORCHLIGHT POSTS
“We already know about screen problems. The question is: Do we want to know this? Or is it easier to just ignore how bad it is because it feels so good?” — Kevin McKeever, ‘Screened Out’ Movie Asks: Can We Regain Control of Our Screen Time?
“As a man, I see my role as a provider. What good am I if I can’t even do that?”- Dan Flanagan, Lockdown Is Changing the Type of Dad I Want To Be
“If Mom was the beauty, Dad was the truth. If Mom was the warm fire, Dad was the sturdy hearth, and I basked in their glow.” — Maria Longo, Fatherhood and A Need For Hope
“I was the kind of tired a parent gets when all three kids want something all day, and you do your best to give it to them. That’s why I didn’t see the phone sailing through the air.” — Shannon Carpenter, I Never Saw Fatherhood Coming
“We needed to find a creative solution that would make life a bit more bearable for Adam. So, we ordered a dump truck load of dirt.” — John Engel, A Truckload of Goodness In Difficult Times
‘GRAM OF THE WEEK
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Originally published at https://dad2.com on May 29, 2020.
